The time to visit the sorting process at the Post-office is between
half-past five and eight o'clock in the evening. At closing time the
letters are simply poured by thousands into the baskets waiting to
receive them, and each one as soon as full is wheeled off in an instant
to the sorters and other officials waiting to deal with them. When they
have been deposited on the innumerable tables, the first process is to
face the letters--not so easy a task when the shapes and sizes of the
letters are so varied. As soon as the facing process is over, they are
passed as quick as lightning on to the stampers, who proceed to deface
the Queen's head. The noise whilst this process is being gone through is
deafening. Some stampers have a hand-machine, whilst others are making a
trial of a treadle stamping-machine which stamps some four hundred
letters per minute. From the stampers the letters pass on to the
sorters. Whilst all this is proceeding, the visitor should step up into
the gallery for a minute or two and look down on the busy scene below.
It is a sight well worth seeing and not likely to be forgotten--the
thousands of letters heaped on the tables, and the hundreds of workers
as hard at work as it is possible for them to be. The envelopes are
separated and placed in the several pigeon-holes which indicate the
various directions they are to travel. Liverpool, Manchester,
Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow have special receptacles for
themselves, as the first three cities have on an average fifteen
thousand letters a day despatched to each; and further, there are eight
despatches a day to these places, eleven thousand per day go to Glasgow,
and between eight and nine thousand to Edinburgh. All official
letters--that is, 'On Her Majesty's Service'--have a special table to
themselves. Some eighty-nine thousand Savings-bank books pass through St
Martin's-le-Grand daily. Some sorters get through between forty and
fifty letters a minute, whilst a new-comer will not be able to manage
more than twenty or thirty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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