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in longhand in different hands, of course, because different people had recorded different episodes of his employment and unemployment, where he had been referred, when he refused to take work, when he left London and went to Liverpool.

This was the central, national file and everything had to be looked up there. Everything centered on that. They had an enormous amount of employees and they all seemed to be searching records.

I was accredited and had a right to see everything, so I asked to see these boxes. They very obligingly got out these boxes and let me see what was in them, what kind of forms they used. I brought home a full collection of all the forms they used, not only the guards on which the name was originally inserted, with its number, but all the correspondence and document forms. I read them all over. I asked the reason for this and that. There wasn't a paper in Sam Smith's file that didn't have a reason. I asked what use was made of something. They would say, “Well, the office in Liverpool writes to know, so we look here and we find that Sam Smith worked in Southampton, worked in the north for a while, went to Scotland. Now he's in Liverpool and they want to know how many weeks coverage he's had.”

I was impressed by the enormous number of employees and the terrific searching of records like that all the time.