Things ain’t what they used to be, and it’s hard to imagine a beleaguered institution suffering reputational damage these days sending for filmmakers, a composer and a poet, as did the General Post Office in 1936. Indeed, now it’s the filmmakers who seem to have shone the strongest light on the injustices visited on so many sub-postmasters and covered up for so long. But back in the 1930s, collaboration between a public institution and the creative arts resulted in Night Mail, a short black-and-whitefilm picturing the journey of a postal train from Euston to Aberdeen, set to a score by Benjamin Britten and concluding with a poem by WH Auden, which was painstakingly constructed to mirror the rhythm and speed of the train’s progress. The GPO’s ambition – to portray its service as modern, reliable and vital to the life of the nation, as well as to bolster the morale of its underpaid workers – was largely satisfied.
Auden’s poem – until Four Weddings and a Funeral stopped all the clocks – became perhaps his most quoted, and among its achievements is a keen understanding of what the post meant to its recipients; the daily tombola that might bring the brown envelopes of officialdom but also a love letter, an unexpected card from foreign parts, an invitation to a party. “The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.”
