Saturday 3 July 2021

Mail Travail & More

 

Please, Mr. Postman,
Is that a letter for me?
Japan, circa 1890

Mr. P received a business letter the other day which travelled a distance of merely 20 kilometres and yet took a full calendar week to arrive! Words cannot express the disappointment, Australia Post. If, as a society, we are contemplating supersonic air travel again, how can it be that this letter travelled at around 3km per day? Such mail travail ... Yet I know for certain that our postmen haven't thrown aside their modern transport modes and gone all retro-Japanese-postal-runner in a loin cloth and sandals (although I suspect the tattoos are a pretty close fit & for showing them off, it is a style nonpareil), for I see them ambling (Clue #1?) in their hi-viz uniforms and tootling about (Clue #2??) in vans from time to time. Rather a shame, really, as a dashing runner could cover the distance in some small number of hours, even stopping for a bowl of sustaining ramen along the way. 

Somehow, I feel the catch-all excuse of These Trying Times will be behind this.

Shall I suggest that this present sorry state about our mail is reflective of the "deepening twilight of industrial society" and prefigures the looming deindustrialisation* of our civilisation that's regularly chewed over by one of the blogosphere's more interesting musers**? When the presumed linear trajectory of societal and technological progress is set back somewhere, does everything automatically go to Hell-in-a-Handbasket? Should we expect to find our lives now shaped by anarchy? And no wifi? Or do we regroup, and try shooting for the stars again? Or, do we plumb the experiences of our forebears, and discover that the past was indeed a different country, actually quite enjoyable, the food delicious and the weather agreeable, and the locals friendly and photogenic?

For one, I would be quite happy to wind back the clock in the Postal Department, as a quick look at its history presents us with plenty of examples of Better Times for those who once enjoyed sending and receiving missives requiring stamps and envelopes. Indeed, the Postal Service, in its determination to offer a swift and reliable delivery (and turn a handy profit), was mostly ever the model of Futurism and Progress as it embraced innovation and modernity. Shall we see what I mean, Dear Reader?

The Postal Pentacycle
 a.k.a. Hen & Chicks


A recent binge-watching of Lark Rise to Candleford gave me opportunity to ponder this whole business of Progress. Amongst the TV-show's many themes and subplots***, the featured 1890s regional English Post Office dealt with the looming spectre of the Future in many forms. For inst., who could not titter at the pious postman Thomas Brown getting to grips with the arrival of the frightening Bicycle? Reality was otherwise, as the postman's Bicycle was old hat by this time, so Thomas's regulation socks would have been blown by the notion of the Pentacyle, which was trialled in Horsham in Sussex in 1882, although sadly it didn't take off.

It was in 1784 that wealthy and well-connected Bath theatre-owner John Palmer first successfully addressed the notion of a postman Feeling-the-Need-for-Speed. For the preceding 150 years, the public postal service relied upon horse-riding post-boys carrying letters from post-to-post at around 3 miles-per-hour, and local postmasters organising final delivery. The system had many flaws but it was principally slow (mind you, better than Sydney in 2021), expensive,  and subject to such vagaries as post-boys being set upon by highwaymen. As coaches were already being used by parcel couriers, John Palmer found therein a solution. And after financing a trial run which demonstrated the feasibility of Bristol to London in 16-hours, the liveried Mail Coach was born. 

Commissioned poster art for the General Post Office
John Armstrong, 1934
Mail Coach AD 1784

© Royal Mail Group Ltd

After this sluggish start to a public postal service, the Victorian era saw progress in this arena take off like a rocket! By furnishing each with a uniformed postal official armed against bandits with two pistols and a blunderbuss (like the armed Pony Express rider with his revolver and knife, who bore business letters across continental America), within a few years Mail Coaches were safely criss-crossing England, carrying paid-passengers on their express journey to subsidise their private contractors and delivering letters to a hallowed and regulated timetable.

Commissioned poster art for the General Post Office
Grace Lydia Golden, 1948
Loading the Travelling Post Office
© Royal Mail Group Ltd

Fast-forward fifty years and the Royal Mail became an early adopter of the railway. While our endearing postmistress Dorcas Lane and her Lark Rise &c. neighbours were contemplating the arrival of the steam age with mixed feelings as to what such progress might mean to their lives, for the legion of men and women in the employ of the Royal Mail, the railway had already formed the backbone of the postal service in Victorian England. Cheaper travel had lured the lucrative Mail Coach passenger business onto the trains from 1830 (and, joy, paying passengers no longer had to walk up steep hills for the sake of the coach-horses) and quick to seize advantage, the first mail train was up and running and by 1838 the Postmaster-General was empowered by an Act of Parliament to commandeer trains to run at will. By having dedicated carriages to sort as they steamed along, the Travelling Post Office became the next leap.

Although Lark Rise &c. dwelt in the rosy glow of a rural idyll, tentatively and gently meeting each of the changes that brought them perhaps appropriately up-to-date with the rest of the land, and was indeed based upon a memoir, it did feel rather like its inhabitants were insects trapped in amber. While they were toying with adopting a bicycle, in addition to the aforementioned Hen & Chickens, the Royal Mail was experimenting with electric vehicles! 

Commissioned poster art for the General Post Office
Harold Sandys Williams, 1934
Loading Air Mails for the Empire, Croydon

© Royal Mail Group Ltd

The 1890s, when the story was set, was witness to an explosion of ideas and inventions, and the postal service was an enthusiastic participant. Railway costs had started to soar for the Royal Mail, so they shifted their parcel deliveries back onto coaches in 1887, and by the next decade they'd trialled a number of horse-less vans: an electrical parcel van in 1894; a steam-powered Daimler motor van in 1897; then settling on the petrol mail vans in 1898. Then in the blink of an eye, or certainly within the lifetime of our gently annoying friends, they would have seen the glory of Air Mail. And hullo!, here's our old friend Scylla ...

Behold the mercury arc rectifier
(with bonus 1973 fashion)
Which replaced rotary converters from 1959

And while they may not have lived to see the thrilling mercury arc rectifier, above, they would have had an inkling of what was to come as not only did a pneumatic underground railway operate within London, coming and going by the 1870s, it was replaced by a driverless underground electric railway in 1927 that managed AC to DC with rotary converters. The Future was well and truly Now[Then]!

Ms. Davis's address.
Let's be specific,
Royal Mail Never Fails

So how did we abruptly stop this momentum and fall into the hole we find ourselves in today? Dependence upon electronic communication is a simplistic excuse for letting the letter-writer down, for the electricity could be switched off tomorrow. Remember the looming deindustrialisation! So something from the Past may have to step up again, and the present mail travail needs to put a bit more effort into the le travail bit. Meanwhile, on a happier note, sidebar resident Futility Closet yesterday furnished this related piece about a better Postal Success Story (above), hinting that perhaps it's just a personal touch that's required. As Australia Post is not the Royal Mail****, and although there's no hint as to how long it took Ms. Davis's fan-mail to arrive, in this current climate, I daresay it would be an exercise in futility to apply similar creative writing to an envelope destined for an address within this wide, brown land of ours right now.




* And not to be confused with the everyday preoccupation with your postindustrial/dystopian/post-apocalyptic/trad-sci-fi. Obv.

** One Archdruid, John Michael Greer, found over at Ecosophia. Your Correspondent enjoys a catholic taste in blogs as well as books.

*** And many of them I found dull and tedious on this revisiting, rather like with ol' Poldark recently.

**** viz. we are presently rationed to alternate days for letter delivery because of These Trying Times, whereas I hear the Royal Mail can still muster up deliveries six days per week ... although far cry from the between 6 and 12 (count them!) deliveries per day in London in Victorian times!


Image credits: 1: via Pinterest; 2 - 6: The Postal Museum; 7: BBC via futilitycloset.com


26 comments:

  1. Hello Pipistrello, There is more at stake here than just slow letters. The situation is very much the same in the U.S. There aren't as many letters as before, but there are many more packages, and high rates and slow deliveries are going to be a major factor in future business models. It also introduces the familiar inequities, since small businesses will have to use poor services or lose customers due to high rates, while the Amazons of this world will be able to negotiate bulk contracts and eliminate competition.
    --Jim

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    1. Dearest Jim, yes, there is much to ponder about. As for your home country, indeed yesterday saw me receiving an emailed newsletter from a quirky online small business in America that I've bought gifts from in the past, saying they were abandoning international sales because of the headaches and financial costs associated with posting stuffs overseas & into the wild unknowns. His little business has gone back to its roots, as it were, selling only to his home market - two steps forward, one step back, perhaps? And will no doubt survive as he's not planning to conquer the world ... that I'm aware!

      As for the direction the online behemoths would like to take things, I rather think that if they've workshopped what to do if end-of-days comes and the electricity is turned off, knowing they'd vanish in a puff, they're best off making as much profit as possible now!

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  2. As stated above, the US postal service is in trouble. For example, I sent cards to the UK and NYC. The UK cards arrived in 2 weeks. The NYC cards arrived in 6 weeks. Amazon is not using the US postal service as they originally did. Amazon felt the postal service was expensive and decided to invest in an Amazon fleet for making package deliveries.

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    1. Dearest Susan, it's a vexing situation, no? And so hard to plan for when delivery times are seemingly random. It sounds like the the Royal Mail is still sticking to what they always did best - getting the post delivered! Amazon is not a thing I know much about, but starting their own fleet is not so dissimilar to the direction that parcel delivery took in the UK in the late-C19th. I guess it remains to be seen if they take up the mantle of innovation or just chase profit through monopoly. But, as I said to Jim, it could just end up a moot point when deindustrialisation comes!

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  3. My wife recently sent a letter (containing a cheque) to England. She posted it on a Tuesday at our nearby supermarket, and it arrived in London the following day. On another occasion she sent a small parcel to a relative in Sweden. It was very carefully addressed, but went to Ireland where it stayed for a month, before finally finding its way to Sweden about two months later.

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    1. Oh, Cro, I love hearing postage stories! Sublime to the ridiculous springs to mind, for Lady M. Austria and Australia still get confused for mail delivery, and occasionally envelopes arrive with extra ink on them suggesting a European holiday along the way, but Sweden and Ireland aren't so obvious.

      At the beginning of last year's shenanigans, I had a small parcel in transit from NY which was diverted to Singapore and then Perth and took about 14 weeks in the end, but I think that was due to restricted air transit routes.

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    2. You are lucky it didn't end up here in proper Perth near to where I live. Oh the number of times I have had to explain that a) I am not an Australian and b) Perth in Scotland is not named after Perth in Australia but more likely the other way around!

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    3. Oh, the tedium! It does amuse me that those in the employ of postal agencies can have such wobbly grasp of Geography. You would rather think it would be the natural employment for map-nerds, but it would seem otherwise. As to the precendence of our competing Perths, I'm happy to concede to Scotland but West Australians can be as fierce as a Scot in defending their national pride, so I couldn't guarantee them to do likewise!

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  4. I spent my first-ever year abroad in 1966, without telephone, email or any other communication in real time. My parents had to rely on weekly aerogrammes, as did I. It took 7 days for my aerogramme to reach Australia, then they responded and it took another 7 days for the answers to arrive in Tel Aviv!!

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    1. Dear Hels, we can only be green with envy today over the reliability and speed of such postage! Aerogrammes were wonderful things. They need to come back.

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  5. I used to so look forward to the daily post. What wonderful things would arrive?
    Now the post is a drag, of brochures, junk mails and bills. No fun comes in the post.

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    1. Dearest Ur-spo, we Pipistrellos spent some time in America early in our courtship and were staggered at the mountainous glossy junk mails and whatnots that would come in the post, so the piddling amount we receive in this neck o' the woods which proclaim the delights of industrially-baked pizzas delivered to your door, that a real estate agent can sell from under you for dazzling numbers of pesos is really small beer. But the absence of the hand-written envelope except at around birthdays and Xmas is rather droop-making. The remedy, of course, is to send fun things and hope that, chain-letter-style, fun things come back.

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  6. There's nothing but junk and bill in the mail these days. Things have improved over last year so I'll try not to complain. With all its problems, I still prefer snail mail to electronic mail. it feels so much more personal.

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    1. Dearest Loree, I whole-heartedly agree that snail mail is a joy and can't resist the lure of cards and paper in stationers' shoppes. But I'm also rather guilty of scanty output when it comes around to putting the pen to paper and can be found reaching for the laptop more often. In outing myself, I'm also hoping to shame myself into trying harder :)

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  7. I often contemplate the intricate vagaries of cause and effect, and here we see a fine example of a mere slow letter initiating such a fine burst of literary and visual delights. I am pleased that the letter took its time a'coming oh.

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    1. Dearest Andrew, thank you for your lovely compliment! Cause and effect contemplations do occupy the noodle a fair bit and this post had been gestating for a while, but the untimely letter was the timely nudge to bring it to light.

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  8. Eva (via email):

    Hello Pipistrello,

    My most recent experience with our postal system was an enquiry regarding a registered letter via express mail to Hungary. Two months later the definition of express was wearing thin so a polite phone call to our esteemed carrier service revealed my letter was waiting patiently in Ireland to be cleared by customs. When I enquired why it had gone to Ireland, I was told it was because the letters H and I are near each other in the alphabet.

    Sadly, I fear the hand written letters of old are a dying tradition. Our daughters write thoughtful cards on festive occasions but I think that is the only time they put pen to paper. Their primary school teachers spent an inordinate amount of time teaching penmanship which has been confined to the lost arts.

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  9. Dear Eva, I am both baffled and amused by this explanation for a holiday in Ireland for your letter! So many questions as to why this could be an answer ... The young seem really to have been sold on the idea that electronic missives will last forever as mementos of their thoughts and desires. The idea of future biographers needing to sort through hard drives looking for complete sentences to make sense of their subjects' lives spells looming disaster for the whole genre! As to penmanship, I'm hoping it's still taught, nonetheless, if not as an insurance policy. However I suspect, like Chinese Whispers, if it's being handed on by those around my age, then it couldn't make for an Art, lost or not. My own scrappy handwriting I like to attribute to the laissez-faire approach to these things as taught in the 70s, and it's a hard thing to improve upon once the muscle memory sets in! I'd be the last person who should teach this skill :)

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  10. Years ago when I lived in Scotland, you could post a letter in the evening and it would arrive down south the next morning. There was a time when you could even expect to receive two deliveries a day.
    Today we have 1st class and 2nd class mail - you can't rely on 1st class arriving the next day and 2nd class can take more than a week.

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    1. Dear Rosemary, they seem like glory days now, I'm sure! And since it was once so, it seems impossible that in this supersonic and instant gratification age it can't be so again. I sometimes wonder if some things should be better handed over to enthusiastic amateurs and retirees to have a go for a bit - postal delivery could be a delightful opportunity to get some exercise and see the sights, and get things done the way we (speaking, ahem, for myself) like it!

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  11. Yikes!
    I just realized you are not on my blogger buddy list!
    I will remedy this today unless you don't wish this; email me with a 'nay'

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    1. How lovely you are, dear Ur-spo! I feel very honoured to be stuck up on your pegboard with your friends :)

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  12. So informative and amusing and depressing : ) We are careening into the future with flying cars et al, but paper mail is going the way of the dinosaur (letter writers), leaving only the payee concerned for timely delivery of their bill. (And why do those always arrive ON TIME?) Most of all, I adored the last one... everything about it. Reminded me of Three Men in a Boat : ) Debbie

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    1. Dearest Debbie, I felt a spasm of guilt in having the word 'depressing' coming from your happy self but relieved to see that TMIAB was your reward for persevering :)

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  13. WONDERFUL POST!
    I KNOW......I KEEP COMPLAINING IT WAS MUCH BETTER BEFORE!
    I'm talking about LIFE before all the gadgets we all carry about!
    TIRED OF THIS WORLD..........TOO MUCH INVENTING AND NOT ENOUGH OLD WORLD CHARM!
    YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!!!
    XOX

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    1. Thank you, dearest Contessa, and I do know what you mean! Although I rather feel that much so-called inventing is only fiddling around at the edges and not really adding anything substantive to our world. I daresay charm is rarely the prerequisite to be sought after. xx

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