ENDPAPERS
Postman's Knock
By LESLIE ADRIAN One day a couple of weeks ago a certain area of London received no mail at all. Anxious citi- zens, some of them expecting money,- others appointment times or business arrangements for • the very day, rang up the local sorting office. The explanation was that the postman on the 'walk' round that area had been taken ill, and there was no one to take his place.
In a great many more parts of Britain.the four- penny stamp caused almost as much chaos as the non-delivery of mail did to a few score faMilies in a London borough. In some towns there were no Stamps at all, of the right denbmination, and soon afterwards there were no penny or half- Penny stamps either.
As a journalist I get a press handout from the GPO every day, sometimes two a day, or even a batch of up to a dozen, telling me that I can send greetings telegrams to Mauritius, telex messages to Greenland and reply-paid cables to Outer Mongolia. Sometimes they are jolly with news that the GPO-Interflora Personality Girl will be chosen on television, or that the notorious fourpenny stamp is going to appear in a darker shade of blue or that a warbling telephone instru- ment in middle grey/olive green and other colour schemes will 'shortly be available as optional extras in strictly limited quantity in parts of the London North-West Telephone Area. . .
Occasionally a gloomy note intrudes. 'Because of the unofficial ban on overtime at Post Office Supplies Depots, it will not now be possible for the special stamps to commemorate the 700th Anniversary of the Simon de Montfort Parlia- ment to be put on sale on June 10th, as .was planned.' Yes, I'm in close touch with all the goings-on at St. Martin's-le-Grand, except those that really matter. The only document emanating from those ancient and gloomy precincts that I really like to scan is the annual White Paper Post Office Prospects. This they never send. Can it be the Is. 6d. charge that stops them? The usual excuse from a government department is that it is a parliamentary paper and goes only to lobby correspondents, but I know that this is a half-truth and so, presumably, do they. I would like to avoid getting nine-tenths of the stuff with which the GPO press department clutters its own mails, but they, tell me it must be all or nothing. If only it were all, then.
This inflexibility of attitude and system re- appears in dealings with the GPO telephone area managers. On kno account will they voluntarily
supply information about trunk calls and tele- grams, other than to tell you that you sent them, which I have found often enough to be untrue. And if you insist on being told, they charge you a fee. It is the only instance of having to pay for a bill that I know.
This institutional schizophrenia, to which Mr. Wedgwood Benn has taken with sinister celerity (note• his extraordinary 'ten-point plan' speech at Scarborough) causes the Post' Office to be con- fused about whether it is a part of the Civil Ser- vice, a nationalised industry, or simply unique. It advertises services, like telex, that are already overstretched, builds a tower at fabulous expense that no private developer would have got permis- mission for (and continues to house its senior officials in a decaying Victorian office block that would • make an invaluable development site), arranges satellite communications and can't link. EC4. with SW1 by old-fashioned wire with any. certainty. They will be,`catering' for 35( radio- phone subscribers in London. One company alone has asked for 100 car telephones already. No wonder that they need the services of the trouble- shooting Hugh Parker and his McKinsey con- sultancy circus.
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