Transcribed from the [1891] Eyre and Spottiswoode edition by David Price, email [email protected]
With a Preface by the Controller of the London Postal Service.
BY the operation of the new Order in Council regulating Civil Service superannuations, under which officers who have attained the age of sixty-five have—_nolens volens_—to take their pensions, there will be, at the end of this year 1891, quite an exodus of many who through the survival of the strongest and fittest are still serving Her Majesty, although they have reached the Psalmist’s allotted span of three score years and ten.
The loss of our veterans in this manner will be accompanied by many a pang of regret, but in the case of Mr. Moses James Nobbs, the last of the Mail Coach Guards, who is now about to be pensioned, the regret is softened by the circumstance that he recognises his inability to work any longer, and finds the quiet and comfort of country life at Uxbridge, to which place he is retiring, more suitable than Post Office occupation at a busy London Railway Station.
Mr. Nobbs has been in the service of the Post Office fifty-five years. He commenced life as a Mail Guard, and for years worked on Mail coaches. When the old coach system was superseded by railway service Mr. Nobbs did postal duty for some years as Mail Guard on the London and Exeter Railway, and was afterwards appointed to superintend the receipt and despatch of Mail bags at Paddington Station. Thus he was better known to travellers of all degrees on the Great Western line of Railway than to his fellow-servants, with whom he was not brought much into contact, owing to the fact that his duties confined him to the Paddington Terminus. In order, therefore, that this Post Office _rara avis_ might be brought into prominence—as his early retirement was then foreseen—I wrote of him as follows in a published report on the Post Office work in the Christmas Season of 1889:—
“The Christmas postal traffic on the Great Western Railway necessitated the running of the Night Mail train in two portions between London and Penzance, the first part taking the passengers, and the second being reserved exclusively for the Mails. Strangely enough, the despatch of the Mails from Paddington Station was superintended by the only Mail Coach Guard now in the service, Mr. James Nobbs, who for over fifty years has most faithfully looked after Her Majesty’s Mails. He well recollects that on Christmas Eve, 1839, just prior to the introduction of the Penny Post, he was the Guard to the Mail Coach running between Cheltenham and Aberystwith. What a contrast! His Christmas night’s load of Mails in 1839 did not exceed a hundredweight. In 1889 he saw off from Paddington twenty tons of Mail matter in the day, in the most prosaic manner, with no blowing of musical horn, and no carrying of deadly blunderbuss, as of yore. The still hale and hearty old gentleman, in the picturesque costume of the Mail Guard of the past, is a prominent figure at Paddington Station, and long may he so remain.”