BERMUDA’S CENSORS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 50, Issue 3057, 2 April 1941, Page 7

BERMUDA’S CENSORS

TOTAL IS NOW 700 DO NOT HOLD UP ■ MAILS HAMILTON (Bermuda). The original dozen censors sent here by Britain have grown to a battalion of 700 men and women who know how to do a thing or two with pencil and shears.

The censors and censorettes, whose task it is to read other people’s mail and intercept anything going to the enemy, have taken over two of Bermuda’s biggest hotels, one for their work and the other to house them. The money they spend has brought a small boomlet -to this island, which in normal times gets the tourists’ dollar. Their chief task is to examine both mail and passengers aboard ships calling here on trans-Atlantic trips—-and they catch them both ways. When, for instance, an American liner heaves to outside the islands, a dozen or more men and women clamber aboard from a contraband control tender. When they’ve, finished with you —or your mail —you’ve been thoroughly censored Some speak and read 15 languages.

The censors boast proudly that they do not “hold up the mails.” They say that mail usually is placed aboard the next boat, unless it turns oiit to be “interesting,” and in the ease of Clippers it sometimes is put back on the same ’plane.