The Royal Mail Part 14

"A letter supposed to contain a 10 note was registered at Moffat, and in due course delivered to the addressee, who, however, declined to sign a receipt for it, as the 10 note was missing. The sender was written to, but he a.s.serted that the note had been enclosed. The postmaster chiefly concerned (who had been more than fifty years in the service) was greatly distressed at the doubt thus cast upon his honesty; but on further inquiry, the sender admitted that he had obtained a trace of the 10 note, and stated that the fault had not been with the Post-office.

On being pressed for fuller information, he stated that when writing his letter he had placed the 10 note in an envelope and affixed a postage-stamp thereon, when a lady came hurriedly into his shop, also to write a letter, and he had a.s.sisted her by getting an envelope and placing a postage-stamp on it; that he had placed this envelope beside that which contained the bank-note; and that when the lady had finished her letter, he gave her by mistake the envelope with the 10 note in it, and put his own letter into the empty envelope. He had carried the two letters to the Post-office; and his own, which he supposed contained the 10, he had registered. Both letters were safely delivered; and the 10 having been returned as evidently sent in error, the lady who had forwarded it brought it to the complainant, and thus the mystery was cleared up."

During a snowstorm which occurred a year or two ago, a London firm put up for posting, among others, a letter to a Glasgow firm containing a cheque for a sum little short of 1000. The cheque not reaching its destination in due course, payment was stopped at the bank, and notwithstanding that every inquiry was made, nothing was heard of the letter at the time. Eventually, however, the cheque was brought to the firm who had drawn it, together with the letter, by a police-inspector, who had found the letter adhering to a block of ice floating in the Thames off Deptford. The supposition is, that when the letters of the day were being carried to the Lombard Street Post-office, this letter was dropped in the street, that it was carted off in the snow to the Thames, and there, after a week's immersion in the river, got affixed to the block of ice, as already stated.

On the 27th February 1885, a medical gentleman residing at Richmond, Surrey, when going his usual round of visits, found on the carriage floor two letters, one addressed to a person in Edinburgh, the other to a lady residing near Castle-Douglas. The letters had been duly prepared for the post, each bearing an undefaced postage-stamp, but nothing in their appearance indicated that they had ever been posted. The finder was at first puzzled at the discovery, but on reflection, he remembered having a few minutes previously opened a large newspaper, the 'Queen,'

which had reached him from Edinburgh two or three days before, but had till then remained unopened in his carriage. It occurred to him that the letters might have come concealed within the folds of the newspaper, and he was good enough to forward a note with each to the persons addressed, explaining the circ.u.mstances under which he had found them. Subsequent investigation by the Post-office brought to light the fact that one of the two letters, and the copy of the 'Queen' from which they were supposed to have dropped, had been deposited in different pillar-boxes in Edinburgh, but in the same collector's district; and there can be no doubt that this letter, and probably also the other letter, were shaken inside the folds of the newspaper during their conveyance to the head-office in the collector's bag. In one of the notes which the doctor sent with the letters, he made this remark:--"I cannot help feeling that the postal authorities and the public should both have their eyes opened to what a serious danger such a letter-trap as a large newspaper might prove." He omitted to add, however, that the sender of the 'Queen' had tied it up very carelessly without a wrapper, and in a way that could hardly fail to render it a dangerous travelling companion for letters.

Had the letters fallen into dishonest hands, their loss would certainly have been attributed to the Post-office, and the case is one which aptly ill.u.s.trates a means by which letters sometimes get out of their proper course, or are lost altogether.

A firm of solicitors in Leith wrote a letter to a client in the same town, enclosing a cheque for 102; and this letter, although it was alleged to have been duly posted, failed to reach the person for whom it was intended. The usual inquiries were made, but unsuccessfully, no trace being discovered of the letter. Some days afterwards the firm received the letter and cheque, minus the envelope, from a farmer near Tranent, in one of whose fields a ploughman had picked them up. This man was engaged spreading town-refuse upon the field when he found the letter, which he opened, and thereupon threw away the cover. For the purposes of investigation, it was very essential that this should be produced; but it happened that meanwhile the field had been gone over with a grubbing machine, and the chances of the recovery of the discarded envelope were thereby greatly lessened. The ploughman's son was set to work, however, to make a search, and after toiling a whole day, he found the envelope. On examination, it was seen that the postage-stamp affixed was still undefaced, and the envelope bore nothing to show that it had ever been in the Post-office. The whole circ.u.mstances left no doubt that the letter had either got into the waste-paper basket of the senders, or had been dropped on the way to the Post-office, and that it had been carried ten miles into the country amongst street rubbish, with which, as manure, the farm in question was supplied from the town of Leith.

A registered letter posted at Newcastle, and addressed to a banker in Edinburgh, not having reached the addressee's hands, a telegram was forwarded to the sender intimating the fact, and requesting explanation of the failure. The banker supposed that the letter had been lost or purloined in the Post-office; but it was afterwards proved to have been duly delivered to the bank porter, who having locked it up in his desk, had quite forgotten it.

A lady residing in Jersey applied to the Post-office respecting a letter which had been sent by her to a clergyman at Oxford. Inquiry was made for it at all the offices through which it would pa.s.s, but unsuccessfully, no trace whatever of it being found. Subsequently the clergyman informed the secretary of the Post-office that he had found the letter between the cushions of his own arm-chair, where it had been placed, no doubt, at the time of delivery.

"A person complained of delay in the receipt of a letter which appeared to have pa.s.sed through the Post-office twice. It transpired that the letter had, in the first instance, been duly delivered at a shop, where it was to remain till called for, but that it had accidentally been taken away with some music by a customer, who had afterwards dropped it in the street. Subsequently the letter must have been picked up and again posted, and hence its double pa.s.sage through the Post-office."

"A barrister complained of the non-delivery of a letter containing the halves of two 10 Bank of England notes, stating that he had posted the letter himself; but he shortly afterwards wrote to say that the letter had reached its destination. It appeared that, instead of putting it into the letter-box, he had dropped the letter in the street, where, fortunately, it was picked up by some honest person, who posted it."

A business firm having frequently failed to receive letters which had been addressed to them, made complaint on the subject from time to time; but the inquiries which were inst.i.tuted resulted in nothing. After much trouble, however, it was at length discovered that a defect existed in the letter-box in the firm's office-door, and fifteen letters were found lodged between the box and the door, some of which had been in that situation more than nine years.

A letter said to contain a cheque for 12, 4s., addressed to a London firm, not having reached its destination, inquiries were made with respect to it. At the end of three months it turned up at a _papier-mache_ factory, whither it had, no doubt, been carried among waste-paper from the office at which it had been delivered.

In 1883, a registered letter sent from Dunkeld on a given date was duly received in Edinburgh, and delivered at its address, which was a bank, the postman obtaining a signature to the receipt-form in the usual way.

Some little time afterwards complaint was made by the manager of the bank that the letter had not been received; but the Post-office was able to prove the contrary by the receipt, the signature to which, on being submitted to the manager, was acknowledged to be that of the wife of the housekeeper of the establishment. Yet this person could give no account of the letter, nor had any one else seen it; and as the letter was stated to have contained four 1 notes and a bank deposit-book, the fact of its disappearance gave rise to a state of things which can be better imagined than described. The Post-office, in the circ.u.mstances, offered the suggestion that the bank's waste-paper should be carefully examined.

As it happened, however, a quant.i.ty of this material had just been cleared out, having been purchased by a waste-paper dealer; and the fact made the chances of recovery in that direction all the more remote. Yet the housekeeper was set to work: he traced the bags first to the store of the dealer, then to the premises of a waste-paper merchant in another part of the city. With a.s.sistance he carefully examined the contents of the bags filled at the bank, and his efforts were rewarded by the discovery of the registered letter, which was in precisely the same state as when delivered, never having been opened. It had very likely fallen from a desk in the bank on to the floor, and by a careless person been brushed aside with used envelopes and sc.r.a.ps of paper, thus finding its way into the waste-paper basket.

In April 1873, a letter was posted in a certain village in Ayrshire, addressed by a wife to her husband, who was in command of a vessel bound for New York. The letter was properly directed to the captain by name, it bore the name of his ship, and was addressed to the care of the British Consul, New York. The captain never received the letter, and this circ.u.mstance gave rise, upon his return from sea, to what is described as a "feud" between him and his wife,--he, reposing perhaps greater faith in the Post-office than in the dutiful attentions of his wife, believing that his better-half had not written to him, since he failed to receive the letter on application at its place of address in New York. Time, with its incessant changes, hopes, fears, joys, and disappointments, winged its hurried flight for a period of eleven years ere the matter which had caused the feud came to be fully understood. At the end of that time the same letter was returned to the writer through the Dead-letter Office, having (according to the stamp upon it) been unclaimed at New York. It was stated that the return of the letter had "put all to rights" between the couple concerned, though it is to be hoped that the healing hand of Time had already done much in this direction, and that the return of the long-lost letter did nothing more than put the finishing touch to restored confidence. In connection with this matter, it was afterwards ascertained that the letter was one of over 4000 similar letters returned to the New York Post-Office from the offices of the British Consul in that city, upon a new appointment being made to the Consulate,--the "new broom," as one of his first acts, having made a clean sweep of this acc.u.mulation of letters, some of which had been lying there no less than seventeen years. How far the failure of these letters to reach the persons addressed was due to their not having been called for, or to the negligence of clerks at the Consulate, is not known, nor will it ever be ascertained what heart-burnings and misery may have been occasioned by this wholesale miscarriage of correspondence.

In March 1880, a letter plainly addressed to an individual by name, and bearing the name and number of a street in a certain district of London, reached the Dead-letter Office, whither it had been sent by the postman of the district, owing to the person to whom it was directed not being known at the address given. When opened, with a view to its return to the writer, the letter was discovered to contain a Bank of England note for 100, together with a short memorandum suggesting the return of the note to some person, but in such vague and general terms that no one who had not had previous information on the subject could have fully understood the purport of the message.

The memorandum was, moreover, without head or tail--it had no superscription to indicate whence it had come, nor had it a signature to show by whom it had been written. The circ.u.mstance being one of an exceptional character, special steps were taken with a view to trace the owner, and an advertis.e.m.e.nt was inserted in several of the metropolitan newspapers--bringing up, it is true, a responsive crop of claimants for lost notes, but without eliciting any such claims as would warrant the surrender of the note in question. From the terms of the memorandum in the letter, and the fact that it was anonymous, the suggestion readily arose that whoever had had the note last had not come by it in the regular way of business; and this idea was strengthened by the discovery that the note had been paid over by a bank about eight years previously to a person whose name and address were endorsed upon it; and from that period the note had evidently not been in circulation. It was thought probable that the endorser had lost the note in some way shortly after receiving it, and that coming into the hands of some individual who feared to put it in circulation, it had been kept up during these eight years. Meanwhile, the right to receive the note not having been established by any one, the amount was paid in to the Revenue.

In the Postmaster-General's report for 1881, further mention was made of the finding of the note in the Dead-letter Office, and several claims again reached headquarters, one of which proved to be so far good, that, when the facts had been fully investigated, the amount was paid over to the claimant.

It appeared that the person whose name was endorsed on the note received it in part payment of a cheque cashed by him in 1872, when he was bought out of the business in which he had till then been a partner. Two years afterwards--viz., in 1874--he died, and his widow was unaware at the time that the note had been lost. From circ.u.mstances which this lady was able to prove, however, there seemed to be every reason to believe that her husband (whose practice it was to endorse notes when he had received them) had by some means lost the note, or that it had been carelessly left by him in some old book or other papers which were sold as waste-paper after her husband's death; and thus the Post-office was made the means of restoring a considerable sum of money to the rightful owner, while the person who had without t.i.tle possessed it in the interval dared not claim it.

"A letter said to have been posted by a person at Fochabers, enclosing a letter of credit for 50, was supposed to have been appropriated by an officer of the Post-office; but on inquiry it was ascertained that, instead of posting the letter himself, as he a.s.serted, the writer had intrusted it to a servant, who had destroyed the letter, and had attempted to negotiate the order."

"A person complained repeatedly of letters addressed to him having been intercepted and tampered with, and of drafts having been stolen from them and negotiated. There being ground to suspect that the thief was in the complainant's own office, he reluctantly consented to test the honesty of his clerks; and the result showed that one of them was the guilty party, the man being subsequently tried and convicted. The thefts had been committed by means of a duplicate key, which gave the clerk access to the letter-box."

"Several complaints were made of the non-delivery of letters addressed to the editor of a newspaper; but this gentleman afterwards intimated that he had discovered that the delinquent was his own errand-boy, who confessed to having pilfered his letter-box."

"A similar case occurred at Romsey, where, on an investigation by the surveyor, it was discovered that the applicant's errand-boy had abstracted the letters from his private bag, which it was found could be done even when the bag was locked."

"Application was made respecting a letter containing a cheque for 79, 12s. 11d., which had been presented and cashed. The letter had not been registered, and no trace of it could be discovered. The applicants, however, ultimately withdrew their complaint against the Post-office, stating their belief that the missing letter had not been posted, but had been stolen by one of their clerks, who had absconded."

"A merchant sent his errand-boy to post a letter, and to purchase a stamp to put upon it. The letter contained negotiable bills amounting to 1200; and as the merchant did not receive an acknowledgment from his correspondent, he cast the blame on the Post-office. An inquiry followed, which resulted in showing that the errand-boy had met another boy on a similar mission, who undertook to post the letter in question.

On further reflection, however, the latter resolved to convert the penny intended for a postage-stamp into sweetmeats, which he did, and then destroyed the letter with its contents, carrying the fragments into a field near the Post-office, where they were found hidden."

A sailor applied for a missing letter containing a money-order for 30s., which he said had been sent, but had not reached him; but when he found that the matter was under strict investigation, he confessed that the money had been paid to him, and that he had denied having received it, in order to excuse himself from not paying a debt to the person with whom he lodged.

"A person having applied for a missing letter, said to contain two 10 and one 5 Bank of England notes, and which he stated had been sent to him by his father, it appeared on inquiry that no such letter had been written; and he afterwards confessed that his object in asking for the letter was a device to keep in abeyance a pecuniary demand upon him by his landlady."

Some years ago a person complained that twelve sovereigns had been abstracted from a letter received by him while it was in transit through the post, but he was told in reply that the envelope bore evidence that it had not contained coin to that amount. This person then communicated with the sender of the letter, who persisted in declaring that she had put therein the amount stated. At this stage of the inquiry an officer was despatched to investigate the matter; and upon his requiring the woman who had sent the envelope to accompany him before a magistrate to attest the truth of her statement upon oath, she confessed that the statement was false, and explained her conduct by saying that she had promised to lend the person to whom the envelope had been addressed 12, but that she had been unwilling to do so, as she felt sure that she should never get her money back again; and that she determined, therefore, to keep her money, and throw the blame on the Post-office.

"A bank in Glasgow some years ago complained that a letter had been delivered there without its contents--halves of bank-notes for 75; and on a strict investigation, it appeared that the letter had been intrusted to a boy to post, who confessed that, being aware the letter contained money, and finding that the wafer with which it was fastened was wet, he had been tempted to steal the contents, which, at the time, he believed to be whole notes; but who added that when, on afterwards examining them, he found them to be halves only, he enclosed them in an unfastened sheet of paper, which he directed according, as he believed, to the address of the letter from which he had taken them. The halves of the notes and sheet of paper were subsequently discovered in the Glasgow Post-office, the address on the paper being, however, very different from that of the letter in which the notes had been enclosed."

"Complaint was made that a letter containing the halves of Bank of England notes for 65, sent to a firm in Liverpool, had failed to reach its destination. On inquiry, it appeared that the letter had been duly delivered, and subsequently stolen by a well-known thief, who had the audacity to go and claim the corresponding half-notes from another firm in Liverpool, to whose care the stolen letter showed they had been sent by the same post; and in this object the scoundrel succeeded."

An unregistered letter containing a 10 Bank of England note, posted at Macclesfield and addressed to Manchester, was stated not to have reached its destination. Full inquiry was made, but the letter could not be found. Subsequently, however, the note was presented at the Bank of England, and on being traced, it was discovered that the letter had been stolen after its delivery.

"A letter containing two 5 Bank of England notes was stated to have been posted at Leeds, addressed to a lady at Leamington, without reaching its destination; but the inquiry that was inst.i.tuted by the Post-office caused the sender to withdraw his complaint, and to prefer against the clerk whom he had intrusted with the letter, a charge of having purloined it before it reached the Post-office."

"The secretary of a charitable inst.i.tution in London gave directions for posting a large number of 'election papers,' and supposed that these directions had been duly acted upon. Shortly, however, he received complaints of the non-receipt of many of the papers, and in other cases of delay. He at once made a complaint at the Post-office; but, on examination, circ.u.mstances soon came to light which cast suspicion on the person employed to post the notices, although this man had been many years in the service of the society, and was supposed to be of strict integrity. Ultimately, the man confessed that he had embezzled the postage, amounting to 3, 15s. 6d., and had endeavoured to deliver the election papers himself."

"Complaint having been made by a dealer in foreign postage-stamps that several letters containing such stamps had not reached him, a careful investigation was made, but for some time without any result. The letters should have been dropped by the letter-carrier into the addressee's letter-box; but to this box no one, the dealer a.s.serted, had access but himself. Some time afterwards, however, a cover addressed to the complainant was picked up in the street, and on inquiry being made whether the letter to which it belonged had been delivered, the complainant stated that it had not. But it so happened that the letter-carrier had a clear recollection of dropping this letter into the letter-box, and, moreover, remembered to have observed a young girl who was at the window move, as he thought, towards the box. This led to the girl being closely questioned, when she admitted the theft, confessing also that she had committed other similar thefts previously.

Thus, by a mere chance, a suspicion which had been cast on the Post-office was dispelled."

"The publisher of one of the London papers complained of the repeated loss in the Post-office of copies of his journal addressed to persons abroad. An investigation showed that the abstraction was made by the publisher's clerk, his object apparently being to appropriate the stamps required to defray the foreign postage. In another case a general complaint having arisen as to the loss of newspapers sent to the chief office in St Martin's-le-Grand, inquiry led to the discovery of a regular mart held near the office, and supplied with newspapers by the private messengers employed to convey them to the post. On another occasion a man was detected in the act of robbing a newsvendor's cart, by volunteering on its arrival at the General Post-office to a.s.sist the drivers in posting the newspapers: instead of doing so, he walked through the hall with those intrusted to him, and, upon his being stopped, three quires of a weekly paper were found in his possession."

In the spring of 1855, a young lady, fifteen years of age, whose parents resided in a small English town, which shall be nameless, was sent to a boarding-school at some distance therefrom to pursue her education. The mother of the young lady was in a delicate state of health, and, as was most proper in the circ.u.mstances, letters were written from time to time and forwarded to the daughter at school, giving particulars of her mother's progress. So far this is all plain and straightforward. The young lady, however, one day declared that though on a particular date mentioned by her she had written home to inquire how her mother was, that letter had not been delivered; and that on the second day thereafter a brown-paper parcel was placed in a very mysterious manner in the hall of the house where she was at school. In this parcel was found a letter for the young lady intimating her mother's death, and explaining that the parcel had been brought by a friend--thus accounting for the absence from it of all post-marks. Other circ.u.mstances were related by the girl--that she had seen a man galloping along the road, and that he had left the parcel in question. Two days after this event, a letter was posted from her parents' residence to inform the young lady that her mother was much better; but when the letter arrived and was opened, she produced another letter requiring her immediate return, in order to attend her mother's funeral. The case was very puzzling, and naturally excited great interest,--the more so, as some suspicion arose that a conspiracy existed to carry off the young lady, in which some person in the Post-office was aiding and abetting. The matter formed the subject of two separate investigations, ending in failure, and the mystery still remained. It was only after a third attempt at elucidation--when an officer specially skilled in prosecuting inquiries of a difficult kind had visited the school--that the truth began to appear. This officer reported that, in his opinion, the whole proceedings were but a plot of a school-girl to get home; and the young lady afterwards confessed this to be the case.

It is not probable that the petty fraud of again using stamps which have already pa.s.sed through the post is perpetrated with any great frequency upon the Post-office. Still, cases no doubt do occur, and may at any time lead to criminal proceedings, like those which took place at Hull some years ago. A person in that town having posted a letter with an old stamp affixed, the stamper who had to deface the stamp in the usual way, detected the irregularity, and brought the matter under notice.

Proceedings were taken against the offender, and the case being established against him, and the fact being stated that this person had previously been warned by the Post-office against committing like frauds, he was mulcted in a fine of 5 and costs, with the alternative punishment of three-months' imprisonment.

The accidents and misfortunes which are the lot of letters in this country, seem also to attend post-letters in their progress through the Post-offices of other countries. A curious case was noticed some years ago in the French capital. Some alterations were being carried out in the General Post-office in Paris, when there was found, in a panel situated near a letter-box, a letter which had been posted just fifty years before. There it had remained concealed half a century. The letter was forwarded to the person whose address it bore, and who, strange to say, was still alive; but the writer, it transpired, had been dead many years.

On one occasion notice was given to the Post-office by a clergyman residing in a country town in the south of England, that a packet sent by him containing a watch had been tampered with in the post, the packet having reached the person addressed, not with the watch that had been despatched, but containing a stone, which, it was alleged, must have been subst.i.tuted in course of transit. As is usual in cases of this kind, very particular inquiries were necessary to establish whether the Post-office was really in fault, because experience has shown that very often obloquy is laid upon the Department which ought to rest elsewhere; and accordingly, a shrewd and practised officer in such matters was sent to the town in question to make investigations. Arrived at the clergyman's residence, the officer found that that gentleman was from home; but introducing himself to the sender's wife, he explained his mission, and in a general way learned from her what she was able to communicate with regard to the violated packet. While the interview was thus proceeding, the officer, with professional habit, made the best use of his eyes, which, lighting upon a rough causeway of small stones somewhere on the premises, afforded him a hint, if not as yet a suspicion, as to the locality of the fraud. In fact, he remarked a striking resemblance between the stone which had been received in the packet and the stones forming the causeway. In the most delicate way he insinuated the inquiry whether the lady might not possibly entertain some shadow of a suspicion of her own servants.

"Oh dear, no," was the reply; "they are all most respectable, and have the highest characters."

The lady had the utmost confidence in them, and to admit such a thought was to do them grave injustice. The officer was not to be satisfied with such an a.s.surance, however, and by using tact and patience he brought the lady to see that, if there was no dishonesty with her own servants, they would come safely out of the inquiry, and it might be well to allow him to question them. It was further permitted, after some objection on the lady's part and persuasion on that of the officer, that the latter should ask each of the servants separately whether they would allow their boxes to be examined. If they had nothing to conceal, the ordeal could not, of course, hurt them. The female servants were called up one by one and closely questioned, and on the proposed examination of the boxes being suggested, the girls at once a.s.sented. This was so far satisfactory, but there was still the butler to deal with. In due turn the presence of this household ornament was summoned to the room, when, up to a certain point, everything went well; but it being put to him to have his boxes searched, injured virtue cried out, and indignation and scorn were vented upon the obtrusive inquirer. The officer had, however, gained a point, for he was now in a position to say that if the butler continued to object, the suspicion would arise that he might possibly be the culprit, and it might even be concluded that he and not the Post-office ought to account for the watch. At length the man-servant gave way, and he and the officer proceeded to the butler's quarters.

Upon the trunk being opened, the first thing to attract notice was three bottles of wine.

"Holloa!" says the officer, "what have we here? A strange wine-cellar this!"

"Oh," observed the butler, "these are three bottles of ginger-wine which were given me by my father, a grocer in the town."

"Indeed!" says the officer, who had meanwhile been noting the colour as he held a bottle between himself and the light; "it looks a queer colour for ginger-wine. You won't mind letting me taste your wine, will you?"

Overborne by the a.s.surance of the officer perhaps, or thinking him quite chatty and chummy, a cork was withdrawn, and the officer was sipping capital old crusted port. The wine was p.r.o.nounced very good, but the missing watch was not forthcoming.

The scene of inquiry was now changed. The officer proceeded to the shop of the grocer, made some trifling purchase, put on his most affable ways, and he soon had the grocer talking, first on general topics, then on personal matters, and at last on the theme of his own family.

"How many have you?" says the officer.

"So-and-so," responds the grocer.

"All doing for themselves by this time, I suppose?" continues the officer.