KING EDWARD'S BUILDING
In every big town the post office is now one of the most important,
while in some cases it is the most imposing of all the local public
buildings. Here the head postmaster is to be found, and here all the
post office business of the district is administered. People have often
asked me, “Who is the postmaster of London?” They understand that the
Postmaster-General and the Secretary have their offices at St. Martin's
le Grand, but it is evident that these gentlemen are the supreme heads
of the whole Post Office system, and are not specially concerned with
London. “Is there not a postmaster of London, just as there is one of
Birmingham and of Liverpool?” The answer is that there is a London head
postmaster, but his official title is Controller of the London Postal
Service. Until a comparatively recent period he shared a building with
the Postmaster-General and Secretary, and the dignity of his office was
perhaps a little obscured by the presence of the greater luminaries.
Latterly, however, the old building at St. Martin's le Grand became
practically the chief London post office, and all the big administrative
departments moved to the other side of the road. But old associations
take long to die, and I do not think that even Post Office servants have
ever looked upon the old building as belonging specially to London; they
have thought of it still as a portion of the big administrative
department which has monopolised so much of the district of St. Martin's
le Grand.
It is not therefore merely a fancy of my own that for the first time
London possesses in King Edward's Building a head post office which is
worthy of her, and which bears the same relations to the London district
as the post office in Liverpool does to the Liverpool district. London
is the biggest city in the world; it now possesses the biggest post
office in the world. That is as it should be. It is London's chief
office in a way that the old building never was. It has been built for
London, and is fitted up entirely to meet the needs of London. Nobody
who knows the old building could have said this of the inconvenient and
out-of-date structure which was built for other times and other
purposes.
The site of the new building covers ground which up to the beginning of
the thirteenth century was one of the numerous vacant spaces in the
north-west portion of the area enclosed by the Roman wall which went
round the City of London. This wall, it is conjectured, was built
between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369, only about half a century before Rome
withdrew her legions from Britain. It belongs, therefore, to the later
period of the Roman occupation of this country. A large section of this
wall was discovered by the workmen when digging the foundations for King
Edward's building, and it extended for about 400 feet. Most of this had
to be destroyed and carried away, but a fine bastion at the western
angle has been preserved, and can be inspected by visitors. The wall is
built in the usual Roman method, and is composed of Kentish ragstone
from the Maidstone district. In the ditch which ran outside the wall
were discovered a number of Norman and mediæval relics, and within the
wall many Roman remains. The section of wall laid bare by the workmen
was found underneath the playground and dining-hall of Christ's
Hospital, known to us all as the Bluecoat School. The school removed
from the building some years ago into the country, and the site was then
sold and divided between Bartholomew's Hospital and the General Post
Office.
The foundation stone of the new post office was laid by King Edward VII.
on the 10th October 1905, and it was opened for public business on the
7th November 1910. The building is constructed of Portland cement
concrete, strengthened by bars of steel, on what is known as the
Hennibique reinforced concrete system, and it is the largest building
that has yet been erected on this plan. It is an all-in-one-piece
building, fashioned out of Thames ballast and cement. Not a single steel
joist has been used in the centre construction. Barge after barge from
Rotherhithe landed at Blackfriars the mud chalk and gravel which
dredgers had scooped up in the lower reaches of the Thames. This ballast
was carted direct to King Edward Street, passed through a machine which
sorts the stones into various sizes, and then turned into liquid
concrete by another wonderful machine which mixes sand, cement, and
stones together at a rapid rate. The steel rods and bars interlacing one
another extend in a network throughout the building like the skeleton of
an animal, while the entire system is embedded in a perfectly connected
sheath of concrete. The great feature in this system is the immense
reduction in wall thickness. The effect is seen in the lightness and
airy nature of the building; one's first impression is that it is
certainly not built for eternity, as somebody said the granite
structures of Aberdeen are.
But this is an illusion: the concrete increases in strength as time goes
on, and the passing years only make the building stronger and more
capable of resisting weather and the strain of the loads which it has
daily to carry.
Wattles and mud were the building materials of our remote ancestors, and
it has been said that we are reverting to the old method, only British
mud has given place to British concrete, concrete of Thames ballast and
Portland cement. The outer walls are only 7 inches thick, but the
frontages to King Edward Street and Newgate Street are faced with
Portland stone with granite plinths. To see fully the effect of the
reinforced concrete in building one has to examine the back elevations,
where there are no stone facings. But even with its false but ornamental
front the building has nothing of “the solemn and spacious Greek charm
of the delightful old front in St. Martin's le Grand.” The Post Office
gains in spaciousness and utility what it loses in architectural beauty.
The building consists at present of two parts, a block facing King
Edward Street which contains, on the ground floor, the new Public
Office, and on the four upper floors the offices of the Controller of
the London Postal Service. The other is a much larger block containing
the main sorting offices both for foreign and colonial correspondence,
and for the E.C. or City district.
The actual foundation is only 3 feet in depth, and not one of the floors
is more than 3½ inches in thickness.
Between the two blocks is a loading and unloading yard for the mails,
and on the west side of the second block is a large yard and unoccupied
space left for such future additions as may be required for growth of
work. The Post Office is learning from experience the value of the
margin, and that there is no finality in its advances. It is in this
open space below the level of the ground where is to be found the
section of the Roman wall which I have described.
The public office is the central office in London for the transaction by
the public of all classes of postal and telegraphic business. It is the
largest public post office in the country, and measures 152 feet by 52
feet, with a counter running the whole length. The inside walls are
lined throughout with marble; a green Irish marble being used for the
dado, pilasters, panels, door architraves, and the front of the counter,
and a light Italian marble for the remainder. The pilasters and piers
have bases and capitals of bronze, and bronze is also used for the
counter edges, table edges, and electric light fittings.
All this is unaccustomed magnificence for a London post office, and he
must be a man singularly deficient in a sense of the fitness of things
who can enter these marble halls and boldly go up to the bronze-edged
counter and ask for a halfpenny stamp.
Under the public office is the posting room, into which falls the
correspondence posted in the big letter-boxes by the public. It is
interesting to stand in this room and watch the postal packets pouring
down the shoot from the letter-boxes. There begins the first stage of
the travels of a letter. Everything that machinery and science can do to
economise labour and to facilitate delivery and despatch is brought into
play. Sorting is simply continual subdivision, and it is interesting to
watch the journeyings of the letters from the moment of posting in the
big letter-box. There is very little carriage from one place to another
by hand. Cable conveyors and band conveyors, worked much on the same
principle as the moving platforms we have all seen at exhibitions and
great emporiums, carry the letters from point to point until each letter
finds its appointed bag, and is either taken out of the building by the
City postman or deposited in a mail cart which takes it to the railway
station or district office.
A band conveyor takes the letters from the posting room which are
addressed to places in London or abroad, to the ground floor of the
building in baskets, and the empty baskets are sent down by a return
band. The correspondence for the provinces, which is dealt with at a
large sorting office at Mount Pleasant, nearly a mile away, is put into
bags, and another band conveyor takes these bags to the departure
platform at the west end of the sorting office. There is a third band
conveyor suspended from the ceiling of the same floor, which is for the
conveyance of bags of mails from the east to the west of the sorting
office.
The London letters and those for abroad are conveyed to the ground
floor, which is occupied by the E.C. district sorting office. The
letters are brought to the eastern end of the immense room and with them
are bags of letters which have arrived from provincial offices and
abroad, amounting altogether to upwards of five millions weekly.
The posted letters are arranged in order for stamping on what are called
facing tables, on which running bands are placed, and at the end of
these tables are electric stamping machines which can obliterate the
stamps on the letters up to a rate of 700 or 800 per minute. Then the
letters pass into two main divisions. On the northern side
correspondence for all parts of London, except the E.C. district, is
dealt with, and direct despatches are made to every chief district and
sub-district delivery office in London for every delivery during the
day. On the southern side the postmen prepare the correspondence for the
twelve daily deliveries in the E.C. district. Upwards of 1400 postmen
are attached to this office. A noticeable feature of the work of sorting
is that the letters travel from east to west always, and at the west end
is the platform from which bags for other offices are despatched.
The first floor is entirely devoted to the treatment of correspondence
for the Colonies and abroad. About 900 officers of all grades are
employed upon the work and about 400,000 articles are despatched weekly.
The work is brought up by lifts from the eastern platform.
The principle here is also continual subdivision, and there are upwards
of 1000 different post offices for which direct bags are made up nightly
in the Foreign Section. A striking feature of this section to the
visitor is the varied colouring of the big mail bags intended for
over-sea mails. If the foreign sailor cannot read he can appreciate
colour, and he will know the destination of a mail bag by its colour.
A band conveyor from east to west conveys the bags from the Foreign
Section to the top of a special shoot at the west end of the building,
whence they are shot down to the departure platform on the ground floor.
All the letters everywhere are “stepping westward,” and everything goes
even on the busiest night with something like the regularity of clock
work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
_Photo_ _Clarke & Hyde_
THE BLIND SECTION.
These men are dealing with badly and insufficiently
addressed letters. They have directories in front of them,
and every effort is made to put the letters into circulation
again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
An interesting feature of the Sorting Office is the Blind Section. Here
at all hours of the day you will find a row of men sitting at a long
table over which is a bookshelf full of up-to-date directories, guides,
and other manuals of topographical information. These men are doing
their best to put in the way of delivery the imperfectly and
indistinctly written packets. If they fail the letter goes to the
Returned Letter Office to submit to more expert treatment. Experience
counts for much with these men. The badly spelt addresses are perhaps
the easiest of these puzzles. “Saintlings, Hilewite,” is at once decided
to be “St. Helens, Isle of Wight” “Has bedallar—such” even a schoolboy
would recognise as Ashby-de-la-Zouch; but it requires the specialist in
puzzles addresses to arrange for the delivery of a letter addressed
simply as 25th March to Lady Day, the wife of the judge of that name.
Whenever we speak of the activities of London we have to deal with big
figures, and comparative tables of growth and development are a little
wearisome to the modern reader, simply because they have lost all the
charm of unexpectedness. We know there must be a huge staff employed at
the Head Office in London; the statement that 20,000 is the actual
number leaves us unaffected: perhaps even we guessed it was 40,000. We
are fully prepared to hear that billions of letters are delivered in the
City of London weekly; we are even a little disappointed when we know
that up to the present the average is about 5½ millions. If we have been
interested in the new building itself and what it is expected to bear in
the way of work, we may at least like to know that the total weight of
the weekly correspondence passing through its walls is about 366 tons.
I expect that if we were asked in a newspaper competition to state how
many post offices and posting receptacles there were in London, we
should make a wild guess and say perhaps 15,000 or even 20,000. The
actual number is 4650. The fact is the average human mind is incapable
of realising facts when stated in thousands. Only very experienced men
can tell the approximate numbers at a Hyde Park meeting or a royal
procession. Post office numbers are bewildering; we simply cannot
realise that they are human life expressed in terms of figures. In order
to help our limited human faculties, Mr. J. Holt Schooling has estimated
that if one man were given the task of sorting all the postal packets
delivered in the United Kingdom in one year—and supposing him to work at
the rate of sixty a minute—he would have had to begin nearly one hundred
and sixty years ago, in the reign of George II., before the conquest of
India began under Lord Clive, in order to complete his task by the year
1910. Mr. Schooling gives him no time for sleep or meals; he goes on
without stopping. This is indeed harder to realise than the actual
number of the postal packets, which is something over 5,000,000,000.
It is perhaps interesting to know that 32 per 100 of all letters
delivered in England and Wales are proper to the London district, nearly
one-third. The outgoing letters from the London district also show
somewhat similar results. A City firm has posted as many as 132,000
letters at one time.
It is also an interesting fact that we send out of this country a great
many more letters than we receive from all the five continents. Even in
the case of America, the excess is something like 80,000, but one
portion of America, viz., the United States, sends us more letters than
we send to that country.
The following estimate will not perhaps test severely the brains which
rebel at large sums. According to Mr. Schooling, whom we have quoted
before, the number of letters, post cards, halfpenny packets, and
newspapers delivered during a year in this country works out for each
individual as 65 letters, 19 post cards, 21 halfpenny packets, and 4
newspapers. A moment's consideration of these figures will convince us
of the vast number of folk still living with whom the receipt of a
letter must be an event in the year.
It is only a little over eighty years since the comparatively small
office at Lombard Street housed the whole staff of the London chief
office. The change has been tremendous, but no more in proportion to the
population than other activities of life. Post Office servants often
point with pride to what their Department has achieved, but the truth
must be told, and it is that the credit cannot be claimed by the
officials. We might almost say that, as far as the Department is
concerned, the increase is mostly unearned increment. The increase in
population, and especially the advance in the means of communication,
are the two chief causes; it is the people who have made the Post
Office, not the officials. A retiring postmaster, or even a retiring
Postmaster-General, will sometimes tell us in round figures what has
been accomplished under his rule. “Alone I did it” is sometimes the
burden of these valedictory speeches. But the true explanation lies
often in the birth-rate or in the opening of a new railway, and the Post
Office reaps what others have sown. And there have been times when the
Post Office administrator, proud of what he has done and what his
Department is doing, has tried to say “Thus far shalt thou go and no
further” to the reformers. “Why not remain satisfied with the perfection
I have been the humble means of securing?” The official mind usually
requires some driving force from outside before it can see the necessity
for another advance.
Still, do not let us forget the huge army which serves the nation in
postal matters. The counter-clerk who sells the stamp and the postman
who delivers the letter are the two officials who are known to the
public, and the different officers who conduct the operations which come
between the buying of the stamp and the delivery of the letter are
almost unknown outside the walls of their own offices. And it is a
matter for congratulation that in King Edward's Building the health and
bodily needs of the staff have been considered in a way which twenty or
thirty years ago would have been regarded as quixotic and as
grandmotherly administration.
Ducts have been provided in the main building for mechanically
ventilating the three lower floors, and uptakes are led from these into
fan-houses situated on the roof. The fans which have been installed are
directly coupled to motors of variable speed, and are designed to move
large quantities of air. Fresh air is admitted through windows and
ventilating radiators, and the vitiated air is discharged on the roof.
The ventilation of the Bag Room has been separately treated; here a
considerable quantity of dust is liberated by the handling of mail bags,
and dust, we are beginning to learn, is the great enemy to health.
Arrangements have been made for concentrating this at one point near a
collecting hopper, through which the dust-laden air passes and is
discharged on the roof.
The third floor is entirely devoted to kitchen and refreshment-room
accommodation and retiring-rooms for the various classes of the staff.
Each officer has a long locker for his belongings. As the work goes on
during the whole of the twenty-four hours, the refreshment branch is
practically always open. A very large business is done here. Three
thousand dinners can be prepared every day.
The roof is flat, and on it two miniature rifle ranges, one of 25 yards
and one of 50 yards, have been constructed. Here are to be seen the
large ventilating fans for securing a constant supply of fresh air to
the rooms below.
The new-comer into the service speedily takes all these conveniences and
comforts for granted, and perhaps is aggrieved because arm-chairs and
lounges are not yet provided; but the middle-aged official, who
remembers times when nothing apart from his work was ever considered by
his chiefs, rubs his eyes sometimes and wonders whether it is all a
dream.
King Edward's Building is in keeping with all the traditions of the City
of London. Charlotte Brontë in _Villette_ says: “I have seen the West
End, the parks, the fine squares: but I love the City far better. The
City seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar are
such serious things, sights, sounds. The City is getting its living—the
West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused,
but in the City you are deeply excited.” That is the mood which will
possess the visitor as he leaves the new building.
Here is a list of the huge buildings which now make up the London
General Post Office:—
1. G.P.O. North. For the Postmaster-General and the offices of the
Secretary, Accountant-General, and Solicitor.
2. G.P.O. West. For the Central Telegraph Office and Engineering
Staff.
3. G.P.O. South (Queen Victoria Street). For the Telephone Department.
4. King Edward's Building. For the Controller of the London Postal
Service and his staff and for the E.C. and Foreign Sections of the
Sorting Office.
5. Mount Pleasant. For the Inland Letter and Parcel Sections of the
Sorting Office, Returned Letter Office, Telegraph Factories, &c.
6. West Kensington. For the Post Office Savings Bank.
7. Studd Street, N. For the Stores Department.
8. Holloway, N. For Money Order and Postal Order Departments.
The staff working in these eight buildings is about 20,000, of whom 4300
are in King Edward's Building.