TWO ESSENTIALS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 95, 16 January 1935, Page 9

TWO ESSENTIALS

Efficient Empire Air Mail Service FREQUENCY & CHEAPNESS (British Official Wireless.) Rugby, January 14. Referring to tlie new Empire mail services and the considerable increase there had been in tlie past year in the air mails dispatched from England to the Empire, Sir Kingsley Wood, Postmaster-General, in a speeeli at Bristol, said that for a really great Empire scheme two things were essential —much greater frequency in airmail services and a cheap fiat Empire air postal rate. Faster air communications were also desirable, and this involved adequate provisiou for night Hying. In the Government’s Empire scheme they had decided to adopt an important principle of which the British Post Office had lately been the pioneer in inland mails of sending first-class correspondence by air without extra charge. He hoped, with the co-opera-tion of the Dominions concerned, that in 1937 for the sum of, say, ljd., an Imperial correspondent in Britain would have his letter transported halfway round the globe within a week instead of the mqiith hitherto taken. In embarking upon such a project he had been fortified by tlie belief that a reduction of the time taken in the exchange of correspondence and the introduction at the same time of a flat cheap postal rate would cause traffic to grow to a remunerative level. Above all. the Government, had been encouraged to take this historic step forward by the belief that Imperial unity and corporate prosperity were largely dependent upon the freest facilities for rapid intercourse between the nations and the peoples of the Empire.