When Scotland had its own Post Office and 'post towns'

“If so,” she added, “is there any chance we could get back to it?”

There was indeed a Scottish General Post Office, and it was established by an act of the Scottish Parliament which received royal assent in this week of 1695.

On August 5 in that year, King William II – III of England – approved the act which established the Scottish General Post Office based in Edinburgh, and as the Act states: “From whence all letters and pacquets whatsoever may with speed and expedition sent into any part of the kingdom, or any other of his Majesty’s dominions, or into any kingdom or country beyond seas, by the pacquets sealed to London. It is also enacted, that a Postmaster-General shall be appointed by letters patent under the Privy Seal.”

There had been a postal service of some sort dating back to the 13th century, run by, and solely used by the nobility and clergy for transmitting important letters and documents.

Scotland's own postal system ended following the Act of Union

In 1590, a regular postal service was inaugurated between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. The local magistrates employed a flunkey known as a council post to run between the two cities and he apparently had a fetching uniform in blue with Aberdeen’s coat of arms sewn onto his sleeve.

Though he only visited Scotland once after his move to London to unite the crowns of Scotland and England in his own person, King James VI liked to keep up with what was happening in his original kingdom, and that was probably one of the reasons why the Scottish Privy Council established the position of Postmaster General for Scotland in 1616. The first man to be appointed was Sir William Seton, a lawyer and statesman who held the job until his death in 1635.

In that year, Scottish-born King Charles I brought in a recognisable post service between London and Edinburgh which took three days and charged a sixpence a letter.

When Oliver Cromwell conquered and occupied Scotland from 1650 onwards, the Scottish post office was subsumed into the Commonwealth. It appears to have run more efficiently in that decade …

Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the position of Postmaster General for Scotland was approved by King Charles II and given to Patrick Graeme, laird of Inchbrakie, for life. Under him and his successors, more “receiving places” were established across Scotland, thus instituting a post office network.

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The 1695 Act confirmed that network centred on Edinburgh, and gave the Postmaster General the monopoly power of conveying the post – any “common carriers” would face six days in prison if caught.

The Postmaster General prior to the Act, John Blair, stayed in post for a year before being succeeded by Robert Sinclair and George Main.

Then came the Acts of Union of 1707. It has always puzzled me that given the Treaty’s attention to detail as confirmed in the Act, no specific attention was paid to the two offices of Postmaster General and the separate postal systems north and south of the Border. It was one of several situations that was left to the new United Kingdom Parliament to resolve.

This they did in 1710 when an Act to have just one Postmaster General for the new state was passed through Parliament. Apparently the end of Scotland’s separate GPO – reported to be very efficient – was seen as a fait accompli and no real objection was mounted but the Scots got the sop of their own Deputy Postmaster General, the first being George Main.

We know that by 1715, there were some 60 “post towns” in Scotland, and they were part of a thriving system.

We also know how much the mail in Scotland and between Scotland and England and Wales and Ireland increased in the 18th and early 19th centuries. That indefatigable chronicler Robert Chambers wrote in his Gazetteer of Scotland in 1838: “The Scottish posts yielded in 1707 only £1194, in 1730 £5399, in 1757 £10,623, in 1774 £30,461, in 1780 upwards of £40,000, in 1796 £69,338, and in 1828 the gross amount was £203,137, while the expense of the management was nearly £29,000.

“The following statistics from a Parliamentary Report by Commissioners of Revenue Inquiry give a good idea of the value of the Edinburgh Post Office alone, and the traffic in letters and newspapers.

“In the week ending December 14, 1828, which is taken as an average, the money drawn by the Post Office was £2535, 11s 54d, the number of letters delivered was 29,965, and of newspapers 5550; the number of letters put in was 33,138, and of newspapers 17,534; the number of letters passing through Edinburgh was 27,707, and of newspapers 8568.”

“Thus the number of deliveries of letters and newspapers in Edinburgh in one year will amount to 1,846,780 and the number of letters and newspapers dispatched will be 2,634, 949.”

With the arrival of the railways, these numbers hugely increased, but in 1831, Scotland lost its Deputy Postmaster General, the post being subsumed into the office of the Postmaster General in London.

To answer my reader’s last question, I am sorry to say there is only one answer which is that we can have our own Scottish post office only when we regain our independence, and if it could run successfully for 15 years at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, I am sure it could work very well in these modern days, and probably a darn sight more honestly and efficiently than the current Post Office with which we are lumbered.

But would it be more honest? For in next week’s column, I’m going to tell the extraordinary untold story of a past Scottish postal scandal.