Arrangements are made to meet emergency requisitions due to telegraphic breakdowns, naval or military manœuvres, &c., and officers are frequently called from their home at night to despatch by the first means at their disposal the necessary instruments.
The returned stores form a large item of the business. Instruments get out of date as well as out of repair. These are examined by an officer, who decides whether they shall be sold complete, or broken up and sold as brass, ebonite, &c. It pays to break up instruments, if, for example, they contain platinum, but on the other hand, for instruments such as bells, switches, &c., there is a limited demand, and these are sold in small lots by auction. It is a matter of some difficulty to determine, and it has frequently to be decided by experiment, what instruments can be broken up, and as the demand is very limited, how many complete instruments can be released from stock without affecting the price.
Storeboys do most of the breaking up of instruments, and useful parts are retained for stock. Nobody can be relied on to break up anything with more of the joy of life than a boy. Lead-covered cable is stripped in the factories for sale as copper and lead, and gutta-percha for sale as copper wire and gutta-percha strippings. Superintending Engineers throughout the country are allowed to sell locally certain stores such as old iron, iron wire, and poles, but other valuable stores are sent to London for disposal.
There are two or three general tender sales of old stores in the year, and special sales of copper and lead are arranged whenever the accumulations or the state of the market require it. But the scrap-heap of the Post Office is of the dimensions of a mountain.
There are also returned postal stores, which come under the name of condemned material. These are sold for what they will fetch. In one year the Department obtained £1800 for clothing and rags, £850 for string, and £700 for boots. Accumulations of used string are disposed of also locally by certain postmasters. Here is indeed an example in domestic economy.
The Stores supply in response to requisitions a quantity of postal stores to the Colonies and British post offices abroad. There are British post offices at Ascension, Beyrout, Constantinople, Panama, Salonica, Smyrna, and Tangier.
I must not omit to mention the Awards Committee of the Post Office, which exists to encourage workmen and other Post Office servants to bring forward suggestions for improvements in machinery, tools, apparatus, &c., and lists of the awards are published from time to time in the Post Office Circular. The Postmaster-General, in a recent report, stated that “since the operations of the Committee began, the Post Office workmen have displayed greater interest in their work.”
There is a systematic inspection of the conditions of employment under Post Office contractors. The amended Fair Wages Resolution passed by the House of Commons on the 10th March 1909 is now inserted in all contracts for Post Office stores, and firms desiring to be added to the official lists of contractors are required to give an undertaking that they will conform strictly to the conditions of this Resolution. A clause is also introduced into head-dress and clothing contracts prescribing minimum wages for women and girl workers.
The labour conditions of the Post Office in other respects are sometimes not so satisfactory. A Superintending Engineer recently sent in a claim for a double extra allowance for certain of his men who had performed seventy-six hours' extra duty each in a week, and he explained that one of the men had worked for eighteen of these hours “under somewhat discouraging conditions, being head downwards in a manhole.” Many of us would prefer to take the risk of balancing ourselves on the top of a telegraph pole.
The work of the Stores Department is, it will be seen, of a singularly responsible character. Dealing as it does with contractors in a very large way, it requires in its officers not only judgment and experience but the highest commercial probity as well. Dealing also with large numbers of workmen, it has opportunities of earning for the State a reputation for fair treatment, and for setting an example to private firms. No doubt the popular view would be that the Stores only supply telegraph poles, sealing-wax, and things of that sort, and any salesman in Oxford Street could do the work. The Stores Department suffers from its name: the man in the street connects it in his mind with the Civil Service Stores, and he knows what goes on in those premises. But if he were to visit the offices of the Department, he would find the difference rather striking, and he would for ever afterwards have a wondering respect for “the man from the Stores” who buys and sells articles by the million, and who will probably ask you for the loan of a pencil or a stick of sealing-wax, as his personal supply of these articles has run short.