the problem is that there is so much "paper work" coming out of Whitehall, County Hall and Borough, that it takes any clerk hours to read and decide if it matters. The precept is not a fixed amount. If it need to increase to pay the clerk a sensible wage, so be it.
Ours is a young mother who clerks for several parishes.
Clerking for a small number of parishes is therefore well within the capabilities of a young mother who can do the work at home for the most part. Meetings are evenings when the partner can do the babysitting. And the result is a nice addition to the family budget.
Not sure about 20th century - they are meant to be machine readible/sortable.
A detailed explanation at
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which doesn't explain why a village should have the same post code at the top and the bottom whilst there are 3 more in between.
I recall that the idea of the last 2 characters represented a bundle, ie the postman would deliver that bundle and then move on to the next, a bundle being about what can be held in the hand.
The first part of the code (usuallY) refers to the main sorting office. In Ilford it is IG, which I couldn't make sense of at first, but then I recalled when I was at college in the area and post from them was postmarked 'Ilford & Barking', so IG is the first and last letters of that.
Ilford is now only a local delivery office, the main sorting office being Romford (RM) but I would imagine that attempting to change the codes in such a densely populated area would cause chaos so, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Makes sense. Our lat postcode covered from the end of the road back to an intermediate junction with different codes for both sides of the road.
Our post code ended AN for numbers 18 - 82 (even) and the odd side was AL, so around 32 houses per code, which seems reasonable, given that not every house gets post every day.
Two things which have changed, though: several of the houses have been converted to flats, thus increasing the number of addresses and the postie is now required to deliver humungous piles of junk mail to every address, whether they have mail or not.
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