ON POSTING A LETTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 22, 24 November 1939, Page 33

ON POSTING A LETTER

letter is as simple as blinking. You stick on a stamp, drop your letter through a slot, and know that it will be promptly delivered; that is, of course, unless you put it in your waistcoat pocket or your handbag and: forget all about it! Yet this simple posting of a letter has a fascinating history. The Post and Telegraph, realising that here is something in which everybody is directly interested, have constructed at the Exhibition a dramatic survey of the sending of mails from the early days of the Dominion. Visitors may see the contrast between "then" and "now" by. means of a moving diorama with cinematographic background, and a "sound track" which will amplify 7 atte tails.The oc then" section is dilly the more interesting — it is after all a slice out of the life our fathers and grandfathers lived, and even small slices of life are more interesting in retrospect. The earliest overseas mails from this country only received dispatch through the goodwill of masters of sailing ships who might be leaving for the long voyage home to England. A boat was sent out to the ship in the roadstead, and the letters were handed to the captain, who would entrust them to the official post in Sydney. You couldn’t work off your dislike of somebody in those days. by under-stamping a letter to him, as all postage was paid on delivery. So off went the letter, and one could hope for a reply in perhaps a couple of years. This involved method of posting is shown in one of the groups of the "Pageant of Progress." Then, in the background is seen a picture of the modern way — a little child running to post a letter at the nearest pillerbox. The human touch, which enters so much into everyday mail delivery, has not been forgotten. Old records and photographs have supplied much interesting, and sometimes amusing, material. There is one amusing group which shows the reaction of old-time postal officers to old-time mail-bags. These bags, made | of animal skins, became rather "high" when effluvia from the skins exuded because of poor curing. So the bearded postmen are holding a consignment of correspondence with faces daintily % these modern days, posting a

averted from the offending container. To-day, messages flash across the world with the ease with which Mrs. Jones addresses vitupération at Mrs. Smith over the back-yard fence. By high-fre-quency telegraph and telephone, coaxial cable, radio-telephone _ service, ship, train’ and aeroplane, the messages go; all these things are demonstrated in the exhibit.