Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Brindley Logistics ·
The Store of Returned Overcoats
At the Vale Road depot the store of overcoats nobody claims is counted once a season, and some of the name cards in the collars give men the personnel index has not yet agreed to employ.
- filed: "after the depot season"
- reference: "BL/OC/28"
1. Brindley Logistics maintains at its Vale Road depot a locked store for overcoats returned in freight and left unclaimed. The store is kept under the charge of the storekeeper, on the first floor of the freight annexe, and is counted once at the close of each depot season, the count being taken this year in the last week of the rota.
2. Coats enter the store by rule 6 of the house book. Any overcoat found unaccompanied in wagons, contractor buses or the loading yard is carried to the store, hung on its size rack and entered by rack, hook and date of finding. Where the owner has been identified from a waybill or a lost-property slip, his name is typed on a card at the depot office and pinned through the hangar.
3. The season's count was taken in the presence of the storekeeper and the undersigned clerk. Racks A to L were counted hook by hook. The tally came level at two hundred and eleven coats against two hundred and eleven entries, and for the eleventh season running the irregularity is not in the count. It is in the names.
4. Fifteen of the entries carry names that were not names of men on the personnel index at the date the card was pinned. The cards are typed on the depot's own machine, and the index was checked forward as well as back before any finding was drawn. Three cases can be stated.
5. Rack F, hook 3, size 40: card "A. SORRELL", dated the 9th of March. No Sorrell was on the index, in any department, on that date. On the 22nd of April the index gained an Arthur Sorrell, engaged as a shunter. He came to the store on his first morning and asked whether his coat had come in, having, as he said, seen it written already at the gate.
6. Rack B, hook 11, size 42: card "L. PETCH", dated the 4th of June. No Petch was on the index at that date. A Leslie Petch was engaged as yard checker at the opening of the present season, and asked for the coat in his first week, giving the hook number.
7. Rack H, hook 7, size 38: card "E. GRIMWADE", the date stamp legible. No Grimwade appears on the index, past or present, and no engagement of the name has been made up to the date of this register. The coat hangs at its hook. The pin has rusted level with the card, and not before then.
8. Of the twelve names remaining, six have since been matched to engagements, each engagement falling within the year and each man coming in quietly for his own, as if the employment were the later of the two things to arrive. The last five belong to nobody the index has heard of since the store book was opened. Two have the shape of a first name with no surname, which the house book does not allow.
9. The store is under lock from the last bus to the first van, and the key log is clean. No coat recorded as reclaimed has been reclaimed by any hand but its owner's. The storekeeper, Mr R Pool, has kept the store nineteen seasons, and makes a habit of reading each new name aloud once at the count, so that the rack has heard it.
10. The depot season closed on Saturday and the winter rota opens with the early vans. The count itself has never been shown wrong. What is shown wrong is the order of things: the coats, size-sorted and carded, take their places ahead of the men, and the men then arrive, ordinary and punctual, to be measured against what was already hanging.
11. Whether the store holds coats until their men are hired, or the depot hires men because the coats are waiting, is not a matter the books settle. The index is silent, the house book is silent, and the five names outrun every list this depot keeps. The count will be taken again at the end of the next season.