BETTER MAIL SERVICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 243, 14 October 1929, Page 4

BETTER MAIL SERVICE.

N.Z. BUSINESSMEN COMPLAIN. Frequent letters from business houses in New Zealand have been received by the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, asking that the matter of the varying times taken by English mails to reach New Zealand should be gone into. In a letter to the London Chamber of Commerce, the Auckland Chamber stated that British, post officials dispatched NewZealand mails by Suez or by America, according to the boat which left first- It 1 followed that where mail was sent via Suez a few days before mail via America, the first mail to leave necessarily arrived here much later than that by the American route. The anomaly existing was shown by the fact that mails by the direct London-New Zealand steamer Hororata, which left London on I>ecember 20, 1928, reached New Zealand on February 10, 1929, whereas mail dispatched on December 27 via Canada, reached Auckland on January 28, 1929. The route via San Francisco was also quicker for EnglishNew Zealand mails. New Zealand Post Office officials dispatched first-class mail' matter from New Zealand to London not by the steamer which left first, but. by one which would arrive first. Keplying to the Auckland Chamber, the London institution stated that the matter had been brought before the New Zealand trade section of the London Chamber, and that while members there were fully alive to the importance of marking mail "San Francisco" where it was of advantage, it had'been agreed to bring the matter before the notice of the British postal authorities Instructions were to be given that when not marked for a particular route, mail was to be sent by the quickest way. The apparent practice was to send the original by the quickest route and the duplicates by a slower. It happened that the Australian and New Zealand trade sections in conjunction with the Australian and New Zealand Merchants' Association were presenting a deputation to the Postmaster-General in connection with the acceleration of mails to New Zealand and Australia by the provision of an air-mail service, and the opportunity would be taken to discuss the position with the authorities.