72 ON THE TRACK OF THE MAIL-COACH 



fastidious. They declined to stand in the street and 

 be rained upon, or blown about, whilst registering- 

 letters or buying stamps ; and having had enough, 

 a couple of hundred years before, of Blackfriargate, 

 they no^Y constrained the department to remove itself, 

 in 1843, to Whitefriargate, to premises erected by the 

 Brethren of the Trinity House. Even here the public 

 were not long content, for by 1847 they insisted on 

 an enlargement, thus critical had taste become in this 

 serious matter of an adequate post-office. 



But with penny postage, savings bank, postal 

 orders, and telegraphs, even the Trinity House 

 Chambers extended did but suffice for a bare thirty 

 years ; so in due course came the grand, and perhaps 

 final, move to the Market Place. 



No more blocking up of gangways by fat men ; of 

 sorting up an open passage ; of standing out in the 

 rain to argue with the postmaster. The Government 

 (egged on, I do not doubt, by Mr. Norwood, M.P., 

 w4io then sat for Hull, and was a power in the land) 

 built a brand new post-office, four stories high, 

 giving, instead of an apartment fifteen feet square for 

 all purposes, a sorting-room which alone is seventy- 

 eight feet long, and nearly half as wide, and which 

 towers aloft, having a ceiling twenty feet above the 

 foot-mark of its tenants. 



Within my owai personal experience the force of the 

 Hull post-office has been enlarged from thirty-seven 

 to three hundred and seventy-five persons. Its cost, 

 like its personnel, has increased tenfold. 



