Fun with Stamps: How the Post is Carried Now (1958)

This is the first of a series of enjoyable articles extracted from “More Fun with Stamps” (1958) by Dianne Doubtfire & Kay Horowicz. We have cut the title down to “Fun with Stamps” on PDb as we do not have a copy of the first in the series. We will continue to publish more of these articles in due course. We have retained the original charming illustrations.

Perhaps you’re saying, ‘But I know how the post is carried now – it’s carried by van, train, boat or aeroplane, finishing up with a postman on a bicycle or on foot.’ And you’re perfectly right. But did you know that letters also travel by means of pigeons, bottles, casks, tin cans, dog sledges, camels, trams, buses, helicopters, balloons, underground railways and rockets?

Let’s begin with the more ordinary ways. Have you heard of the ‘Down Special’? It is a train only for mails and it is one of the many Travelling Post Offices which roar through the night across Great Britain so that you can have your letters by breakfast-time.

It takes seven and a half hours from London to Edinburgh. Sometimes, on the ‘Down Special’, there are as many as eighty sorters working all night as it dashes on its way to Aberdeen. If you ever stand on station platforms collecting engine numbers you may have seen the apparatus that is used to pick up and put down mail-bags as the train tears through the main-line stations at night. But have you ever seen it working?

Even if you happen to be on the spot it is almost impossible to see anything because it is all over in a few seconds as the train rushes through the station at over forty miles an hour. The arms swing out of the mail train, carrying pouches of letters and in a flash these are dropped into a net and the new pouches, which were hanging waiting for them, are picked up.

The actual picking-up is automatic but it needs very clever timing to work the machine. Just think that not so much more than a hundred years ago the mail-coach guard used to grab a pouch of letters from the Postmaster as he leaned out of his bedroom window, and everyone thought that was the last word in speed!

The very first Travelling Post Office started in 1838, but it was a very slow affair compared with the ‘Down Special’ of today. If you would like to see what one of today’s T.P.O.s looks like inside, you can see a picture of one on a French stamp (1951).

Now let’s suppose you are sailing to America on The Queen Mary (which takes 4 days 20 hours from Southampton to New York) and you want to write a letter to a friend in England. If you post it at the Ship’s Post Office, before you reach Cherbourg, your friend will have an interesting postmark for his collection because the letter will be taken off The Queen Mary at Cherbourg and have the word ‘PAQUEBOT’ stamped on it (the French for Packet Boat).

Do you know why it is called a Packet Boat? In the beginning these boats sailing from England to the Continent carried the packet of State Letters (instead of holiday postcards and ordinary letters as they do today). These early packet boats used to be armed with guns because enemy spies were very anxious to capture them and read the state letters and steal any gold or other goods they might be carrying. Today the word ‘Paquebot’ is normally stamped on all letters posted on board ship.

Now we’ve talked about land and sea – but what about air? Well, in 1919, there was a great event in Post Office history. Ten thousand letters, postcards and newspapers were flown in an aeroplane for the first time in Great Britain. The pilot was a young man called Hamel. This was the Coronation Air Post – from Hendon to Windsor in thirteen minutes – celebrating the Coronation of King George V.

The next big change came in 1919, just after World War I, when the first regular air post started between London and Paris. Soon other countries began sending letters by aeroplane and now airmail services run all over the world and the post travels faster and faster – London to Johannesburg (5,600 miles) in two days! But the story of airmails is a long and exciting one; you can read more about it in Chapter 14.

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Now let’s have a look at the way mail is carried in foreign lands. What about the frozen north? In cold barren parts like Alaska and Labrador letters are carried in a sledge drawn by dogs, and the postmen have to carry guns to protect themselves from wild animals.

In outlying villages in Finland the postman comes on a sleigh drawn by reindeer. There is a Post Office in Finland that is only open one day in the year – just for the reindeer market! Its name is Gallivare, but if you find an envelope with a Finnish stamp on it and the postmark has a reindeer included in it you will know it comes from there, even if you have forgotten the name. What a treasure this would be for a postmark collection.

Norwegians who live in the towns and villages round the northern fjords get their post only by ship. One ship is enough for a small fjord but it takes more than twenty to collect and deliver mail all round the largest one.

People who live high up in the mountains of Austria and Switzerland get their letters brought to their villages by Post Bus. These sturdy buses climb up the mountain roads to a height of 7,000 feet in the summer. They carry newspapers, goods and passengers as well as letters; there is no other way for people to get their supplies in the remote places. When the horn of the Post Bus is heard, all other traffic gets out of the way; the mails must be on time. There are post-boxes on the buses and places along the mountain roads where the bus will stop, so if you lived in a lonely chalet high up in the mountains you would have to take your letters down to one of these bus stops when the bus was due, and pop your letter into its box.

Letters are carried by lake steamers, trams and trolley buses, by mule and donkey over mountainous roads where no van can go, and across the blazing deserts by camel. They go down rivers – sometimes through jungles  – in all kinds of strange craft.

In Malaya, for instance, where many places can only be reached by river, the postman uses a Sampan to collect and deliver the mail. You can see one of these on a Singapore stamp (1955). What a fascinating collection you could make of stamps showing all kinds of mail carriers – from pigeons and sailing ships to trains and helicopters. Countries are so proud of their posts that – you can find stamps showing everything connected with letters and parcels. Here are a few of the things – just to show you what a marvellous collection you could make:

Post runners (Togo, India, Nicaragua); postmen on elephants (Cambodia) and on camels (Sudan); Moorish couriers on fiery Arab horses (Spanish Morocco); an Arab courier taking a letter from a scribe (French Morocco); Turkish, Icelandic and Chinese postmen; oldtime German and Polish postmen; a post-woman delivering letters in Hungary; postmen on bicycles (U.S.A.); postmen motor-cycling through Ethiopia and Guatemala; a Postillion (the continental word for a mounted post-boy or rider (Saar); trucks stacked high with parcels (Yugoslavia); mails going by horse-cart (Yugoslavia) and by bullock-cart (India); Austrian and Swiss Post Buses; horse mail coaches (nearly every country shows these, and there are some beauties – with two, four and even six horses); mail trains; mail ships; mail-carrying aeroplanes; postmen emptying pillar- or mail-boxes; Chinese and Swiss Mobile Post Offices, and, of course, Post Offices from all over the world.

There are hundreds more, and a story in stamps such as this, beautifully arranged and mounted, would surely win a prize in your Club Competition.

Before we go on to tell you about some of the strangest ways the mail is carried, let’s talk a little about what is carried.

The usual things are postcards, letters, letter-cards, parcels, newspapers, books and printed papers – but did you know that a live cow could be sent by post? Not long ago a farmer ‘posted’ a cow called Flossie by Special Express delivery and it cost him £3 11s. The stamps were stuck on Flossie’s address label and she was delivered safely to her destination. A goat has also been sent, and a Shetland pony called Tom. What a surprise for the postman who had to deliver these amazing ‘parcels’!

Turkeys, chickens and geese are often sent by parcel post, especially at Christmas – but not alive. Sometimes they are not properly packed or labelled and then they are sent to Mount Pleasant, London – the world’s largest sorting office. At the Returned Letter Section there is a department for perishable goods with a refrigerated storehouse, and lost turkeys and such-like are kept there while the staff try to sort out from torn bits of paper whose Christmas dinners they are!

Everything that has lost its label or been wrongly addressed or badly packed goes to the R.L.S., which has a staff of several hundred people. These men and women have to be rather like detectives to find the owners of the strange assortment of things that turn up there – cameras, false teeth, toys, pound notes, gold bracelets, footballs, bottles of poison – almost anything you can think of that does not weigh more than 15 lb. or measure over 3 feet 6 inches by 2 feet 6 inches. You wouldn’t believe what fantastic things people send through the post – quite against the regulations: white mice and snakes have been known to pop out of parcels. Strangely enough, bees are allowed to be sent but they must be very carefully packed or else you can imagine what would happen to the poor man who had to open a parcel of them in the R.L.S.!

As soon as you have posted a letter or a parcel you can forget all about it, can’t you, knowing that the Post Office will take charge of it and see to its safe delivery? Just stop and think what a marvellous system it is.

The Post Office has always been anxious to become speedier and more efficient, and now it has fleets of red mail vans which, amongst their many duties, carry the bags of letters from the villages to the towns, take mail to and from stations and deliver your parcels. There are also Mobile Post Offices, complete Post Offices on wheels, which can be sent to any part of the country where there will be a large crowd of people, such as an Agricultural or Motor Show. Wherever people are they want to be able to buy stamps and send letters and the P.O. does its best to see that they can.

Now, last of all, let’s talk about some of the very queer ways letters are carried in various parts of the world.

First of all, bottles! Have you ever sent a message in a bottle? We have. We once put our names and addresses in an empty wine bottle and dropped it over the Pont Neuf into the River Seine in Paris. A few months later we had a letter from a French boy who had found it while he was fishing miles away from Paris! This is a very exciting way of sending letters, but the trouble is that you never know who you’re sending them to or even that they will ever be read by anyone at all!

In 1585 Queen Elizabeth I forbade anyone, on pain of death, to open a drifting bottle that contained a message; this must be done by the official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles! The reason for this order was that a letter from Mary Queen of Scots (then imprisoned in the Tower of London) had been found in a bottle on the beach at Dover by a fisherman. The message was for the Duke of Lorraine, appealing to him to organize Europe against Elizabeth.

When Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned, it was a big problem how to get secret messages to her. One of her prisons was a house with a moat all round it and a brewery nearby, and some of her friends had the bright idea of smuggling letters to her inside a barrel of beer! The messages were wrapped up in a waterproof bag and pushed through the bung-hole. The brewer delivered the barrel to the house and Mary put her replies in the empty barrel which was called for later. This queer ‘post’ did not last very long; somebody found out about it.

There has never been an official Bottle Post – tides and currents are too uncertain – but a study of ocean currents is made by this means. The British Admiralty supply ship masters with printed forms in several languages to be despatched in bottles. These messages ask the finder to supply information and return it to the nearest British Consul.

There will always be private notes sent in bottles by ship-wrecked sailors and by holidaymakers like you and me who are intrigued by the idea of finding a foreign pen friend in this unusual way.

The Cocos Islands are situated in the Indian Ocean between Australia and Ceylon and the liners cannot teach them because of reefs. Mail is put into casks which are lowered by ropes over the side of the ship and picked up by a small boat. Coloured balloons are fastened to the casks so that they can be easily seen.

Have you ever heard of Tin Can Island? This was the name given to Niuafo’ou, a volcanic island of the Tongan group, because it had its mail delivered in tin tans! These were sealed up, thrown overboard from visiting schooners and retrieved by natives who swam ashore carrying the tins on their backs. They must have been excellent swimmers because quite often they had to go out two miles to collect the tins. One day a native ‘postman’ was carried off by a shark and from that day until the island was evacuated (after the volcano erupted) canoes were used instead.

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And now back to England for another strange and wonderful way of carrying mail.

Seventy feet below the busy streets of London is an Underground Railway run by the Post Office. It is the only one of its kind in the world and was begun in 1927. There are six and a half miles of it, carrying letters from Paddington to the G.P.O. and beyond. It travels at about thirty-five miles an hour and it needs no driver; it is all worked by electricity. The bags of mail are sent down from the surface to the eight ‘stations’ by conveyor belt. Mail can go from East to West London in twelve minutes and is never held up by fogs or traffic jams.

Although no official post has yet been sent by rocket, there have been hundreds of experiments. Thousands of letters have soared into the air, some landing safely, some slightly scorched, and many crashing to earth, lost for ever. But who knows, one day there may be an official Rocket Mail.

The first rocket ever to carry letters was launched by an Austrian named Schmiedel in 1931. Then Zucker, a German, tried to send mail from the Isle of Wight to the English coast by rocket in 1934. This crashed. Two years later an American one crashed when carrying 6,000 letters.

These early rockets were fired by explosives and landed by means of a parachute which opened when the missile descended. The letters were carefully sealed in an asbestos cover in the nose. In 1957 the Americans successfully sent five rockets, each fourteen feet long, from Nevada to California. Each carried 1,000 letters in a specially designed fin.

Perhaps in your lifetime letters may be sent to the moon – or even to other planets!

A well-known scientist has prophesied that in a hundred years the earth will be surrounded by a whole family of satellites and that some will have taken over the mailman’s job. He says, ‘They will receive messages radioed up to them while they are over one city, country or continent and play them back while above others.’ A hundred years is a long time! But we can be pretty sure that the mails of the world will go on travelling faster and faster, and that every year will bring new and exciting developments.