The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
matters. The counter-clerk who sells the stamp and the postman who delivers the letter are the two officials who are known to the public, and the different officers who conduct the operations which come between the buying of the stamp and the delivery of the letter are almost unknown outside the walls of their own offices. And it is a matter for congratulation that in King Edward's Building the health and bodily needs of the staff have been considered in a way which twenty or thirty years ago would have been regarded as quixotic and as grandmotherly administration.
Ducts have been provided in the main building for mechanically ventilating the three lower floors, and uptakes are led from these into fan-houses situated on the roof. The fans which have been installed are directly coupled to motors of variable speed, and are designed to move large quantities of air. Fresh air is admitted through windows and ventilating radiators, and the vitiated air is discharged on the roof. The ventilation of the Bag Room has been separately treated; here a considerable quantity of dust is liberated by the handling of mail bags, and dust, we are beginning to learn, is the great enemy to health. Arrangements have been made for concentrating this at one point near a collecting hopper, through which the dust-laden air passes and is discharged on the roof.
The third floor is entirely devoted to kitchen and refreshment-room accommodation and retiring-rooms for the various classes of the staff. Each officer has a long locker for his belongings. As the work goes on during the whole of the twenty-four hours, the refreshment branch is practically always open. A very large business is done here. Three thousand dinners can be prepared every day.
The roof is flat, and on it two miniature rifle ranges, one of 25 yards and one of 50 yards, have been constructed. Here are to be seen the large ventilating fans for securing a constant supply of fresh air to the rooms below.
The new-comer into the service speedily takes all these conveniences and comforts for granted, and perhaps is aggrieved because arm-chairs and lounges are not yet provided; but the middle-aged official, who remembers times when nothing apart from his work was ever considered by his chiefs, rubs his eyes sometimes and wonders whether it is all a dream.
King Edward's Building is in keeping with all the traditions of the City of London. Charlotte Brontë in Villette says: “I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares: but I love the City far better. The City seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar are such serious things, sights, sounds. The City is getting its living—the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused, but in the City you are deeply excited.” That is the mood which will possess the visitor as he leaves the new building.
Here is a list of the huge buildings which now make up the London General Post Office:—
1. G.P.O. North. For the Postmaster-General and the offices of the Secretary, Accountant-General, and Solicitor.
2. G.P.O. West. For the Central Telegraph Office and Engineering Staff.
3. G.P.O. South (Queen Victoria Street). For the Telephone Department.
4. King Edward's Building. For the Controller of the London Postal Service and his staff and for the E.C. and Foreign Sections of the Sorting Office.
5. Mount Pleasant. For the Inland Letter and Parcel Sections of the Sorting Office, Returned Letter Office, Telegraph Factories, &c.
6. West Kensington. For the Post Office Savings Bank.
7. Studd Street, N. For the Stores Department.
8. Holloway, N. For Money Order and Postal Order Departments.
The staff working in these eight buildings is about 20,000, of whom 4300 are in King Edward's Building.
CHAPTER V
THE TRAVELLING POST OFFICE
Something of the old romance of the service lingers about the Travelling Post Office. To those who work it there is always a possibility of adventure, not to mention the risk to life and limb, while to those who watch its operations there is that indefinable element which makes an appeal to the imagination. Moreover, in more than one of its features it links up our time with the old mail coach days. There are pictures in existence of the mail coach passing through a village or hamlet, and the mail bag is being handed out from the upper windows of the local post office to the guard of the coach. The driver is reducing his speed while the exchange is taking place, and the suggestion of the picture is that no time is to be lost. The same idea is carried out to-day by means of mechanical appliances. Indeed, so soon as the mail train came into being, the minds of officials were at once exercised how to maintain the old system of exchange under altered conditions. The early effects were scarcely ingenious, and were obviously dangerous. The experiment was tried of hoisting up the bags towards the railway guards on long poles, but after one guard had had his eye poked out, and others had suffered from severe falls while endeavouring to secure the bags, it was felt that the business placed too severe a strain on human endeavour. Under this clumsy arrangement it was necessary for the train to reduce its speed, and it was not only, I am afraid, to preserve the guards from injury, but also to prevent delay during the process of exchange, that the efforts of inventors were directed. But before I proceed to describe the ingenious apparatus which is in operation to-day, and which is on practically the same lines as that invented more than seventy years ago, I must deal with the Travelling Post Office itself.
As early as 1837, when railways were yet in their infancy, it was suggested to the Post Office by Frederick Karstadt, a son of one of the surveyors of the Department, that much time would be saved if some of the necessary business of sorting and preparation for delivery of letters were performed on the train. On the 6th January 1838, a carriage was run as an experiment on the railway between Birmingham and Liverpool. The carriage used for the purpose was simply a horse-box temporarily fitted up as a sorting office. The experiment was decided to be a success, not only by officials, but by the press and the public. In the words of an enthusiastic writer at the time, “Here is a specimen of the exhaustless ingenuity which bids fair to annihilate time and space, an improvement which enables the Post Office to work practically double tides—in other words, to duplicate time by travelling and working at the same instant.” We smile at writing of this kind in these days, when the familiarity of the operations has robbed us of all sense of wonder, but the language is not very different from what we frequently hear to-day when the achievements of the aeroplane or wireless telegraphy are recorded. To our grandfathers the Travelling Post Office was a miracle of the day, and it is not difficult, if we know the social life of that time, to understand the way in which they must have speculated on its possibilities.
Photo
Herbert Lazenby.
The Travelling Post Office.
This is the interior of the most recently constructed Great Northern Railway travelling post office. Notice the exchange apparatus fittings behind the sorters.
It was the idea of being able to carry on the ordinary business of life while travelling from one place to another which appealed to the imaginations of men whose experiences of travel had been limited to the cramped conditions of the mail coach. But I doubt whether they could have conceived of a time when we should breakfast, lunch, dine, and have comfortable beds on trains running at fifty miles an hour. And one of the latest developments of all, the providing of lady typists on trains for the benefit of business men travelling to and from London, would certainly have justified the enthusiastic prose of an earlier day. We take these things in a more complacent fashion; we talk of the increased economy and convenience as meeting a public demand, and we grumble at the railway which withholds luxuries from us.
There is no doubt, however, that the success of the Travelling Post Office was the first revelation to the railway companies, and to the public, of what could be done on a train while in motion, but much was needed in the direction of improving the permanent way and the springs and general