Post 9 Has Filed 3,140 Times Since 1241. Its Subcommittee Closed In 1974.

THE DEPOSITORY, Peripheral Section — Post 9 has never missed a quarter.

The accession register of the Committee's depository records 3,140 quarterly returns from the observation post covering this system: the first date-stamped in the spring of 1241, the most recent on 4 July this year. The longest interval between any two of them is fifteen weeks.

Not one of the 3,140 has ever been tabled, read, summarised or cited.

The schedule at the back

Post 9 reports, and has always reported, to the Subcommittee on Peripheral Monitoring.

In 1974 the Committee on Establishments adopted a resolution merging the Subcommittee into itself, to take effect at the opening of the 1977 session. Resolutions of that kind carry a schedule of transferred functions at the back, and this one does: fourteen numbered items across two pages.

They are the ordinary things. Appointment of observers. Certification of instruments. Custody of the standing instructions. Publication of the peripheral list.

Receipt of returns from posts is not among the fourteen.

We read the schedule against the Subcommittee's own list of functions eleven times, and had it read independently by a man who clerked for the Subcommittee until it closed. He agrees the function is missing. He does not think anybody hid it.

"You are looking at a drafting omission," he said. "The receipt of a return was not thought of as a function. It was thought of as the post."

Then they kept arriving

Nothing in Post 9's establishment instrument depends on the Subcommittee existing. The instrument requires a return every quarter, and the post files one.

Returns come to the depository first, because registration has always come before circulation. After 1977 they stopped going anywhere afterwards. The register shows each one received, numbered into a consignment, date-stamped and shelved.

The Committee on Establishments has no entry for them at all. Not a refusal, not a redirection, not a query. Its minute index is published annually and the words Post 9 do not appear in any volume of it since 1977.

The part we did not expect

We had assumed the returns were read before 1977, and went looking for the contrast.

The Subcommittee's minute books survive continuously from 1604 — 149 volumes, and every sitting opens with a tabling list, the papers put before the members that day, by title. Our correspondent and a research assistant read 373 years of tabling lists over nine days, to the Subcommittee's last sitting.

A Post 9 return appears on none of them.

Before 1604 there are no minute books, only a register of sittings recording dates and attendance and no papers, and about those 363 years we can say nothing whatever.

So the finding is not that a merger broke a reporting line in 1977. The line never carried anything anywhere. In 1977 it merely stopped having an end.

Two memoranda, both noted

Ottoline Vasker-Rhode joined the depository as a temporary clerk in the summer of 1977 and has registered every Post 9 return that has arrived since — one hundred and ninety-six of them.

Twice she has asked, in writing, what happens to them next.

On 12 March 1981 she asked the then Keeper which body she should be forwarding to. On 6 November 1989 she asked again, attaching the schedule of transferred functions and marking the omission on page six in pencil. The pencil mark is still on the page.

Both memoranda are in the file. Both carry the same annotation, in the same unsigned hand: noted.

She registered the next return eleven weeks later, on time and in the correct form, and has registered a hundred and forty-six more since.

What is in them

We do not know, and that is the flat centre of this story.

The register gives each consignment a number and one line of subject. For 2,911 of the 3,140 that line reads ordinary. For 229 it reads with annexe. Nothing else about the contents is recorded anywhere we have been shown.

To read one, a reader supplies an item reference. An item reference comes from a catalogue. There is no catalogue of the level these are shelved on, for reasons the depository publishes itself in an annual statement and which this newspaper reports separately today.

What this desk takes from it

Something has been watching this system since 1241 and writing down what it saw, four times a year, without missing a quarter.

The writing was delivered. It was received. It was numbered, stamped and shelved, correctly, every time.

There is no reader at the end of it. There is a schedule of fourteen transferred functions with an omission on page six, an instrument that requires a return and says nothing about who reads it, and a woman of sixty-eight who has done her part of it properly for forty-nine years, into a subcommittee that ceased to exist in the month she was hired.