JOB ROLES
The Office Girl was the first Littlewood’s job created by John and Cecil Moores in 1925. These Permutations/ Coupon Clerks would mark and stamp coupons to identify the checker and the date of checking. Suspicious of the probity of the business in 1926 the Government attempted a sting operation on Littlewoods. A Policeman visited the Littlewoods Pools office and offered ready money along with a coupon. Accepting this would have breached the gambling laws and opened the company up to prosecution, the girls saw through the ruse and sent the officer packing.
By 1930 the job of Permutations had been separated from that of Coupon Clerks. All coupons would be permutated with the date of arrival encoded by a pattern of holes. They would also have been stamped using a joey machine with everyone's name who had checked the coupon including the supervisor.
Later on Permutations were replaced by a barcode which recorded the date of arrival and marking information. Moreover, permutations became less important as fewer coupons were hand marked. Littlewoods would later evolve into an online business which required no physical coupon to be permutated.
The introduction of the Mail Room closely followed that of the Permutations department in 1925. Mailroom workers would receive incoming mailed coupons, store them and record their information. This was a key role as the Mail Room would allot coupons to a particular Coupon Clerk team thus enabling them to be easily traceable. With the introduction of time locks in the 1930s the job of sorting coupons would be delayed until the time locks were released.
As the job of Littlewoods Coupon Clerks became more mechanised, Mail Room staff were still employed to sort the coupons, now for the machines. Eventually the Mail Rooms was superseded by the automated spreadsheets of Littlewoods online incarnation.
Correspondence was originally a task performed by the Office Girls but as the company grew in the late 1920s it became an independent section. The correspondence department would respond to Littlewoods clientele. Winners were contacted to explain how they would receive their winnings. The Correspondence department would also remain in contact with winners and offer financial advice. Moreover, callers who hadn't been acknowledged as winners would call the correspondence department to initiate a building search for their coupon. This was a costly process as all work had to cease.
In the early years Littlewoods correspondence was done via the telephone and mail. The company would later introduce call centres and by the modern era they were using email.