Can’t resist one more British Pathé film – in part because this Business Efficiency Exhibition was in 1965, the year I was born. And partly because some of the whizzy new equipment looks a bit Professor Branestawm-like to me. But mostly because it tells me things are relative. Success and failure are relative.
You’ll hear the (still. terribly. formal. but. a. bit. more. chipper!) presenter say that the Post Office has to cope with 30 million letters per day. Right now we imagine the Royal Mail is dying – or at least I have imagined it since I’m email-obsessed – but the latest figures available show it’s carting around 46 million letters per day.
(‘Latest’ means 2010. You’d think there would be far more recent data given the recent sell-off of Royal Mail shares but seemingly, not so much. Read Letters Delivered 1920-2010, a PDF from the Postal Heritage website’s statistics page. I did not know there was such a thing until I wanted to tell you. Note that the PDF lists annual figures, not daily. British Pathé or its source clearly just took the annual figure for 1965 and divided by 365 because if you do that, you get a total of 30,684,931.51 letters per day. The 2010 equivalent is 45,613,698.63.)
We now return to your regularly-scheduled video from the Business Efficiency Exhibition 1965:
