FOOTBALL POOLS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 August 1938, Page 7

FOOTBALL POOLS

HUGE POST OFFICE BURDEN Every week the Liverpool Post Office handles 9,000,000 football pool postings. Postal orders to the value of £2,250,000 have to be kept in stock in Liverpool post offices, ready for the firm running the pools. Even then, London often, has to be requisitioned to rush extra supplies up on Monday. Poundage payable on postal orders bought by pools organisations (excluding the public) yield £1750 to the Treasury. These facts were mentioned by Mr J. B. Fenion, chief postal superintendent of Liverpool. “The pools,” said Mr Fenion, “can best be visualised as a kind of cuckoo in the postal nest which has grown so big that special measures, machinery, vehicles and a special permanent staff has to be employed to cope with the extra work. The main result at Liverpool is that the competitions postal traffic is now wholly dealt with in a postal department of its own, with its own machinery and staff, and its own superintendent. What is more, the pools office is bigger than the main sorting office itself. 1 “Liverpool now employs one superintendent, two assistant superintendents, nine overseers, 61 sorting clerks, three assistant inspectors, four head postmen, and 90 postmen who were exclusively engaged during the football season in dealing with pools traffic. We have installed eight special electrically driven stamping machines to deal with 600 letters a mniute each and two more machines have had to be ordered for next season.”