LONDON AND ITS LETTERS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3715, 19 October 1926, Page 2

LONDON AND ITS LETTERS

70 PER GENT. INCREASE SINCE 1900

“THE TRAVELLING POST OFFICE " The office of Postmaster of London does not appear in the official documents, but it is an accurate enough de scription of the position officially known as Controller of the London Postal Service, to which Mr T. R. Gardiner has just been appointed. Mr Gardiner succeeds a distinguished and much-esteemed postal servant, Sir Charles Sanderson, and, at the age of forty-three years, is the youngest man ever appointed to the position. The area under the charge of the Controller stretches from Ealing in the west to Woolwich in the east, and from Barnet in the north to Croydon in the south. The staff consists of about 30.000 men and 2,000 whoso wages amount approximately to six millions and a-half a year. Besides the two main headquarters, King Edward’s Building and Mount Pleasant, including a newly-opened sorting office, there are in the London postal area eight district offices, 105 sub-district offices, 140 branch offices, and nearly 1,000 town sub-offices, many of them in shops. With the constant growth of postal business the number of offices steadily increases. | THE BUSIEST HOUR. The delivery and collection of letters in London, the regulation of which is in the hands of the Controller, has reached enormous dimensions, the number of letters, newspapers, and packets delivered daily being about six and a half millions, and the number collected five and a-half In addition, about 150.000 parcels are posted in London daily, and about 70,000 delivered. The peak in the work of collection is reached between half-past 5 and 7 o’clock in the evening. The largest delivery is the first in the morning. The numbers subside during the day, and pick up again for the last at night. Three hundred mail vans are used in the service. Many of them are motordriven, and a good proportion of those still horse-drawn will shortly be replaced by motor vans; but some will always remain horse vans, owing to the necessarily slow nature of working the traffic in the city. The amount of postal traffic that now goes through London by road will he reduced towards the end of the year with flo opening of the new Post Office Tube Railway, running underground from Liverpool street to Paddington, and serving most of the principal district offices on the way. This tube will carry both letters and parcels. One of its main purposes is to give more time for handling postal traffic, and thus to enable economies in working to he effected. RAILWAY WORK, i In the Travelling Post Office service the responsibility of the Controller extends far beyond the metropolitan area. Four trains, one each way between London and Aberdeen, and one each way between London and Penzance, travel every night, without passengers, solely for "postal business. Letters not in time to be sorted at the offices in Loudon are taken by these trains, and a large staff of men are employed in sorting them as they go along. Each of these special postal trains is made up of a considerable number of vans —as many as fifteen in one instance. That for Aberdeen leaves London at half-past 8 each evening; that for Penzance at ten minutes past 10. The corresponding mails arrive in London about 4 o’clock in the morning, and everything that comes by them is delivered by the first post, which is sent out about 7. In addition to these four special trains, in which none but the postal staff travels, there are many travelling post offices attached to passenger trains, which are run at times determined by

the Post Office. The 8.25 and 10.25 pan. from King’s Cross to Edinburgh mav be mentioned as examples of this interesting combination of postal and passenger services. By means of these travelling post offices letters arc delivered en route, not only at stations at which the trains stop, but also in districts where no stop is made, a special mail bag apparatus being used on the non-stop sections of the line. For delivery in these districts mail bags placed in leathern pouches are extended by arms outside the doors of the postal van, and are caught by a heavy rope net placed on the ground some hundreds of yards from the nearest station, postmen standing by to take them to the post office. Letters are collected by these travelling post offices by a method similarly .ingenious, the vans, by means of a net extended from their doors, picking up the mails from standards erected by the railway wayside. ' These travelling post offices take mails from all parts of the country, as well as those from and to London.

INCREASE IN POSTAL TRAFFIC. One of. the most difiicult problems that must face the new Controller rapid increase in postal traffic. Even under the present depressed conditions of industry it is still going up;, and, after the temporary set-back during the war, the rise that has taken place is striking. Since 1900 the traffic has increased by 70 per cent., and there has been an increase of lo pei cent, since the war ended. —‘ Observer.’