Women Clerks are employed in the great financial Services of the General Post Office, the Savings Bank Department, Money Order Department (including the Postal Order Branch), Accountant-General's Department, and the Controller's Office of the London Telephone Service, as well as in the Accountant's Departments of the General Post Offices in Edinburgh and Dublin. In all, they number nearly 3,000. It may, perhaps, be of interest to go into the history of this class. Women Clerks were first introduced into the General Post Office in 1871 by Mr Scudamore, who considered that as women were more "fault-finding" than men, they might well be used as "a check on the somewhat illiterate postmasters of the United Kingdom in the interests of a somewhat long-suffering public." Entry was at first by nomination, but in 1881 the appointment of Women Clerks was thrown open to the public by competitive examination by Mr Fawcett, who was then Postmaster General. This step met with some opposition, and Queen Victoria even caused a letter to be written to Mr Fawcett expressing her strong disapproval of the change. The Postmaster-General, however, carried his point, and fixed the scale of salary at £65, rising by £3 per annum to £80. When the working day was increased from six to seven hours, the maximum was raised to £100. The revisions of the Tweedmouth Inter-Departmental Committee came into force in 1897, involving many concessions to the male staff, and simultaneously the minimum salary of the Women Clerks was, without any warning, reduced for new entrants to £55 per annum, and the increment for the first six years was reduced to £2, 10s.