Pigeons and Pirates

As early as 1557, Britain's mail carriers were complaining about their paltry wages. According to one sympathetic chronicler, in that "busy tyme of the warres they were not hable to lyve of Xlld [12 pence] by the daye, which in tyme of peace was their ordinary wages." Not until last week, however, did the country's long-suffering letter carriers finally get around to staging the first nationwide strike in the history of the British post office. Britain's distinctive red mailboxes were sealed with brown tape as most of the 230,000 members of the Union of Post Office Workers (U.P.W.) walked off the job.

The U.P.W. mans most of the telephone and telegraph services and handles 35 million letters and 500,000 parcels a day. Its members demanded a 15% increase in their pay, which now ranges from $36 to $66 a week. The post office, $72 million in the red last year, offered only 8%. U.P.W. Leader Tom Jackson, a barrel-shaped ex-sailor with a formidable ten-inch mustache, called his men out.

Determined Bulldog. The nation met the strike with its customary equanimity and ingenuity. Posts and Telecommunications Minister Christopher Chataway suspended the post office's century-old monopoly on letter and parcel handling and invited private operators to deliver the mail. Almost immediately, independent operators, dubbed "pirates" by the press, mobilized horses, courier vans, charter aircraft, pigeons and even the members of motorcycle gangs.

To aid his church's restoration fund, the Rev. David Hill of Luton offered to deliver parishioners' letters for 30-c- each. Scotland's electricity board got employees' wives to distribute bills by hand. For 72-c- a letter, one outfit collected mail from London firms and delivered it to Paris by plane. A London builder and decorator named Tim Randall, 24, recruited seven "postmen," mostly students, at 96-c- an hour to deliver letters.

During the first 24 hours of the strike, the students carried 1,000 letters with Randall's own 24-c- stamp. Such individually designed stamps, some of which depict a dogged-looking Winston Churchill or a determined bulldog, are already bringing $2.40 from philatelists.

The football pools, massively dependent on the mails, sent out three weeks of coupons in advance and had most of the 12 million in hand before the walkout began. Other firms are taking advantage of the fact that 8,000 telephone operators have remained on the job, keeping many phone and telex lines open.

Those entrepreneurs who have resorted to pigeon post have had mixed results. The mating season has just begun, and a pigeon named Concorde, assigned to fly 170 miles with microfilmed letters tied to one leg. was found dallying in a loft only a mile from its starting point. But another bird carrying a microfilmed letter between two brothers in London and Portsmouth arrived in only 2-c- hours.

The postmen, whose union is too poor to afford strike pay. are taking care not to make themselves as unpopular as the electrical workers did seven weeks ago. On two afternoons last week, they voluntarily appeared to deliver family allowances to mothers and pension checks to old folks. Nonetheless, the fund of good will is likely to dwindle as pools coupons, checks and love letters go undelivered. That is precisely what Prime Minister Edward Heath's government wants. Heath confronts an American-style situation. While prices are rising, so is unemployment, which last week reached 690,707, or 3% of the working force, the highest since 1963.

Heath's Conservative government has been trying to take a tough line on inflationary union demands. It is also pushing vigorously for passage of a controversial industrial relations bill that will make labor contracts legally binding and thereby reduce shop-floor pressures for inflationary wage increases. When the government sought last week to curtail debate on the measure, the House of Commons erupted in the noisiest parliamentary session since Heath took office. From Labor benches came shouts of "Fascist!," "Dictator!" and "Reichstag!" At one point Tory and Labor whips were facing each other down and waving so angrily that a fistfight almost started.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.