At Cross Purposes
Page 30
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THE campaign which Dr. Charles Hill, Postmaster General, last week launched to impress on the public the importance of addressing mail correctly, may have unfortunate repercussions for hauliers. Setting out the requirements of the Post Office to ensure that mail is handled with the utmost dispatch and the minimum of labour, he said that, in addition to the name of the recipient, the thoroughfare and number, and, in some cases, the village or locality, the name of the "post town" should be written in block capitals. As mail was first sorted by counties, the county should appear at the end of the address.
Even before Dr. Hill inaugurated his campaign, hauliers were complaining bitterly of the use of postal addresses by consignors of goods. Now they will be even more aggrieved.
To take an example, the "post town" of Alderley Edge, Cheshire, is Manchester. Alderley Edge is, however, 15 miles south of the centre of Manchester and to consign goods to "Alderley Edge, Manchester," would be most misleading to a driver who did not know the district. His natural impulse would be to go to the city centre to pick up his bearings, probably to discover that he had to travel 20 or more unnecessary miles when, if the goods had been addressed simply to "Alderley Edge, near Macclesfield, Cheshire," he might have found his way directly there.
This is by no means an isolated case and hauliers are experiencing a great deal of wasted mileage through the use of the names of "post towns" at some distance from the precise destination.
The associations representing hauliers should impress upon traders the importance, when sending goods by road, of using an address which will enable the driver to find it easily without going first to the "post town" and perhaps having to retrace his steps. It is much preferable that, in the case of small places, the name of the nearest larger centre should be given, rather than that of the "post town."