The General Post Office in 1900

This is what Arthur H. Beavan had to say about London's General Post Office, located at that time in St Martin's-le-Grand, in Imperial London, published in 1901.

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If the shade of the Earl of Lichfield - who was Postmaster-General in 1839 - could revisit St Martin's-le-Grand in 1900, it would be forced to admit that human ideas are very small and limited.

In 1839, his lordship declared that "of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever heard proposed, the penny post was the maddest."

At that time the old Post Office had just been finished, and was considered a ridiculously large and expensive house for the purpose.

But what would the Earl of Lichfield think of its additional story and other enlargements?

What would he say of the imposing building opposite to it, almost double its height, where the General Telegraph Office is housed, or of the stately annex by its side known as the "General Post Office, North," built for the Central Savings Bank and offices of the Postmaster-General and chief staff?

Yet more: what would he think of the Central Parcel Post Office at Mount Pleasant, where the provincial letters are sorted?

As for our Post Office statistics, they would stagger him! Our present Postmaster has to deal with an annual revenue of £17,000,000, to expend in administration £13,000,000, and to control a staff of 160,000 employees.

The number of letters dealt with in this department is enormous.

Last year, (1900), 2,186,000,000 were delivered in the United Kingdom (nearly one-third, or 617,700,000, being credited to London alone), while the average for 1898-99, of mail-matter, i.e. letters, post-cards, book-packets, circulars, newspapers, and parcels, per head of population in the United Kingdom was 86.8; a record for the world, and resulting chiefly from the once despised and ridiculed penny postage.

The privilege of inspecting the General Post Office during working-hours is not so easily obtained as would at first appear.

Orders to go over it are supposed to be issued from the chief officials, but they are somewhat chary of according the favour, as it is calculated to obstruct the conduct of business.

The best time to go is about five o'clock, and there is much to see.

There is the Foreign and Colonial section, where you are shown samples of the zinc-lined boxes in which the Australian mails used to be put up, very few sufficing.

The mail-matter dealt with here in 1898-99, to and from every part of the world, amounted in weight to nearly 10,625 tons!

The book, newspaper, and packet departments are interesting because of their great variety, and one witnesses the practical application of the rule against the insertion of any written communication, as an official, examining a rather bulky volume sent in the ordinary way, discovers therein a slip of paper "in the nature of a letter," and charges it at the letter-rate.

By special favour a visitor is allowed, as the hour draws near for the dispatch of the night mail, to remain in the long-room, which for some years has absorbed the central hall of the General Post Office, through which there used to be a public thoroughfare from St. Martin's-le-Grand to Foster Lane at the back.

A series of immense tables fill up a large portion of this noble hall, those at the south end being reserved for the City or E.C. division, on whose behalf an enormous amount of work has to be done, upwards of 14,290,000 articles being posted and delivered during the week, so that throughout the day there is much activity here, whereas, in the other sections, viz. the foreign and Metropolitan, work, though great, is more or less intermittent until evening approaches, the slackest time being between twelve and one o'clock.

(The sorting of provincial letters is now transferred to Mount Pleasant, Clerkenwell, thus relieving the Central establishment of one-half its work, or, roughly speaking, leaving it to deal with the foreign, and all postal arrangements connected with London.)

The letters, post-cards, etc., are thrown in heaps upon the tables, and the first operation is to set them in order with the address in the right position for the dating and the obliterating of the stamp, which is deftly and swiftly effected with an improved self-inking machine that automatically counts them.

This is all simple enough; but the sorting is not so easy.

The sorter must be a person of intelligence, and able to decipher all kinds of handwriting; he must instantaneously recollect the exact district-office to which each letter has to be sent, and pigeon-hole it accordingly; and, in the case of provincial letters, he requires, not only an accurate acquaintance with locality, but with the particular railway centre to which they should be sent, which is not necessarily that of the nearest city or town.

Collected from the sorters' tables, the respective bundles of letters are placed in the mail-bags that bear the name of their destination; these are then tied up, sealed from great caldrons of wax, and are ready for the mail-vans.

The two items, string and wax, are used up at the General Post Office by many hundredweights per annum.

The foreign, the registered, royal, and official letters, are sorted on separate tables in a slightly different manner.

From a small gallery at the General Post Office, visitors used to be able to watch the process of dispatching the night provincial mail, but now they must go to Mount Pleasant to see it.

(From the Central Telegraph Office, a private General Post Office omnibus starts at intervals to convey any person, on business bound, to the Mount Pleasant branch.)

In the big room there are, at busy seasons, as many as 1800 people, all earnestly working in silence.

Every table is completely covered with mountainous heaps of letters, which keep being poured upon them like an avalanche until the last moment for posting has expired, after which they rapidly dwindle, until, as if by magic, not an envelope remains on floor or table, a fine being inflicted for every document so discovered after "time has been called."

In London there are, in addition to the General Post Office, eleven Head Offices, some of them fine large buildings - as in High Holborn, the West Central District, and the South-Western District Office near Buckingham Palace; there are 106 sub-offices, 837 town sub-offices, and over1000 letter-boxes.

The total number of employees in this great Department of State is about 12,000!

The Money Order section is interesting because of its vast statistics, which show for 1898-9 a grand total of business transacted with the United Kingdom and abroad of 103,278,517; while the popular Postal Orders issued for the same period represented £76,755,217.

The Central Savings Bank is now removed from Queen Victoria Street to a large building at West Kensington, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the then Prince of Wales on behalf of the late Queen Victoria, on June 24, 1899.

Gigantic are the very latest figures of the Savings Bank's returns, it having £130,000,000 in trust for over 7,700,000 depositors.

Out of the 71,913,000 parcels delivered in the United Kingdom during 1898-9, hundreds of thousands passed every week through the Mount Pleasant office.

At Christmas time, when the number is augmented by many thousands, the large staff of men work day and night in twelve-hours shifts.

Not until ten o'clock on Christmas morning does the unpacking of the great wicker hampers, and the sorting and repacking of their varied contents, cease for a moment.

After thirteen years' experience, the system of distribution has attained to great perfection.

A van brings in from a London post office a dozen heavy wicker crates, enclosing packages addressed to all parts of the kingdom.

These packages are taken out and deposited upon a long tin-lined, trough-shaped table.

Behind the table is a staff of sorters, and beyond them a number of racks, one labelled "Euston," for instance.

Into this particular rack are put all parcels destined for the London and North-Western system.

The rack is cleared from behind as fast as it is filled, and the parcels are at once wheeled off to another part of the vast and brilliantly-lighted hall which is marked as the Eastern division.

A series of indicators denote that further sorting will here occur.

Direct dispatches have, among many others, to be made for the Preston "road," which is Post Office phraseology for the groups of towns lying within reach of Preston, and packages for that "road" are promptly taken off to their own duly-labelled quarter, there to be once more assorted, and placed in their proper baskets.

The same system is followed in regard to the York, the Peterborough, and dozens of other "roads."

The parcel-postman is, as a rule, an expert packer, and he can make good use even of the apple-barrels which the Post Office has to utilize sometimes when the supply of wicker baskets gives out.

Occasionally, he comes across some curious packages, though the public have grown more discreet since the early days of the parcel-post, when doctors thought it a convenient method of transporting leeches.

At one time there was a regulation under which live lobsters were accepted as parcels.

This was designed to encourage the fishery on the west coast of Ireland, but it was not very successful.

Bees, however, are still admissible, and are sometimes sent by parcel-post as far as Italy.

Occasionally, the labels come off the parcels, and the grandchild gets the bed-socks and the grandmother the doll.

In the "hospital" at Mount Pleasant there are always a few ladies' hats, which can only be delivered with a fragmentary relic of the band-box which it was fondly believed would protect the contents from the rough usages of the world.

Pictures imperfectly packed are easily damaged; and leaking bottles of spirits come into the "wards" for treatment, incurable cases being at once sent on to the returned Letter Office.

Parcels which fall to pieces sometimes reveal the most unsuspected contents.

Thus one package of Christmas cheer which came to grief last year was composed of a pound of butter, a quantity of starch, and a number of candles.

But the author was told that one of the first parcels received in a damaged condition at the General Post Office, at the inauguration of the Parcel Post in 1883, contained a dress-coat, a brace of partridges, a plum-pudding, and a dozen eggs, which latter had come to grief to the detriment of the partridges, and the total ruin of the dress-coat!

Before leaving the fascinating subject of the General Post Office for its great department, the Telegraph Office, I should mention that its huge staff throughout the kingdom, in spite of its somewhat disadvantageous surroundings, are, on the whole, remarkably healthy, and, although the strain upon the nervous system must be great, the number of cases of retirement from the service during the twelve months ending December 31, 1898, from softening of the brain, mental derangement, and nervous debility, were respectively one, thirty-five, and thirty-four.

In the report one reads, amongst other reasons given for retirement, of "flat feet and weak ankles," "hammer-toes," and "bunions."

For romantic episodes the General Post Office has long been celebrated, and the protracted delay in the delivery of missives has given many a novelist an idea for his plot.

For instance, on Christmas Day, I871, a letter was posted at Swindon, addressed to a young lady living in Charnham Street, Hungerford, and last year it was delivered to a lady at Newbury, having occupied a quarter of a century, plus four years, in transit.

It appears that it had fallen behind some woodwork at the Swindon office, where it lay unnoticed until certain alterations in the building brought it to light.

It was then sent on to Hungerford, where there happened to be a postman who knew the lady to whom the letter was addressed.

Hence the delivery to the rightful owner, in spite of the fact that she had changed her name three times since the envelope was inscribed.

Another curious case was that of a post-card, possibly constituting a record in postal delay.

A jeweller, of Kingston-on-Thames, sent a post-card to a firm of wholesale jewellers in Clerkenwell, ordering certain goods.

They did not arrive, and for some reason he did not write to inquire why they had not been sent.

Last year, he was surprised to receive a packet from a firm in London containing jewellery, which he could not remember having ordered, and so he wrote asking the reason for their forwarding it.

They replied that they had just received a message from him, stamped with his name and address with the order.

The Kingston jeweller called, saw the post-card, and discovered that it was the one he had sent, bearing the mark of the Kingston office (Oct. 16, 1890), and the London stamp (Jan. 31, 1900) as the date of receipt!

The Dead-letter Office is the crematorium for letters that, by reason of insufficiency, or illegibility of address, or by the absence of address, cannot be delivered to the intended recipient.

If, upon being opened, any clue to the address of the sender can be found, they are returned, but, failing this, at the expiration of a certain period, they are burnt.

The contents, however, of letters or parcels thus left on their hands are sold by auction once a year, at Debenham's, Garrick Street, Covent Garden, by order of His Majesty's Postmaster-General.

Things go ridiculously cheap, for the postal authorities know nothing of reserve prices, and could not instruct the auctioneer to adhere to them if they would, the miscellaneous collection of which they become possessed during the past official year having to make room for the one that is fast accumulating.

Next: The GPO in 1900 London: the Blind-Letter Office.