The post office and its story

by Edward Bennett

The Department always holds large stocks of cloths, linings, tapes, braids, and buttons, and it issues them from time to time to its tailoring contractors. Think of a supply of three or four million buttons! The percentage of misfits is two.

Mail bags, parcel post receptacles, official bicycles, and telegraph instruments are supplied in large quantities. Over 11,000 bicycles, carriers, and trailers are in use throughout the Kingdom, and the mileage covered by them amounts to 150 million miles per year.

Miscellaneous postal stores, such as stamps, seals, scales, weights, telegraph paper, string, sealing-wax, are purchased by the Stores for the Post Office. Printed matter, pens, ink, paper, and office requisites, though stocked and distributed by the Stores, are supplied by the Stationery Office, Whitehall. Household stores, that is materials for cleansing and cooking purposes, are supplied to the Post Office by the Board of Works. The Stores supply the General Post Office with red tape to the extent of 1,000,000 yards annually. The amount will not come as a surprise to many people, who may perhaps be inclined to say that the exports of red tape by the Post Office even exceeds the big import. Needless to say, the Stores only supply the article in its material form: they are content to allow the administrative branches to manufacture the other kind. Pencils are supplied to the tune of 1,000,000, and pens I have already mentioned. Again the critic may step in and say that if the average post office pen were renewed as often as it ought to be the order from the Stores would be still larger than it is. The stationery supplies are of course stupendous. Here are a few figures covering one year: 2200 gallons of gum, 4800 gallons of writing ink, 11,000 boxes of paper-fasteners, 4800 quires of blotting-paper. And you can get sealing wax in three qualities, and in hundredweights. But if I continue in this strain I shall turn the heads of my readers.

Closely allied to the Stores are the factories. Speaking broadly, the Post Office does not make the goods which it requires; it gets them for the most part from other firms: the goods are brought into the factories to be examined and tested, and the Stores distributes them throughout the Kingdom. A certain amount of manufacture does, however, take place at the factories. A quantity of telegraphic apparatus is made here: the supply and upkeep of thousands of miles of telegraphs and telephone lines has to be provided for. In one place you will find a machine, the work of which consists in installing wires into cables: in another you will find a machine doing exactly the opposite kind of work, pulling cables to pieces that have had their day; the wires are untwisted, and the gutta-percha is stripped off. The insulators for the telegraph poles all come into the factory, and the arms on which they are to be fixed for the support of the wires are made here. They are of British oak or Australian karri-wood. All kind of fittings for postal and telegraph work, including silence cabinets for the telephone business, are constructed in the factory.

Repairs form a large part of the work. Here are awaiting repair, straps, postmen's bags and pouches, and the great bull hides—envelopes as they are called—in which the mail bags are wrapped to be dropped by the Travelling Post Office. Many of these are continually being brought into the factories to be repaired, rent and split up all to pieces, indicating the violence of the action which often takes place during the exchange of the bags.

Leather is used very much in postal appliances, and a large staff is employed making and repairing articles. Powerful sewing-machines are employed for the purpose. One curious industry is the making of the little felt and leather carriers which are used for the transmitting written telegrams and other papers through the pneumatic tubes. These are made by women. There are, as I have already pointed out, miles of these pneumatic tubes under the streets of London.

Here is a paint shop, also a smith's shop with steam blast and hammer. Basket-mending is very much in evidence. The Post Office uses thousands of baskets, many of which used to be made in prisons. The bulk, however, come from contractors, but the mending is done here.

When the articles have been tested the Stores undertake the delivery throughout the country.

One of the burning questions of the Post Office is the supply of telegraph poles. In the Post Office Circular of the 8th December 1908, the Postmaster-General invited his staff throughout the country to acquaint him of any promising sources of home-supplied timber. There was a time when the needs of the British Post Office were met solely from Norway. From the Norwegian forests came the poles which supported the overhead telegraphs of the United Kingdom. But at the present time there is a shrinkage in the supply from that quarter. The Post Office requires 40,000 poles per annum. Sweden has supplied us, and now Russia with her interminable and primeval forests sends us the poles. There are virgin forests in Russia in the White Sea Hinterland, but these are very dense, and it is sometimes very difficult to get out of them anything longer than 40 feet. The timbers used for telegraph “arms” are, however, imported from Australia.

An interesting fact about the supply of telegraph stores is that a General Election decided on at short notice involves an immediate order for 2600 instruments with accessory stores. The additional telegraph forms required reach high figures.