OUR CARELESS ANCESTORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 14, 17 July 1939, Page 12

OUR CARELESS ANCESTORS

However accurate the Post Office's complaint may be that we fail to address our letters correctly, it would have been far more urgent a hundred years ago, for our ancestors appear to have been almost criminally careless with their postal packets, says the "Manchester Guardian." The Duke of Richmond, giving evidence in 1831, stated that in the previous year in England alone there had been 940 letters containing property to the value of £6645 put into tlie Post Office without any directions at all. In- addition, the noble Duke went on, several bankers' letters were misdirected to the wrong town, and five of those carelesslyaddressed lnissives contained property amounting to £13,833. On one day during p period of severe snow the Glasgow bag was brought into the inland office, and there was £12,000 for one banker alone loose in the bag. The letter had got wet. and th money had dropped out. The Duke 6nished by mentioning that hundreds of newspapers were put into the office without any direction, besides many ordinary letters which lacked addresses. No doubt there are plenty o* people today who are a bit casual about posting money, but surely the modern banker, at least, is not quite so offhand in dispatching large sums through the post as his predecessors (whom, by the way, we have always been taught to regard as staid, leisurely, precise, and conservative men of affairs).