s a large number of branches,
and carries on a very active campaign for improvement in pay and
conditions of service. Equal pay for equal work is one of the planks
in its platform, and formed part of the case put forward before the
Select Committee on Post Office Servants last year.

Women Clerks are employed in the great financial Services of the
General Post Office, the Savings Bank Department, Money Order
Department (including the Postal Order Branch), Accountant-General's
Department, and the Controller's Office of the London Telephone
Service, as well as in the Accountant's Departments of the General
Post Offices in Edinburgh and Dublin. In all, they number nearly
3,000. It may, perhaps, be of interest to go into the history of this
class.

Women Clerks were first introduced into the General Post Office
in 1871 by Mr Scudamore, who considered that as women were more
"fault-finding" than men, they might well be used as "a check on the
somewhat illiterate postmasters of the United Kingdom in the
interests of a somewhat long-suffering public." Entry was at first
by nomination, but in 1881 the appointment of Women Clerks was thrown
open to the public by competitive examination by Mr Fawcett, who was
then Postmaster General. This step met with some opposition, and Queen
Victoria even caused a letter to be written to Mr Fawcett expressing
her strong disapproval of the change. The Postmaster-General, however,
carried his point, and fixed the scale of salary at L65, rising by L3
per annum to L80. When the working day was increased from six to seven
hours, the maximum was raised to L100. The revisions of the Tweedmouth
Inter-Departmental Committee came into force in 1897, involving many
concessions to the male staff, and simultaneously the minimum salary
of the Women Clerks was, without any warning, reduced for new entrants
to L55 per annum, and the increment for the first six years was
reduced to L2, 10s.

Realising the defencelessness of their position, the Women Clerks
formed an Association in 1901, and so strong was the case for
improvement which they were able to bring before the Hobhouse
Parliamentary Committee of 1906, that in spite of considerable
misrepresentation of their work in the evidence given by Heads of
Departments, they were able not only to get back the 1881 minimum of
L65, but were awarded further an increased increment of L5 throughout
the scale and a rise of L10 in the maximum. This was the position