The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
City postman or deposited in a mail cart which takes it to the railway station or district office.
A band conveyor takes the letters from the posting room which are addressed to places in London or abroad, to the ground floor of the building in baskets, and the empty baskets are sent down by a return band. The correspondence for the provinces, which is dealt with at a large sorting office at Mount Pleasant, nearly a mile away, is put into bags, and another band conveyor takes these bags to the departure platform at the west end of the sorting office. There is a third band conveyor suspended from the ceiling of the same floor, which is for the conveyance of bags of mails from the east to the west of the sorting office.
The London letters and those for abroad are conveyed to the ground floor, which is occupied by the E.C. district sorting office. The letters are brought to the eastern end of the immense room and with them are bags of letters which have arrived from provincial offices and abroad, amounting altogether to upwards of five millions weekly.
The posted letters are arranged in order for stamping on what are called facing tables, on which running bands are placed, and at the end of these tables are electric stamping machines which can obliterate the stamps on the letters up to a rate of 700 or 800 per minute. Then the letters pass into two main divisions. On the northernnorthern side correspondence for all parts of London, except the E.C. district, is dealt with, and direct despatches are made to every chief district and sub-district delivery office in London for every delivery during the day. On the southern side the postmen prepare the correspondence for the twelve daily deliveries in the E.C. district. Upwards of 1400 postmen are attached to this office. A noticeable feature of the work of sorting is that the letters travel from east to west always, and at the west end is the platform from which bags for other offices are despatched.
The first floor is entirely devoted to the treatment of correspondence for the Colonies and abroad. About 900 officers of all grades are employed upon the work and about 400,000 articles are despatched weekly. The work is brought up by lifts from the eastern platform.
The principle here is also continual subdivision, and there are upwards of 1000 different post offices for which direct bags are made up nightly in the Foreign Section. A striking feature of this section to the visitor is the varied colouring of the big mail bags intended for over-sea mails. If the foreign sailor cannot read he can appreciate colour, and he will know the destination of a mail bag by its colour.
A band conveyor from east to west conveys the bags from the Foreign Section to the top of a special shoot at the west end of the building, whence they are shot down to the departure platform on the ground floor.
All the letters everywhere are “stepping westward,” and everything goes even on the busiest night with something like the regularity of clock work.
Photo
Clarke & Hyde
The Blind Section.
These men are dealing with badly and insufficiently addressed letters. They have directories in front of them, and every effort is made to put the letters into circulation again.
An interesting feature of the Sorting Office is the Blind Section. Here at all hours of the day you will find a row of men sitting at a long table over which is a bookshelf full of up-to-date directories, guides, and other manuals of topographical information. These men are doing their best to put in the way of delivery the imperfectly and indistinctly written packets. If they fail the letter goes to the Returned Letter Office to submit to more expert treatment. Experience counts for much with these men. The badly spelt addresses are perhaps the easiest of these puzzles. “Saintlings, Hilewite,” is at once decided to be “St. Helens, Isle of Wight” “Has bedallar—such” even a schoolboy would recognise as Ashby-de-la-Zouch; but it requires the specialist in puzzles addresses to arrange for the delivery of a letter addressed simply as 25th March to Lady Day, the wife of the judge of that name.
Whenever we speak of the activities of London we have to deal with big figures, and comparative tables of growth and development are a little wearisome to the modern reader, simply because they have lost all the charm of unexpectedness. We know there must be a huge staff employed at the Head Office in London; the statement that 20,000 is the actual number leaves us unaffected: perhaps even we guessed it was 40,000. We are fully prepared to hear that billions of letters are delivered in the City of London weekly; we are even a little disappointed when we know that up to the present the average is about 5½ millions. If we have been interested in the new building itself and what it is expected to bear in the way of work, we may at least like to know that the total weight of the weekly correspondence passing through its walls is about 366 tons.
I expect that if we were asked in a newspaper competition to state how many post offices and posting receptacles there were in London, we should make a wild guess and say perhaps 15,000 or even 20,000. The actual number is 4650. The fact is the average human mind is incapable of realising facts when stated in thousands. Only very experienced men can tell the approximate numbers at a Hyde Park meeting or a royal procession. Post office numbers are bewildering; we simply cannot realise that they are human life expressed in terms of figures. In order to help our limited human faculties, Mr. J. Holt Schooling has estimated that if one man were given the task of sorting all the postal packets delivered in the United Kingdom in one year—and supposing him to work at the rate of sixty a minute—he would have had to begin nearly one hundred and sixty years ago, in the reign of George II., before the conquest of India began under Lord Clive, in order to complete his task by the year 1910. Mr. Schooling gives him no time for sleep or meals; he goes on without stopping. This is indeed harder to realise than the actual number of the postal packets, which is something over 5,000,000,000.
It is perhaps interesting to know that 32 per 100 of all letters delivered in England and Wales are proper to the London district, nearly one-third. The outgoing letters from the London district also show somewhat similar results. A City firm has posted as many as 132,000 letters at one time.
It is also an interesting fact that we send out of this country a great many more letters than we receive from all the five continents. Even in the case of America, the excess is something like 80,000, but one portion of America, viz., the United States, sends us more letters than we send to that country.
The following estimate will not perhaps test severely the brains which rebel at large sums. According to Mr. Schooling, whom we have quoted before, the number of letters, post cards, halfpenny packets, and newspapers delivered during a year in this country works out for each individual as 65 letters, 19 post cards, 21 halfpenny packets, and 4 newspapers. A moment's consideration of these figures will convince us of the vast number of folk still living with whom the receipt of a letter must be an event in the year.
It is only a little over eighty years since the comparatively small office at Lombard Street housed the whole staff of the London chief office. The change has been tremendous, but no more in proportion to the population than other activities of life. Post Office servants often point with pride to what their Department has achieved, but the truth must be told, and it is that the credit cannot be claimed by the officials. We might almost say that, as far as the Department is concerned, the increase is mostly unearned increment. The increase in population, and especially the advance in the means of communication, are the two chief causes; it is the people who have made the Post Office, not the officials. A retiring postmaster, or even a retiring Postmaster-General, will sometimes tell us in round figures what has been accomplished under his rule. “Alone I did it” is sometimes the burden of these valedictory speeches. But the true explanation lies often in the birth-rate or in the opening of a new railway, and the Post Office reaps what others have sown. And there have been times when the Post Office administrator, proud of what he has done and what his Department is doing, has tried to say “Thus far shalt thou go and no further” to the reformers. “Why not remain satisfied with the perfection I have been the humble means of securing?” The official mind usually requires some driving force from outside before it can see the necessity for another advance.
Still, do not let us forget the huge army which serves the