A fool and his money

Phone and letter

Bernard Hollowood

"This is Philips's answer to the E3 letter." When I read this my first thought, naturally, was that the Post Office had gone mad, and I made a mental note to answer only those letters, like those from Inland Revenue, containing a stamped, addressed envelope.

Then I read on: "Realistic estimates show that the average letter, dictated conventionally to a secretary, now costs around E3." And I was shocked. I don't know the basis of Philips's mathematics, but I suppose they've divided the average earnings of a top Girl Friday (say £3,000 p.a.) by the average number of letters she takes down in a year and arrived at an amount of £3 a letter. This means that your average secretary types three and a bit letters per day!

Of course she has other duties such as making tea and coffee, helping with the drinks cabinet, lending the boss her manicure scissors and nail-file, being reassuring to the boss's wife on the phone when he is busy with a client, booking him a table at the Ivy, the Seminole or the Savoy, entering appointments in his diary

and putting the cover on the typewriter, but £3 per letter seems pretty stiff, and when I said as much to my friends in the bar parlour of The Grapes they agreed with me.

"I've known about this for some time," said Eddie Ffangcon of Dorcas Hairnets, "and one thing I've done is use it as a spur • to • clients. I wind up all my letters with: "'Since this letter is costing my company £3, perhaps more, an early, if not an immediate, reply would oblige yours faithfully ...'

"Some customers respond to my appeal, but others can be distinctly bloody-minded. For example, a German importer in Coblenz answered: "'I very interested in your £3 letter am. Gott knows how much it cost would had it in German, as-it should been have, written! Such inefficiency! For your interest I saying am that our clerical work less than £1 per letter costs. Und, by the weg, your last consignment of the No 2A hairnet of poor quality was. We 64 holes to the square inch specified, but your nets only 25 holes contained and not always then.'

"He writes a comical letter, does Klaus Lerner."

Arnold S. Mayton of Maryland Miscellany Inc had also been notified (by Bob Foskett, managing director of Foskett Leatherwear) of the E3 letter, and had responded in a mood of levity: "Thank you for the precious document informing me that my order for 2,000 3ft x 2ft weekend hold-ails will be a little late in delivery. I shall treasure it. I guess you English are tops in providing valuable correspondence, and I am thinking of offering your kind gift for permanent exhibition to the Metropolitan Museum of Antiquities. By the way, I take it that by £3 a letter you mean £3 for each alphabetical symbol. Your letter of the 9th contains 5,382 alphabetical symbols and is \ therefore worth £16,146!

"For your info "we manage here to get each letter (I know refer to, an entire epistle) dictated, typed, stamped and recorded for less than $15.

"Trusting to hear from you again as soon as you can rustle up enough dough, yours till gnats wear garters, Arnold S. Mayton, Assistant to the President."

When I mentioned the matter to Janice, my secretary, she was incredulous.

"I know postage is 7p," she said:. "and that our embossed stationery, with the directors names listed in the letterhead, costs a bomb, but £3!

I suppose that figure includes VAT and something for my and Elsie's wages: even so, I can't see how-tW get it up to £3..

"You could, of course, cut down the unit cost by dictating more

esteemed letters of the 3rd, 15th and 28th ult and of the 8th and 15th inst. . . ." And delay puts many incoming letters out-of-date so that no action is called for. Among these are appeals for financial help from political parties and workers' sports clubs, letters from the bank, Inland Revenue and the VAT people, complaints from customers about lack of quality control or dishonest advertising and all the notes popped into the Suggestion Box.

I find, too, that by dictating a month's letters at a go I manage to overcome my lack of fluency, so that the words pour out of me as from a Simenon or an Enid Blyton.

"No, Janice," I said, "I shall keep my system intact. £3 may sound an awful lot for One letter: indeed it is a lot and I hope it will discourage you from asking for yet another rise. But we can make other economies. I'd like you to work out what a phone call costs and then what it would cost if you, Elsie, John, Ernest and the girls in Mr Elphinstone's office denied themselves the use of the office phone in their contacts with boy-friends, bookmakers, wives, hairdressers and industrial espionage agents.

"If we can eliminate this waste We may be able to push up the unit cost of a telephone call to £3 or more, and when that happens I'll be able to dictate with the comforting feeling that I'm probably saving

Scrimgeour really started something with their attack on the management and financial performance of Burton. How far they were right in,their condemnation is still being argued out, but the move raises three points. First is the obvious one which some snide company men have lately made, that the City, and stockbrokers in particular, are living in a glass house: there are few whose record of prescience will bear close examination. For instance, how many brokers gave British Leyland as a "sell" three or four years back although its imminent death should have 15een evident to those who cared to look.

The second point is really the opposite of this, namely that major shareholders do bear a responsibility to the company and to the army of small, ignorant and weak `widows and orphans'. In other words the City institutions ought to take an interest in the companies where their money is, and not just let them founder or act irresponsibly. This is a difficult task because the, institutions are on a-aiding to

letters. Twice as many would bring down the price to £1.50 and ten times the number would make each letter set us back only 30p. Roughly. If you dictated once a day, sir, instead of putting all correspondence off till the end of the month I'm sure you could manage a tenfold increase."

The girl is right, absolutely right. .1 use the phone a lot. I am lackadaisical, and I do put off letter-writing to the last minute. The reasons are many. I am somewhat impressionable and I don't want Janice to get under my skin like Dora, Annette, Marilyn and Babs. So the less I see of her — and quite a lot is visible while she sits cross-legged taking dictation — the better. I know I'm vulnerable, so I dictate, at speed, only when the backlog of correspondence has become mountainous.

A lot of work can be eliminated by opening a letter with something like, "I am in receipt of your money by not phoning.

"So get cracking, Janice, on phone costs and if you can prove to me, mathematically, that letters at £3 apiece cost less than phone calls, I'll increase your sa . . ., that is, I'll increase your saccharin allowance. How's that?"

Bernard Hollowood, formerly editor of Punch, writes this column weekly in The Spectator.

nothing. If they interfere the companies resent it, governments and other shareholders may disagree and the question is raised of who knows more about industry — managers or financiers. And if it still goes wrong the institutions get the blame for destructive interference. But if they merely walk away and remove their money they are accused of selfish irresponsibility and a lack of social conacience. There is, of course, no pat answer but one suspects a middle course would be ,wise: if the company fails to meet satisfactory financial targets the institutions will be unable

to make pension payments, square insurance claims and so on, so they would be foolish to accept a low return. They should then perhaps discuss the matter with the board of the company and explain that unless .the performance improved within a specified time, or there was an indication that reasonable moves were being made, they. would be forced to make more public representations. If both of these failed they would probably be justified in putting their money elsewhere.

Whether brokers are in this category or not is not quite clear, but if anybody sees mismanagement, it is laudable for him to try and do something about it. But for brokers to be taking this sort of action at all shows that the Stock Exchange is changing. What into is hard as yet to say. For the third point in this is that there is a hidden assumption that the Stock Exchange is a rational place but, as I keep saying, it is not. In this I have support from no less a pundit'than Mr Jim Slater. In his chairmanly comments on Slater Walker's report he said he was ready to invest but "a market that doubles in a month is a psychological market — it's not in a rational phase. It's difficult to judge — like everybody else I'm watching it with a fascinated horror."

Mr Davenport chides me for my wonder at the mysterious motives of the Stock Exchange. I did not in fact say the FT index would not reach 300 or even 700, since I find its movements as baffling as do the officials of the SE itself, and so would hesitate to predict its oscillations. All I meant was that given the detachment from reality shown by the market over the past couple of years, I thought it brave if not foolhardy to forecast it. His bravery is rewarded — he was right.

Yet while the index is soaring there is still the worrying rise of the dollar premium to around 90 per cent in real terms, which shows that many investors are still not that confident about UK prospects. But that only shows still more clearly that something needs to be done. Since both industry and the City gave some doubts that Mr Benn (or any other minister for that matter) knows much about what industry needs, it is perhaps right that they do something about it themselves, even if Scrimgeour boobed on this occasion.