GPO
Then
Durban, 1973.
“My father he’s late”,
I had asked the worker, a blue collar man who identified as Indian, why he was late. Not sure I had heard him correctly, and somewhat impatient by now, I, his boss, asked him to repeat. There was no doubt. I heard correctly the first time. He was somehow trying to shift blame to his father. Now I was really annoyed.
“To hell with your father! You! YOU are fair and square late. Leave your father out of this! You are late, and I want you to explain.”To my utter surprise, this normally cheerful worker dissolved into tears.
“Nononono. You donunnerstan. You make me tear, ‘n all. You swear my father! But my father … my father … my. FATHER. HE is LEYT”.
You know the feeling. Through the red mists of bad temper rises the morbid sensation that comes with being appallingly wrong. Awkward. I wanted to explain that in English, we don’t use “late” in that way, but it was the worst time for a grammar lesson. I hugged him, and apologised for the misunderstanding, I had lost my own father in my matric year, and it was a shocker. Life changed forever. Grief, and exile, are the worst two things.
I was recovering some decorum, though. His tears dried up. I asked how his father passed. I was doing well. Then, he said
"His heart attacked him”and that, I’m sorry to say, finished me. Some things are so new and surprising, the chortle comes too fast, out of nowhere. I bluntly failed to kybosh my rising risibilities. He was so hurt. What a fail! My socially FUBARest moment. I will never live it down. But, some good came from it. We learn. I learnt: At all costs, avoid anger in the workplace.
The Late Post
Googling, I read that SAPO, the SA Post Office, is still going. It’s not obvious. My friend-brother and long time bandleader, Chris, had posted his newly authored book to me from Australia. Several times he phoned and asked, but the book never arrived. After a year, he told me it was returned to him, marked “Return to Sender”, no reason given.
All that time, I was living in Montgomery Park in Jhb. I had discouraged Chris from posting. Anyone who sees the old Melville Post Office, once SAPO'S pride and joy, boarded up and derelict, would also falter, but optimist Chris, born and raised in a South Africa that still had train trips, post, a national airline, lights that stayed on, naturally had a go. So, given the opening anecdote, is SAPO LEYT? My book post was both late and never. One thing is certain: the post is not better.
General Post Office
I did not grow up with SAPO, not by that name. I grew up with the GPO, a crib of Britain’s GPO. For a century, what they did, we did. Now, we do … not much.
It was called General because it included parcels, telegrams (unknown today), and telephones. Britain split those into separate departments from the old post office. We didn’t quite crib that, but did split telephones out into Telkom, and you know how that went down. Telkom (Telephone Commission) meant that the government committed to providing telephones. It made good progress, until, one day, after investing in cellphone companies, it just told people that their landline was being terminated. No reason. One farmer I know was told he could keep his farm landline, but he needed to replace stolen copper himself. Telkom would no longer do it.
He agreed, but they terminated it anyway. Charming. But, that’s landlines. Are cellphones better? Yes, if you can stand the cost, and when there is a tower in reach. Farm murders, no landline. Hmmm. Makes you think,doesn’t it? When a government commits to doing something, it doesn’t mean a thing: “Koms” are a con. Telkom, Eskom …
Please Mr Postman
I am sentimental about the post office. Back in the day, a postman needed to read, write and walk or ride a bicycle. Those were the skills. A telegram “boy” was indeed a boy. Youngsters on cycles delivered telegrams. So, it was many people’s first job. There were no women doing it, except in wartime, when women did nearly everything. Later, we got post-women. Nobody called them post-girls, evem in their teens, nor post-persons.
I am sentimental, not only for an early lifetime of waiting with bated breath for mail from family and loved ones, and exam results. The post was a wonder, because letters from the trenches in Delville Wood dependably reached worried ancestors in PMB during WWI. As things happened, my ancestor was one of the few that survived Delville Wood, for a further seven months before meeting his maker.
Letters from “Oflags” and “Stalags”, POW camps, followed likewise in WWII. Parcels and post were considered essential for morale in the ranks and trenches. These days, a troepie in the Congo, less than halfway to Delville Wood, has neither snail-mail, nor leadership that can easily return him (or his remains) to his country. Stuff happens: the British Empire could not seriously transport bodies back home from Europe, but it had 20 million to worry about, not 14.
Parcels and Armies
Parcels are inseperable from soldiers on duty. Something from home has always been essential for morale. Home is what they are utlimately defending, so why let them forget it?
I don’t think having a duff army is all bad. We have no enemies, and we don’t need one. I would actually be proud to dump it. War is insane. I just wish the one we do have could be well-run.
Saffer Sappers
I have instead long wished that the army could be retrained as one large “sapper” force. I would re-purpose it to build rural infrastructure, hospitals, clinics, bridges for scholars to cross instead of wading flooded streams, that sort of thing.
There is little point in keeping the army in camps in cities. Drive past Tempe Military Base in Bloemfontein any evening, and you will be lucky to find a single light on in a bungalow. There is no movement. The place is as dead as a doornail. Doornkop, south of Johannesburg, is the same. No wonder it took three whole days to get troops to they July insurrections in KZN: they had to beg the soldiers to report for duty first.
Build camps on the borders. What happened to those in Caprivi? We have drone surveillance, night vision, thermal imaging, gyrocopters: we don't need expensive helicopters. At least, troops on the border would be doing something useful. That would open up the post, and its bank and other services to the bordet, having a civilising effect.
Unsorted
What went wrong with the postal service? My sentiment about it is because the postal service’s dependability played a huge part in the struggle against apartheid. That makes the ANC government’s neglect of both post and soldiers all the more difficult to understand. Looking back, things began to go wrong well before democracy, when sorting the post was mechanised. Most organisations back then were talked into this sort of “solution” by firms like “Big Blue’, IBM. Of course it is not a bad idea. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) had progressed to being able to read (most) handwritten zip codes, but it was massively expensive. It was a dead loss with spidery handwriting (like mine now, at eighty years of age), such that some humans were still needed.
Mail and Rail
A trainset of three parcels wagons can replace one hundered and forty bakkies on the roads in a single trip, polluting ninety-five per cent less. If we are serious about global warming and pollution, regulating traffic back onto rail is precisely the sort of thing that governments are meant to do, and only they can do it.
Returning to sorting the post, why abdicate to a machine? Reasons, at the time, were the blinding speeds of OCR sorting. The trouble is, we did not need that speed: sorting was not the worst bottleneck we had. We got mechanical sorting because England did: bigwigs are very gullible. More importantly, it was likely a fat tender. Who do you think the ANC learned from? Mechanical sorting, my Italian lawn mower mechanic would have said, was “expensive-a rubbish-a”.
No Mail, no Passenger Rail
Mail and Rail live and die together. In Britain, and for half a century before mechanical sorting, mail posted in London before 9am was delivered in Edinburgh in the afternoon, “second post” delivery. The two cities are roughly the same distance apart as are Jhb and Durban. You get the idea: their trains took less than 6 hours for the trip, ours took 14 hours. There’s your delay. Mechanical sorting was never going to take away our problem. What we needed was fast rail.
Edinburgh has been less than six hours from London by rail for more than a century. Over the years, trip time has steadily improved. For a comparison, our trip time between Jhb and Durban has recently been "doubled++" from 14 hours to 30 hours. It is impossible to predict what PRASA’s schedulers are likely to come up with, and why. When I began work after school, the section from PMB to Dbn took 2 hrs 12 min. In 2010, a special “business express” between the two cities was announced. It had plugs for laptops, and was said to be the last word in business comfort. The trouble was, it took 3 ½ hours!. Is this what an MBA does to the brain? Bruce Fordyce regularly ran it in less than five, on the (longer) old route. Driving, even in the worst traffic, took an hour.
For a century, the Jhb to Dbn train took roughly 14 hours. Now, all of a sudden, it has sagged to averaging 25 kph. For perspective, the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway, in England, trains happily run at 40 kph, often pulled by steam locomotives, on 15” gauge. A cutesy, English tourist attraction runs faster than a PRASA business express. Oh dear! And now, we no longer have a Durban service (a train that doesn't always leave cannot be called a service).
Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway
Railcar with Milkcan bay
How things work
It makes no difference that present day vehicles are faster than the Model T. Ask any unionist. Where trains continue for thousands of kilometres with crew changes, road vehicles settle into a routine allowing an outward trip of four hours, and a return trip of four hours, with a lunch hour. Four hours, with stops along the way, in vans on corrugated roads, doesn’t get the mail too far, so post destined for further away would be dumped at a half-way depot, and collected, often the following day, by a different vehicle onward to another centre. Rinse and repeat, and it becomes clear that rural mail will take days. For trips of longer than a working day, rail will always beat road.
I had copies of mail written by my grandfather, in Kat River (where a new narrow gauge line had been laid), in the early 1920’s. He routinely wrote to the Citrus Board in PE on Monday, and was replying to the Board’s response on Wednesday. That meant the Citrus Board had not only attended to the letter quickly, but that their reply was in my grandfather’s hands by Wednesday morning at the latest. Try mailing anything at all from Kat River Valley today, let alone getting a reply from Gqeberha the following day.
Urgent Mail
The other variable was worker urgency. My dad, a civil servant, had a low opinion of the work ethic of post-1948 service entrants, muttering “Mȏre is nog ‘n dag” when talking about new entrants to the service. I heard him, at least once, bark “These guys aren’t servants, they can only give orders”. I can see what he means: public facing civil servants today are tireless, willing and gracious. As a teenager, I would have pegged you as a liar for using the phrase “the nice person at the post office”.
Pretty Penny
For decades, in Victorian Britain, the everyday cost to post a letter was one penny. One GBP had 240 of those, in pre-decimal days. Default postage stamps eventually rose by 50% (Toffs would say “One and a half pence”, working class gits like me would pronounce 1 1/2d as “penny haypenny”, and you’d write it “penny ha’penny. Wouldnya?”. Sniff). Gotta add a sniff, dontcha?
A Penny's worth
What could a Victorian penny buy? A loaf of bread, or a beer. Now you know what to do with your last penny, right, If we had such a thing? A loaf of bread today costs the best bit of R20 or more in SA. So, at R6.30 for a small 5gm letter or postcard in ‘ordinary mail’ today, rising to R15.45 for a Kg, SAPO is incredibly reasonable. ‘Fastmail’ is more expensive. I shudder, wondering what ‘fast’ means in SAPO terms. If my book from Australia is any indication, fast, or slow, can mean “never”.
Last Days
The GPO improved through my youth and adulthood to where it was impressively sometimes delivering mail posted on Monday morning in Cape Town to Jhb recipients on Wednesday. This was in the 1980s. Then, as with so many South African achievements, (think MetroBlitz) it seemed they lost interest. At no stage was the post ever regarded as anything other than a necessary (evil) expense. Making a profit from it was not a concern, but costing too much was. As far as possible, it was expected to pay for itself. In 1991, the GPO became the South African Post Office. Performance wise, it is yet another struggling SOE. it does not lend itself to purchases of knee-pads at R85k each, so the ruling class have no use for it.
It was announced at some point in the 1980s that all mail would go by air. If you are living in mPindweni, Phuthaditjhaba, or Pofadder, this makes no sense. What they really meant was that mail would be collected by vehicle from any village or town, taken to the main town of a province, and put on a plane to a port city. From there, it would be loaded onto a vehicle destined for provincial towns and dorps. You may think this would be faster than rail, but it isn’t, because as mentioned above, drivers of vehicles need to rest, blah, safety regulations blah, unions blah. There are always reasons to not do things, seldom reasons to DO things.
Toe, Toe, Rundu Toe
When I was a musician in the army, I played at many fund-raising concerts for an organisation calling itself the Southern Cross Fund. It raised money for troops on the border. If ever there was an admission that troops were not properly looked after, this was it. The troops occasionally received gift parcels. Despite what I read about those in the press, I have never personally heard an ex-soldier express how wonderful such gift parcels were. Frankly, the opposite.
Few have taken the trouble to find how much the fund raised during its time. Whatever it was, a researcher may be in for a surprise: given the modest price of the gift parcel contents, does the sum of all of them add up to what was collected? We may never know. From what I recall, this outfit created its own distribution service, bypassing the Post Office. Gift parcels arrived on SAAF transport planes. Which is goofy, when you think about it, because those planes also carried the mail.
School Books
If you have ever wondered where the crazy notion of creating a special service to distribute school text books came from, here is your answer. As to which of those two schemes was the more successful, and who benefitted from them, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, but they both heralded the end of the postal service: GPO first, then SAPO. But they were not all. The New Zealand Post Office sent a team of consultants to fix ours in the nineties, responding to a request was from our post office. They left in disgust after a year, without even collecting their fee, saying they were staggered at the level of corruption they encountered. They also said SAPO was unfixable. That story has been somehow erased from history.