Office Communications
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| Ron, George and Eddie - some of the Post Room staff. Bob Dennis was the manager for many years |
The post was dealt with in the 'Post Room' which was often the best source of news and gossip and was also where I secured an early copy of Lloyd's List before reading it over my breakfast. There were wooden racks round the walls into which incoming post was sorted before distribution to each department. An important job was to single out post on 'new' claims matters and to get it to the right syndicate. If the post contained a ship's name in the heading, as it often did, those in the post room then looked up which claims 'syndicate' dealt with it and sent it there. An important part of the Syndicate Manager's job was to allocate new matters to the appropriate person depending on how serious it was likely to become.
Outgoing post was dictated to the typing pool over the internal telephone system and later to one's secretary. Once typed, letters were put into addressed envelopes by the person signing the letter. We had a 'Noted and Approved' stamp which we could use on letters sent in by one of the 800 'correspondents' round the world, the important thing being that the file reference was written on the stamped letter so that future incoming correspondence could be matched up easily. Indeed, correspondents used to send routine letters on matters within their authority in duplicate, so that all we had to do was to 'Note and Approve' the copy with the appropriate reference and post it back.
The post had to reach the post room by 5pm so that it could be stamped with a franking machine and taken to the main sorting office in Houndsditch in time for evening post. As most post was international, sometime in the 1980s we discovered that it was cheaper to send our international post by courier to the Continent and have it franked and posted on from there. Letters to other City firms such as solicitors were delivered to a common sorting office for constant distribution by an army of post boys. Each office had a number. Ours was 621 - and that was all that was required to be written on the envelope.
Individually we frequently sent out up to 60 letters and other missives a day. Letter writing was an important art, and we had to adhere to strict conventions. One was that we should never use 'Draper's Language', meaning phrases like 'Yours of the 16th ult refers' and 'I remain your obedient servant.' Only 'Dear Sir' - 'Yours faithfully' if the person wasn't known to you personally and 'Dear Mr .....- 'Yours sincerely' if he was. In fact, when I had some responsibility for how we wrote our letters, I ordered several copies of Gowers' 'Compete Plain Words' - (as used by the Civil Service) to be distributed to the Syndicates so that we could maintain consistent, clear and un-flowery language. I follow it to this day.
The other main means of communication was the telex, for which one had typed or in urgent cases hand-wrote (in capitals) and took it direct to the telex room where it was then transmitted over one of the many noisy machines that clattered away in a busy room at the heart of the office. Often, one had to stand there late in the evening, pleading with the telex girls to send a particularly important message (ie to give a guarantee to get a ship out of arrest) before they went home*.
In 1884, we installed the first fax machine as the result of a difficult case in which a ship was detained at a port in Algeria for 194 days because of an egregious customs fine. I had to report to the owners in the Far East every evening so that they knew exactly what was happening, and sending hand-written faxes late at night was the most efficient way.
However, post was always the main form of communication and in the 90's, in order to speed things up - ('Urgent matters should be replied to within three hours, important matters the same day and non-urgent matters within three days') - we instituted a 'Night Shift' of secretaries who came in the evening and typed out all outstanding letters from tape (which was by then universally used for dictation).
E-mail first appeared in the office in 1987 and we were all given our first e-mail address (lawfordh). To begin with, few other businesses had e-mail and it was largely used between our own international offices, but it gradually caught on, though it was discouraged for case handling as it was possible for an important e-mail to languish in someone's inbox when they were absent by reason of illness or holidays, and be missed.
E-mail also brought it's own problems, particularly if we used it to communicate when travelling. This is an entry from my address book in the 90’s when the firm used Pipex / Worldcom as our dial up e-mail access provider. Look at at how many different numbers and codes I had to use at that time! And we also had to take a small kit of screwdrivers and plugs to deal with the vagaries of the telephone systems we encountered in hotels and other offices.
Pipex, PO Box 64 Stevenage Herts SG1 2YX UK
0845-0885336 herry@dial.pipex.com
UK (GSM) 44-115-954-8128
Hong Kong 852-3008 8600
Tokyo 81-3-5542-4011
Sydney 61-2-8210-9001
Paris 33-1-47-62-62-62
Nice 0860 504050
Zurich 0842-111092 (local)
Stockholm 46-8-5661-9996
Vancouver 1-604-602-1506
Singapore 65 537 0537
San Francisco 415 357 9923
Toronto 416 368 2622\
Auckland 094415200
Wellington 04477850
Christchurch 094415200
Dunedin 03 77 8839
Hamilton 07 838 9966
Ise 596 20 5059
Kyoto 75 813 6900
Kobe 078 515 1201
Nara 0742 50 0140
Fukuoaka 092 735 7402
Gold Coast 5509 5000
Mail account Multi-Dial UUNET a/c THOMMILL09
Password oolohooz
Username uk/solalgb46N
In Australia change the dial string to X1 at the end of the dial string
To avoid modem waiting for dail tone change X4 to X3
Servers: Primary DNS 158.43.240.4
Secondary DNS 158.43.240.3
Webcache: webcache.dail.pipex.com Port 3128
Incoming Mail pop.dial.pipex.com
Outgoing mail smtp.dial.pipex.com
News news.dial.pipex.com
Not only was it difficult and time-consuming to set up one's e-mail in a new venue or hotel, but it was also costly, as hotels tried to make a lot of money from phone charges. The most egregious was India, where it could sometime take all night to get one's e-mails from the office server, and acrimonious correspondence would ensue to get the charges reduced. It was often better to revert to your secretary faxing important e-mails over to you instead.
Sometimes, too, getting connected was difficult because there wasn't a compatible plug in one's room. I still remember having to sleep in the corridor of an hotel in Cyprus while the laptop on which I had to prepare a presentation in the morning was connected to a plug there.
Soon, though, these early problems faded as e-mail became ubiquitous and mobile phones replaced modems and hotel systems - though it took a long time for places like Japan and the US to catch up and connectivity become universal. But it's worth remembering that smart phones like iPhones weren't actually invented until after I retired.
* as a non-PC aside, there seemed to be an unwritten rule in the City that secretaries and support staff like telex operators should not be employed if they were too attractive lest they 'disturb the smoothy functioning of the office'. This made sense, in that until the 80's, the executive staff in the City was exclusively male and their families could take comfort when sending them off to work every day that there were no 'temptations' that might cause trouble. Indeed, 'fraternisation' between two people in the same office was so frowned on that usually one of the parties was asked to leave. Bridget Jones was nowhere to be seen! However, in one still memorable lapse, we took on a temporary telex operator called Linda who was so stunning that one of the partners, Peter Wright, was found slumped against the wall of the 'Partners' Corridor' after she had walked by, holding his heart. Fortunately she quickly married an insurance broker with a Rolls, and decorum was restored.
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| Ron, George and Eddie - some of the post room staff |
