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 £65, rising by £3 per annum to £80. When the working day was increased from six to seven hours, the maximum was raised to £100. 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 £55 per annum, and the increment for the first six years was reduced to £2, 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 £65, but were awarded further an increased increment of £5 throughout the scale and a rise of £10 in the maximum. This was the position until December 1911, when a tentative scheme was introduced in the Money Order Department to hand over all the simpler duties to a new class of Assistant Women Clerks with an eight-hour day and a wage of 18s. rising to 34s. a week. The Association of Post Office Women Clerks, the basis of which is "equal pay and opportunities for women with men in the Civil Service," and which therefore necessarily stands for simplification of the classes of employment, regarded the restriction of a fresh grade of women to yet another water-tight compartment at a low wage as in itself an evil. But apart from this, they looked upon the scheme as a deliberate evasion of the Hobhouse Committee's recommendations. So strong was the criticism levelled at the new scheme, both by Members of Parliament and the Press, that the Postmaster-General, Mr Herbert Samuel, consented to refer the matter to the Select Committee on the Post Office (known as the Holt Committee)[1], which was appointed in the early part of 1912, and he gave an undertaking that no more appointments to the new grade should be made in the Money Order Department until the Committee had reported, The value of this concession was considerably lessened by its limited application, and the fact that many Assistant Women Clerks were subsequently appointed to the London Telephone Service, clearly indicated the intention of the authorities to proceed with the development of the scheme in a Department which provided an easier field of operation in the shape of new work and a new staff taken over from the National Telephone Company.