The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and RomanceHyde, James Wilson
History
The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance
Hyde, James Wilson
Postal service -- Great Britain
Some years ago the following extensive robbery of letters occurred in
London. An unusually large number of complaints were found to be
reaching the General Post-office, of the non-receipt by merchants,
bankers, and others carrying on business in Lombard Street and its
neighbourhood, of letters containing bank-notes, cheques, advices, and
important correspondence, sent to them from all parts of the kingdom.
The circumstance naturally gave rise to careful inquiry on the part of
the Post-office authorities, with the result that suspicion fell upon a
young postman of nineteen years of age, through whose hands many of the
missing letters would in ordinary course have to pass. Certain Bank of
England notes, which had been contained in some of the letters, were
found to have been cashed; and the names endorsed upon them, though
fictitious, were in a handwriting resembling that of the young man
suspected. Thereupon he was arrested and searched, when in a pocketbook
on his person were found two £5 notes, which had been forwarded from
Norfolk to a banking-house in London, but had failed to reach their
destination. In a pocket in his official coat were found also some
thirty-five letters of various dates, which he had neglected to deliver,
to the inconvenience or loss no doubt of the persons addressed; but the
most astonishing part of the business is, that when his locker or
cupboard at the General Post-office was examined, about 1500 letters
were found there which he had stopped, the dates upon the envelopes
showing that his delinquencies had extended over several months. This
young man, upon being tried for the offences named, was convicted, and
with the usual severity observed in similar circumstances, the judge
passed upon the prisoner a sentence of six years' penal servitude.
The following curious instance of the wholesale misappropriation of
post-letters also came under the notice of the Post-office authorities
in London a few years ago:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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