CHAPTER VIII
THE UNDELIVERED POSTAL PACKET
It is often brought as a reproach against the General Post Office that while it occasionally fails to deliver a letter which is only slightly incorrect in its address, it frequently succeeds if the address is entirely wrong or is more or less unintelligible to the average reader. But Post Office men and women have the ordinary human point of view, and we must not blame them for sometimes despising the solution of simple difficulties and laying themselves out to solve the larger problems of official life. Like Naaman, they prefer to be asked to do some great thing. For one reason, both their chiefs and the public will give them more credit for solving an apparently hopeless puzzle than for suggesting a way out of an easy difficulty. They may have in the one case a paragraph all to themselves in the Daily Mail: in the other case they will not even be thanked by the man who receives the letter, and who is not modest enough to be surprised because he is known to the Post Office in spite of an imperfect address.
None the less, the failure of the Post Office to deliver a letter often means a loss of self-respect to the member of the Department whose duty it is to find an owner for the packet, and he will make great efforts to save his reputation.
The Department which deals with the undelivered letters is called the Returned Letter Office, but the older and more striking name was the Dead Letter Office. This name, however, gave rise to some misunderstanding on the part of the simple-minded British public. Many thought that this office was a place where they could learn all about dead and missing friends and relatives. Descriptions were frequently sent as to the age and appearance of lost fathers, husbands, uncles, &c. For instance, information was required of the whereabouts of “R——, a carpenter by trade, 5 feet 10½, blue eyes, brown hare, and a cut on the forreid, a lump on the smorle of his back, and no whiskers.” A lady wrote this letter: “To the Dead Office Post Office, London. I, the mother of Michael Roach, beg leave to write to you trusting that you will kindly send me the necessary information regarding the death of my son, and if dead you as a gentleman will kindly send me an answer to this, whether dead or living.”
Other folk who are influenced by superstitious considerations disliked the gruesome suggestiveness of the title. Hence this letter: “To the Dead Letter Office. If any of my letters should come to your office that I have not sent since the last, will you be so kind as to burn them and never send them back to me. After that one came, as many as 21 persons have died and been buried in this little place, and I don't know what will be the end of it. I think this will be my last.”
Communications of this nature may have brought about the change in name, but I am inclined to think that this was induced by the reluctance of the staff to admit the deadness of any postal packet which passed through their hands.
At one time there were Dead Letter Offices only in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, but now the chief towns in the Kingdom have their own Returned Letter Offices, and they deal with the business in their own districts.
Our first thought will probably be that the work of these offices must be of a somewhat simple character, but this idea will not survive many minutes' consideration. A large proportion of the letters are found to contain enclosures of varying value which require special treatment. Among them are bank notes, cheques, bills of exchange, letters of credit, circular notes, dividend warrants, money and postal orders, stamps, jewellery, and countless articles of value. All these different items have to be accounted for, and care taken that none but the rightful owners shall possess them.
The figures relating to these undelivered postal packets are positively startling. They show an amount of carelessness on the part of the British public which in these days of universal education is almost unexplainable. During the year ending March 1910 the total number of undelivered packets of all kinds, including packets entirely unaddressed and articles found loose, is estimated to have reached a total of 31,241,000. The curious thing about these figures is that they include nearly 400,000 packets containing articles of value. The total amount of money found in addressed and unaddressed packets was £647,832, of which £15,127 was in cash and bank notes and £632,705 in bills, cheques, money orders, postal orders, and postage stamps. These figures, of course, do not include the value of remittances which may have been enclosed in packets returned unopened to the senders or the value of miscellaneous property dealt with as undeliverable.
The number of packets of all descriptions posted during the same year without any address and of articles found loose in the post was 427,000. Among these were bank notes and cash to the value of about £1500, and bills, cheques, and other forms of remittance to the value of about £16,000.