Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It\u2019s hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email<\/p>\n
Things ain\u2019t what they used to be, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s the filmmakers who seem to have shone the strongest light<\/a> 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<\/em>, a short black-and-whitefilm picturing the journey of a postal train from Euston to Aberdeen<\/a>, 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\u2019s progress. The GPO\u2019s ambition \u2013 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 \u2013 was largely satisfied.<\/p>\n Auden\u2019s poem \u2013 until Four Weddings and a Funeral<\/em> stopped all the clocks<\/a> \u2013 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. \u201cThe chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,\u00a0\/ The cold and official and the heart\u2019s outpouring,\u00a0\/ Clever, stupid, short and long,\u00a0\/ The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It\u2019s hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email Things ain\u2019t what they used to be, and it\u2019s hard to imagine a beleaguered institution suffering reputational damage these days sending for filmmakers, a composer and a poet, as … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}