‘The place to be’

This week, principal engineer, Jan Kojro celebrates an astounding 50 years of service with Royal Mail.

When we asked Jan (pictured left with head of delivery design, Matthew Lawlor) to provide an account of his incredible career, he gave us much more than we were expecting. As such, we decided to serialise his work memoirs and from today, bring you a weekly slice of his Royal Mail journey, a decade at a time.

‘1969 was a good year; man set foot on the moon, Concorde took to the skies for the first time, more than half a million people attended the Woodstock music festival, the Beatles made their last public appearance and Sheffield Wednesday were still in the first division, but only just!’ said Jan. ‘But for yours truly, it was a monumental year.

‘I had been successful in my application to join the General Post Office (GPO) as a trainee technician apprentice. It wasn’t my first job, the recruitment process I recall, was a lengthy one, consisting of having to take a public exam and then a series of aptitude tests and interviews to establish where individuals might best be placed in what was then a much larger organisation than the Royal Mail of today. 

‘In the meantime, being impatient to start work and earn some money, I took a student engineering apprenticeship at one of the many world-renowned precision engineering companies that thrived in Sheffield in the 1960s. It wasn’t difficult to get a job in those days, particularly if you had the right aptitude for the technological transformation that was taking place. Most of the city at that time was dominated by heavy industry and surrounded by coal mines.

‘To put my eagerness for a job with the GPO into context, Post Office technology in the 1960s was a world leader at the cutting edge of development in mechanised systems for sorting letter mail and parcels. Following Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech to the Fabian Society in 1963, the then Postmaster General and later, Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, invested heavily in technology for the future and the Post Office was one of its beneficiaries, so it really was the place to be!

‘1969 was also the year that the GPO changed from a Government department to a statutory corporation, known simply as the Post Office. This gave me the opportunity to state a preference to work in either telephony or join the newly created function of Postal Engineering. To mark the occasion, a First Day Cover was issued and ‘Automatic Sorting’ was featured on the 1/6 stamp. The choice was made. So as far as a career was concerned, I’d hardly got going and was already faced with major change and decisions to make, a theme that was to continue.’

Matthew Lawlor, head of Delivery Design, said: ‘Jan has been involved in a number of the equipment innovations, which have improved the business, and many of the work processes that we now take for granted.

‘These include the RM2000 vertical slot preparation frame, which replaced pigeon hole preparation and cut out a second process to get letters into the house order within a street, and the York roll cage, which combined with the Perstorp tray, allows us to transport letters in bulk, keeping them orientated the same way and in good condition, so that they can be sorted by machine.

‘I can’t emphasise just how much I appreciate the technical advice, wisdom and support, which Jan has given me over the time we’ve worked together, not to mention all the equipment he has helped develop.’