Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
The Form That Returned Smaller
The household survey of Ferry Road has come back from the rounds at exactly half the size it went out, with every heading intact and the count, as always, exact.
- filed: "at the spring print run"
- reference: "FR/PF/14"
1. This note records a matter arising from the spring print run of the household survey, Ferry Road west rounds, and is filed for the attention of the Registrar of Prints. The office issued 8,140 forms on the standard quarter sheet on the 14th of March, in nine consignments to the rounds between the swing bridge and the coal moles. The return was booked complete on the 29th: 8,140 sheets received, as at every survey since the count began in 1954.
2. The matter is one of scale. Sheets leave this office at 295 by 210 millimetres. The sheets that returned measure 147 by 105, to within the width of a straight edge laid by a patient man. Every heading is intact. The printed boxes, the household grids, even the reversed cipher at the foot that the franking clerks key their counts to, are all present and legible in the same type as the issue, with no skipping and no blur, as though the whole county print had stood aside to let a smaller county print through.
3. Precedent was looked for, and found. The return of 1983 stands in the annexe at three-quarter issue. The return of 1981 stands at seven-eighths. The return of 1979, which the last survey kept, stands at fifteen-sixteenths, and nobody then thought to measure it, because a fold and a smoothing will account for a lot. The archives lie flat in map drawers, and the sequence, laid corner to corner down the drawer, reduces by a regular proportion. On that proportion the return of 1991 will arrive at the size of a playing card, and the return of 1999 at the size of a threepence, if the surveys continue.
4. The handwriting on the returned sheets requires the second half of this note, because it is not smaller. Each answer stands at the same height as on the full issue, line for line, and where an answer will not sit in its box the hand struck through and carried on at the back, in the ordinary way. The round clerks read the returns without the help of a glass, and certified 7,742 as legible before the count was disallowed at review and made whole again on second reading. The ink is the office issue. The pressure of the nibs matches the sample register kept since the winter of 1971.
5. The consignments were weighed out on despatch and weighed again on receipt, on the same spring balance, between the same two teas, by the same weighing clerk. The return exceeds the issue by the weight of the carbon copies retained, 40 grams, and by nothing else. This is the item the undersigned cannot put down. Either the balance has kept faith with this office for thirty-two years and its certificate is wrong, or the paper that went out has come back entire, only arranged nearer together, and no clerk can rule between those two.
6. One remark is on file and is reported because it was made to the roundsman and not written on a form. Mrs Angela Petrie of 8 Coble Row told the roundsman that she had filled in her form twice that week, the second time smaller than the first, and that the second was easier. The roundsman recorded the remark without comment, as his instructions require, and the notebook is filed herewith.
7. Action recommended: none. The count is exact, the legibility has passed review twice, and the return fees were paid at the standing rate, in coin, at the usual Monday hour. Whether the issue of 1989 should be printed to the size the county wants, or to the size that is evidently coming, is a question for the Registrar, and it is asked for early, because the spring plates are cut in the autumn, and the autumn is now close.