Scotland’s first Post Office scandal took place in Georgian era

The current inquiry into the Horizon system and the Post Office’s wholesale abuse of its legal powers has shown how so many innocent sub-postmasters were hounded by an organisation which then covered up its failings – as they say in political and public relations circles, it’s never the dirty deed that gets you into trouble, but the cover-up always does.

The Horizon scandal happened across the UK, and the Scottish justice system still has some very serious questions to answers about its role in the frankly malicious and certainly dubious prosecutions that went through Scottish courts. I’ll not hold my breath waiting for an explanation from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

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The prosecutors back in the 1820s were dealing with a scandal of an entirely different type because the workers were not innocent. Instead, numerous Post Office employees at various levels were mired in a miasma of just plain criminality.

Arguably Scotland’s greatest chronicler of the 19th century, Robert Chambers wrote all about the scandal in his Gazetteer of Scotland published in 1838 in Edinburgh by Blackie.

Chambers quoted from the official Post Office Report: “Sometime in the year 1822, the Postmaster-General received information of the existence of an extensive system of depredation upon the Post Office revenue of Scotland, carried on by a combination between some of the clerks in the office and the whole body of the letter-carriers.”

In that report, Sir Francis Freeling, the great English postal system reformer who was then Secretary of the Post Office, explained how the fraudulent system worked: “In point of fact, the letters were stolen from the bags, and never were brought through the proper channels, but given into the possession of the letter-carriers, and at certain periods there was a division of the spoil, according to the rank and standing of the individual in the department.”

Receipts from postage were not recorded and coins went into the hands of the perpetrators – the Post Office itself said 41 officers were involved – and letters just disappeared, while those which contained money were regularly opened and emptied.

Furthermore, the Post Office deduced that the fraud had been going on for 12 years before it was discovered when one of those involved made a confession.

In total the Post Office calculated it had been defrauded of upwards of £70,000 or about £8 million in today’s money.

Chambers tells us what happened after the fraud was uncovered, and it directly affected the “Scottishness” of the Post Office in Scotland which was then under a Deputy Postmaster-General in Edinburgh.

Chambers wrote: “The exposure, then, of such complicated villainy necessarily led to the conclusion, that the duties of the superior and superintending officers of the establishment must have been wholly neglected, or performed with a culpable remissness and inattention; and the removal of these officers, and the supply of their place by others of more active and vigilant talents, were the immediate consequence of the disclosures.”

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Post Office headquarters in London sent in a certain Augustus Godby, an experienced English official who cleansed the Scottish Post Office of its miscreants over several years. Chambers commented: “To almost this individual alone may be traced that surprising exactness in Scottish post-office arrangements now organised.”

He largely did it by bringing in officials from outside Scotland, and it was no surprise and certainly did not cause huge outrage when in 1831, Scotland lost its deputy postmaster general with the office being subsumed into that of the postmaster general in London.

Yet the Anglicisation of Scotland’s Post Office did upset some people, so much so that by 1838, Robert Chambers commented: “We have been somewhat particular in our notice of the circumstances, not so much for their peculiar interest, as for the purpose of mentioning that the disclosures of the fraudulent conduct of the post-office functionaries led to the introduction of Englishmen into all departments of the government revenue in Scotland, and that on such an extensive scale as to have given much reason for national dissatisfaction.”

The crackdown on officials continued for some time after 1822 and the National Records of Scotland has many of the details of the crimes and sentences handed down.

One man was even sentenced to death. In June, 1828, Peter Henderson, who worked at the General Post Office in Edinburgh, was found guilty of stealing, secreting, embezzling or destroying letters at his palace of employment. Apparently he was caught red-handed and confessed.

Guilty of a felony, he was sentenced to death, but after a petition was raised against his execution, his sentence was commuted to transportation – usually to Australia – for life on July 16, 1828.

James Wedderburn Nicol, a clerk in the so-called “dead letter” section of the General Post Office, in Edinburgh was tried and found guilty in March, 1834, of the crimes of theft, secreting and embezzling a letter, reset – handling stolen goods – forgery, falsehood and fraudulent imposition.

It’s not clear whether all his crimes were postal-related but he, too, was sentenced to transportation for life, after having confessed to stealing a £50 note from a letter. His case caused a sensation at the time and was reported in The Scotsman at length. He made a success of his new life in Australia and was granted a conditional pardon in 1849 long before he died at the age of 70 in 1881.

James Heggie, a letter carrier – postman – at the General Post Office, Edinburgh, was found guilty of wilful neglect of duty and violation of trust, among other crimes to which he confessed in November, 1839.

Heggie was jailed for 15 months Also in November, 1839, William Swayne Steele confessed to theft, and secreting, embezzling or destroying letters at the General Post Office, Edinburgh. He, too, was sentenced to transportation for life.

The last convicted Scottish postal official to be transported was Alexander Reid, letter carrier, who in 1848 was accused of several crimes to which he confessed. He was sentenced to transportation for 14 years.

The introduction of the penny post in 1840 is cited as one reason why Post Office workers no longer found it financially rewarding to commit fraud or theft, and there were no great Post Office scandals until Horizon came along.