The post office and its story : $b an interesting account of the activities of a great government departmentBennett, Edward
History
The post office and its story : $b an interesting account of the activities of a great government department
Bennett, Edward
Postal service -- Great Britain -- History
To reach the heart of the people the appeal must be in the people's own
idioms. There is nothing of this kind in the Postal Guide: you stumble
across conveniences for the first time in its pages entirely by
accident—conveniences, perhaps, which you have only imagined in dreams
and have perhaps thought of asking Mr. Henniker Heaton to advocate. And
all the time they were in existence, buried in the pages of the Postal
Guide.
But the man who delights in Bradshaw should find the most entertaining
portion of the volume in the list of offices and time-tables. By itself
this section is an admirable lesson in geography.
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ YOU WONT BE ┃
┃ ┃
┃ NOT LIKE WHAT YOU ┃
┃ MIGHT CALL HAPPY NOT ┃
┃ TILL YOU'VE JOINED ┃
┃ ┃
┃ THE BEDMINSTER DOWN PENNY BANK. ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
I have always found the list of the London streets showing their nearest
post offices extremely useful. If I cannot locate the district in which
the street is situated by its name alone, I am often able to do so when
I know the name of its nearest post office. For instance, Holford
Square, W.C.: where is it in the big Western Central District? The Guide
tells me King's Cross Road is the nearest post office, and I know what
part of London to make for at once.
The time-tables of the provincial mail services always interest me
exceedingly. Part of the charm of writing a letter is to be able to
realise the time when your friend will be reading it. You can of course
usually do this if you send a letter by the last post. You know then
that as a rule he will be reading it at breakfast. But if your friend
lives at Red Hill and you post your letter in London to him after
breakfast, when will he get it? The Guide will enlighten you at once. He
will be reading the letter between 3 and 4 P.M.
If your friend lives at Wick, in the very north of Scotland, when will
he get the letter which you post to him in London, say on a Monday
evening at 6 o'clock? Again you can fix the delivery of the letter
within an hour at about 6 o'clock on the following evening. If he writes
to you by return, and posts the letter the same evening at 11 o'clock,
you will receive it by the first post on Thursday morning. Now if you
went to the local post office with an inquiry on this subject, the
official will only look at the Post Office Guide for the information
which you could have obtained yourself without the trouble of a journey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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