Post Haste

Leaving them, we shall return to St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and follow the footsteps of no less a personage than Miss Lillycrop, for it so happened that that enthusiastic lady, having obtained permission to view the interior of the Post-Office, had fixed on that evening for her visit. But we must go back a little in time—to that period when the postal jaws were about to open for the reception of the evening mail.

Ever since Miss Lillycrop’s visit to the abode of Solomon Flint, she had felt an increasing desire to see the inside and the working of that mighty engine of State about which she had heard so much. A permit had been procured for her, and her cousin, May Maylands, being off duty at that hour, was able to accompany her.

They were handed over to the care of a polite and intelligent letter-sorter named Bright. The sorter seemed fully to appreciate and enter into Miss Lillycrop’s spirit of inquiry. He led her and May to the inside—the throat, as it were—of those postal jaws, the exterior aspect of which we have already described. On the way thither they had to pass through part of the great letter-sorting hall. It seemed to Miss Lillycrop’s excited imagination as if she had been suddenly plunged over head and ears into a very ocean of letters. From that moment onwards, during her two hours’ visit, she swam, as it were, among snowy billows of literature.

“This is the receiving-box—the inside of it,” said Mr Bright, as he led the way through a glass door into a species of closet or compartment about six feet by ten in dimension, or thereabouts, with a low roof.

“This way ladies. Stand here on one side. They are just going to open it.”

The visitors saw in front of them a recess, divided by a partition, in which were two large baskets. A few letters were falling into these as they entered. Glancing upwards, they saw a long slit, through which a number of curious human eyes peeped for a moment, and disappeared, to be replaced by other eyes. Little spurts of letters came intermittently through the slit and fell into the baskets. These, when full, were seized by two attendants, dragged away, and replaced by empty ones.

Suddenly the upper lip of the slit, or postal mouth, rose.

“Oh, May, look!” exclaimed Miss Lillycrop eagerly.

Not only the eyes but the heads and shoulders of the moving public now became visible to those inside, while the intermittent spurts became gradually a continuous shower of letters. The full significance of the old superscription, “Haste, post haste, for thy life,” now began to dawn on Miss Lillycrop. The hurry, mentioned elsewhere in our description of the outside view, increased as the minutes of grace flew by, and the visitors fairly laughed aloud when they saw the cataract of correspondence—the absolute waterfall, with, now and then, a bag or an entire bandboxful of letters, like a loosened boulder—that tumbled into the baskets below.

From this letter-fall Miss Lillycrop was led, speechless, by her cicerone, followed by May, to whom the scene was not quite new, and whose chief enjoyment of it consisted in observing her interested and excitable friend’s surprise.

Mr Bright led them back to the great sorting-room, where the energetic labour of hundreds of men and boys—facing, carrying, stamping, distributing, sorting, etcetera—was going on full swing. Everywhere there was rapid work, but no hurry; busy and varied action, but no confusion; a hum of mingled voice and footfall, but no unnecessary noise. It was a splendid example of the power of orderly and united action. To Miss Lillycrop it conveyed the idea of hopeless and irretrievable confusion!

Mounting a staircase, Mr Bright conducted the ladies to a gallery from which they had a bird’s-eye view of the entire hall. It was, in truth, a series of rooms, connected with the great central apartment by archways. Through these—extending away in far perspective, so that the busy workers in the distance became like miniature men—could be seen rows on rows of facing and sorting-tables, covered, heaped up, and almost hidden, by the snows of the evening mail. Here the chaos of letters, books, papers, etcetera, was being reduced to order—the whole under the superintendence of a watchful gentleman, on a raised platform in the centre, who took good care that England should not only expect, but also be assured, that every man and boy did his duty.

Miss Lillycrop glanced at the clock opposite. It was a quarter to seven.

“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, turning full on Mr Bright, and pointing downwards, “that that ocean of letters will be gone, and these tables emptied by eight o’clock?”

“Indeed I do, ma’am; and more than what you see there, for the district bags have not all come in yet. By eight o’clock these tables will be as bare as the palm of my hand.”

Mr Bright extended a large and manly palm by way of emphasising his remark.

Miss Lillycrop was too polite to say, “That’s a lie!” but she firmly, though mutely, declined to believe it.

“D’you observe the tables just below us, ma’am?”

He pointed to what might have been six large board-room tables, surrounded by boys and men as close as they could stand. As, however, the tables in question were covered more than a foot deep with letters, Miss Lillycrop only saw their legs.

“These are the facing-tables,” continued Mr Bright. “All that the men and lads round ’em have got to do with the letters there is to arrange them for the stampers, with their backs and stamps all turned one way. We call that facing the letters. They have also to pick out and pitch into baskets, as you see, all book-packets, parcels, and newspapers that may have been posted by mistake in the letter-box.”

While the sorter went on expounding matters, one of the tables had begun to show its wooden surface as its “faced” letters were being rapidly removed, but just then a man with a bag on his shoulder came up, sent a fresh cataract of letters on the blank spot, and re-covered it. Presently a stream of men with bags on their backs came in.

“These are the district mails, ma’am,” explained Mr Bright; “during the last half-hour and more they have been hurrying towards us from all quarters of London; the nearest being brought by men on foot, the more distant bags by vans. Some are still on their way; all will concentrate here at last, in time for sorting.”

The contents of these bags as they came in were shot out, and the facing-tables—all of which had begun to show symptoms of the flood going down and dry land appearing—were flooded and reflooded again and again to a greater depth than before.

“The mail will be late to-night,” observed Miss Lillycrop, with an assured nod.

“O no, ma’am, it won’t,” replied Bright, with an easy smile, and May laughed as they returned to the hall to inspect the work in detail.

“Here, you see, we stamp the letters.”

Mr Bright stopped in front of a long table, at which was standing a row of stampers, who passed letters under the stamps with amazing rapidity. Each man or youth grasped a stamp, which was connected with a machine on a sort of universal joint. It was a miniature printing-machine, with a little inking-roller, which was moved over the types each time by the mere process of stamping, so the stamper had only to pass the letters under the die with the one hand and stamp with the other as fast as he could. The rate varied, of course, considerably. Nervous and anxious stampers illustrated more or less the truth of the proverb, “The more hurry the less speed,” while quiet, steady hands made good progress. They stamped on the average from 100 to 150 letters in the minute, each man.

“You see, ma’am,” remarked Mr Bright, “it’s the way all the world over: cool-headed men who know their powers always get on best. The stamping-machine is a great improvement on the old system, where you had to strike the inker first, and then the letter. It just doubled the action and the time. We have another ingeniously contrived stamp in the office. It might not occur to you that stamping parcels and other articles of irregular shape is rather difficult, owing to the stamper not striking flatly on them. To obviate this, one of our own men invented a stamp with an india-rubber neck, so that, no matter how irregular the surface of the article may be, the face of the stamp is forced flat upon it by one blow.”

“When stamped,” continued Mr Bright, moving on, “the letters are taken by boys, as you see, to the sorters. You observe that each sorter has a compartment or frame before him, with separate divisions in it for the great towns only, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Brighton, etcetera. Now, you know”—here he stopped and assumed an impressive explanatory tone—“you couldn’t expect any single man to sort the letters for every town and village in the kingdom—could you, ma’am?”

Miss Lillycrop admitted that she could not indulge such an expectation, and further expressed her belief that any man who could must be little better than a lunatic.

“But every man you see here,” continued Mr Bright, “has batch after batch of letters put before him, which may contain letters from anywhere to everywhere. So, you see, we subdivide the work. The sorters you are now looking at sort the letters for the large towns into separate sections, and all the rest into divisions representing the various parts of the country, such as northern, southern, etcetera. The letters are then collected by the boys you see going up and down the hall.”

“I don’t see them,” interrupted Miss Lillycrop.

“There, that’s a northern division boy who has just backed against you, ma’am.”

The boy referred to turned, apologised, and gathering the letters for the northern division from the sorter at their elbow, moved on to gather more from others.

“The division letters,” continued Bright, “are then conveyed to other sorters, who subdivide them into roads, and then the final sorting takes place for the various towns. We have a staff of about a thousand sorters, assistant sorters, and boy-sorters in this (Inland) office alone, who have been, or are being, carefully trained for the work. Some are smart, and some of course are slow. They are tested occasionally. When a sorter is tested he is given a pack of five hundred cards—dummies—to represent letters. A good man will sort these in thirteen or fifteen minutes. There are always sure to be a few mis-sorts, even in our well-regulated family—that is, letters sorted to the wrong sections or divisions. Forty mis-sorts in the five hundred is considered very bad work.”

“But what if a sorter does not happen to know the division to which any particular letter belongs?” asked Miss Lillycrop.

“He ought to know,” replied her guide, “because all the sorters have to undergo a strict examination once a year as to their knowledge of towns and villages throughout England.”

“Indeed! but,” persisted Miss Lillycrop, “what does he do with a letter if he chances to forget?”

“Why, he must get other sorters to help him.”

“And what happens if he finds a letter so badly addressed that he cannot read it?”

“Sends it to the blind division; we shall come to that presently,” said Mr Bright. “Meanwhile we shall visit the hospital I need scarcely explain to you that the hospital is the place to which wounded letters and packages are taken to be healed. Here it is.”

The party now stood beside a table, at which several clerks—we might almost say surgeons—were at work, busy with sealing-wax and string.

The patients were a wondrous lot, and told eloquently of human carelessness. Here were found letters containing articles that no envelope of mere paper could be expected to hold—such as bunches of heavy keys, articles of jewellery, etcetera, which had already more than half escaped from their covers. There were also frail cardboard boxes, so squeezed and burst that their contents were protruding, and parcels containing worsted and articles of wearing apparel, which had been so carelessly put up as to have come undone in the mail-bags. All these things were being re-tied, re-folded, patched up here and there with sealing-wax, or put into new covers, by the postal surgeons, and done with as much care, too, as though the damage had been caused by the Post-Office rather than by carelessness in the public.

But among these invalided articles were a few whose condition accidentally revealed attempts to contravene the postal laws. One letter which had burst completely open revealed a pill-box inside, with “Dinner Pills” on the outside. On examination, the pills turned out to be two sixpences wrapped up in a scrap of paper, on which was written— “Thought you had no money to get a stamp with, so sent you some.” It is contrary to regulations to send coin by post without registering the letter. The unfortunate receiver would have to pay eightpence, as a registration fee, for this shilling!

While the party was looking at the hospital work another case was discovered. A book-packet came open and revealed a letter inside. But still further, the letter was found to contain sixpence in silver, sent to defray postage when the book should be returned. Here was a double sin! No letter, or writing of the nature of a letter, is allowed to go by book post, and coin may not be sent unregistered. In this case the book would be forwarded at letter-rate, and the 8 pence registration fee would be charged for the coin—the whole amounting to 6 shillings, 6 pence.

“If the public would only attend,” observed Mr Bright, in commenting on these facts, “to the regulations laid down for their guidance by the Post-Office—as detailed in our Directories and Postal Guides—such errors would seldom occur, for I believe that things of this sort are the result of ignorance rather than dishonesty.”

“Now, ma’am,” he continued, “we come to the blind officers.”

There were several of those gentlemen, whose title, we presume, was satirically expressive of the extraordinary sharpness of their eyes and intellects. They were seated at a table, engaged in examining addresses so illegible, so crabbed, so incomplete, and so ineffably ridiculous, that no man of ordinary mental capacity could make head or tail of them. All the principal London and Provincial Directories, Guides, and Gazetteers were ranged in front of the blind officers, to assist them in their arduous labours, and by the aid of these, and their own extensive knowledge of men and places, they managed to dispose of letters for which a stranger would think it impossible to find owners.

“What would you make of that address, now?” said Mr Bright, presenting a letter to Miss Lillycrop for inspection.

“It looks like Cop—Cup—no—it begins with a C at all events.—What think you of it, May?” said the puzzled lady.