Compulsory Registration

As the public persisted in sending coins and other valuable items in the post after 1840, the Post Office began to compulsory register items of mail they considered valuable. Maurice Buxton provides a comprehensive guide to the introduction of the system and how it operated up to the early 20th century.

Let’s start with a simple general definition: ‘compulsory registration’ is what happens if the sender of a letter doesn’t register it, but the Post Office decides it must be registered anyway. Put like that, I suppose it sounds rather arbitrary – but where compulsory registration has been resorted to, it’s been for very practical reasons.

People who enclose coins in their letters have been a perennial bugbear for the Post Office. It didn’t take advanced deduction skills for a sorter to realise that the small hard round object they could feel inside a letter was probably a coin, and hence worth stealing if they were so inclined. A regrettable number of postal employees over the years proved to be so inclined, even in the days when theft from the mails was literally a hanging offence. Compulsory registration of ‘coin letters’ (Figure 1) was thus a natural expedient to reduce losses from the mails (and also to protect said employees from themselves).

Historically, in fact, the first example pre-dates the regular registration system for a fee. This was the ‘Money Letter’ system introduced in 1792, in which any letter even thought to contain a gold or silver coin or jewellery was entered on the letter-bills, and a signature taken on delivery – in effect, it was registered at no additional charge (Figure 2). Readers may recall that this system was the subject of an article in the March 2023 edition of Stamp Collector, so I won’t go into more detail here. It was, however, an important precedent.

Money Letter registration was abandoned at the beginning of 1840, but the public

stubbornly persisted in sending coins in their letters anyway. Paid-for registration was finally introduced on 6 January 1841 to address this problem, but the fee was unhelpfully set at 1s, with the explicit aim of keeping the number of registered letters to a minimum to avoid overloading the system! Both the postmaster general and Rowland Hill were in favour of adding compulsory registration to the mix, but that didn’t happen in 1841. Indeed, despite the subject being raised on occasion, it took some 15 years before there were any developments on this front.

FIRST STEPS

When a compulsory registration measure was finally introduced, it was in response to a very specific problem – an increase in the number of letters with ‘Registered’ written on them found in the ordinary mails. This type of letter – marked for registration, but then just dropped into a letter box – was referred to in later Post Office terminology as ‘posted out of course’. This was obviously a bad idea because registration was typically used for items of value and the senders might as well have written ‘Steal Me’.

It was decided to register such letters and charge a double registration fee (Figure 3), by analogy with the charging method for unpaid

letters. (Normally, only the postage had been paid.) The recipient had to pay the surcharge on delivery – as it wasn’t their fault, this obviously wasn’t ideal, but no-one could come up with a workable alternative. From then on, this was the standard way to treat letters that were compulsorily registered.

Measures to address the ‘coin letter’ problem took an additional few years of cautious discussion before they were implemented. On 1 August 1862, the registration fee was reduced to 4d, and the Post Office also announced that they would ‘treat as registered all letters unquestionably containing coin’, charging a double fee of 8d – although noting that this would initially only be

done in London. However, since this meant any inland letter from, to or passing through the capital, it covered a useful percentage of the mail (Figure 4).

This approach having proved effective, it was extended to the rest of the UK on 1 May 1863 (Figure 5), covering letters between any two places in the kingdom (Figure 6).

It’s probably worth noting that although

Jewellery and watches, which typically had precious metal casings, were added to the list of contents that required compulsory registration on 1 September 1873. Indeed, they should probably have been included in the first place, being just as obvious as coins in a letter…i don’t recall seeing an example of a letter from this era registered because it contained jewellery, though, so a scan would be of interest if anyone has one. It was originally proposed to include banknotes and mint postage stamps as well (the latter were often sent by post to settle small bills), but this was hastily scrapped following public and parliamentary objections.

REGISTRATION OF OPEN LETTERS

You might wonder how anyone would be able to tell that a letter had banknotes or stamps in it. The answer is that the covers were often badly secured (Figure 8), and sometimes when an envelope had come undone, it revealed items that would benefit from registration. (That was if the sender was lucky – at the London Chief Office, it was routine to find things of value lying about the place, having fallen out of a letter.) There were also letters that a Returned Letter Branch (RLB) had opened to get a return address, only to find more than they expected.

1 January 1878 saw a wholesale revamp of the registration system, and some of the measures taken related to the Post Office’s continuing hassles with valuables sent in unregistered letters. For a start, the fee was reduced further to a mere 2d, which was expected to incentivise anyone who had valuables to send to register them. Linen-lined postal stationery envelopes pre-stamped for the registration fee were put on sale, to provide a widely available stout cover (Figure 9).

For the first time, letters of value only discovered when opened in a RLB were compulsorily registered on return to sender, although here just a single 2d fee was charged (Figure 10). What counted as ‘value’ changed over the years – it included the obvious coins and jewellery but also banknotes and eventually such things as mint stamps above a certain face value (the exact value changed quite often) and uncrossed postal orders. Letters with ‘non-obvious’ valuable items were also charged only a single fee for compulsory registration (Figure 11).

Strangely, the other compulsory registration fees were left at 8d, as they were before 1878 – as an internal report later noted, there was ‘no statement or discussion in the papers as to retaining the fee at 8d’. It would appear to have been thought of as ‘the fee for compulsory registration’, and the fact that it had been introduced as a double fee overlooked (Figure 12). It took until 1 February 1897 before it was brought back into line with the original idea and reduced to 4d (Figure 13).

This article has provided a general overview of compulsory registration up to the early years of the 20th century. The follow-up will look at subsequent changes and at some other aspects of the subject, including the labels, postmarks and stationery used.

A compulsorily registered coin letter from 1878 – in this case, the presence of the coin is obvious, even now, from the impression it left on the envelope (probably a florin, given the size). It was from a blind woman to a Catholic priest asking for prayers to be said for her family

ABOVE: 3 Early example of 1s double-rate surcharge (the regular fee was reduced to 6d in 1848) for a letter that paid only the normal 1d postage but with ‘Registered’ written on it. Endorsed on the back ‘Received unregistered at the P.O. Leeds’

BELOW: 2 1836 letter from Tockington to Berkely (Bristol area). It weighed 11/4oz, so paid 5x6d rate for 20–30 miles plus 1d Bristol Penny Post charge. The writer sent 6s (probably a silver crown and a shilling given the weight), which was noticed, and ‘Supposed Cash’ written so that it would be treated as a Money Letter

TOP: 4 From Bristol in March 1863 to the editor of The Times, enclosing coin (which explains the 4d postage for 1–2oz weight). There was no compulsory registration in the provinces at this time, but it was registered on arrival in London and charged 8d. As it was endorsed ‘Refused’ on the back, the editor clearly wasn’t having it

ABOVE: 6 From Derry to Galway in August 1863. Only postage of 2d paid (1/2–1oz rate, again heavier because of a coin), so registered and charged 8d

ABOVE AND RIGHT: 5 A printed form to report that a missing letter could not be found, which was used in 1866. As it mentioned the need to register valuables and enclosed a notice referring to compulsory registration of coin letters, it seems likely that the money was enclosed in the letter

ABOVE AND RIGHT: 9 The first type of registered envelope (used on the second day of issue). These were an important step in making coin letters more secure – indeed, a rule was introduced that compensation for lost coins could only be paid if one of these envelopes had been used

ABOVE: 7 A coin letter with overpaid postage. Posted a few weeks after the higher rates were significantly reduced – the sender apparently didn’t realise and paid the old 3d third step rate for 1–11/2oz, not the new 11/2d second step rate for 1–2oz. The surcharge was 61/2d, calculated as 8d less the 11/2d overpayment – not 5d (as twice the difference between the 51/2d normal registered rate for this weight and the 3d paid would have been)

any overpayment of postage was allowed for when calculating the final surcharge, the compulsory registration fee was always 8d, not simply double the deficiency (Figure 7). This distinction would also prove relevant when changes were made in 1878.

ABOVE: 8 A 1902 letter from someone on the training ship HMS Britannia at Dartmouth that was so badly made up that the coin enclosed was sticking out of the envelope! The Post Office resealed and compulsorily registered it

ABOVE: 13 October 1897 letter posted out of course, again paid 3d, but the surcharge was now only 2d, i.e. 4d compulsory registration fee less 2d already paid by the embossed stamp

ABOVE: 12 An 1891 letter marked for registration and paid 3d (1d postage+2d fee), but evidently posted with the rest of the mail. Marked ‘posted out of course’ and surcharged 8d at first (probably by habit!), it was reduced to 6d to allow for the 2d already paid

LEFT AND BELOW: 10 Printed envelope of the Bristol Returned Letter Branch used for letters that had been compulsorily registered on return to sender, with the 2d single fee surcharge already printed on the front and an explanatory note on the back

BELOW: 11 A 1903 cover that was damaged and resealed. This revealed a blank postal order, which was enough to invoke compulsory registration at the single fee rate