Night Mail (1936) UNABRIDGED FULL DOCUMENTARY 

it wouldnt work.

@@PaulaKelly-s9c All New Royal Mail entrants on just above the minimum wage now and a 3 hour longer working week, we have a two teir workforce, the race to the bottom has begun

@@PaulaKelly-s9c I was a unit rep for 5 years then an area rep for 27 years, its sad to see how its been managed since privatisation. I got out in2020, if I`d stayed in I think I would of been sacked...Still the public got what they voted for...

Join the Union.

@@redtobertshateshandles The union accepted these terrible conditions unfortunately

I heard that there were financial problems some years ago. You can't believe it nowadays. It is quite cleverly produced all the same. A different world back then.

No whimps,or mental anguish. A cohesive workforce Just get on with the work in hand

@@kennethlaycock4724 Well at least, thats what we see. Great film though.

​​@@kennethlaycock4724Auden was not a student but a schoolmaster. He was 29, and left the GPO unit after a few months, complaining that he could not get by on £3 a week. He was an assistant director as well as a scriptwriter, organizing one complicated shot of mails being assembled at Crewe (actually Broad Street). The film was very popular as a support item in cinemas, introducing a large non-literary public to Auden's verse. A few months later, aged only 30, he was given the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

The entire school and engineering colleges have only the records who are I believe in the production team whose names are replicated in every institution and university as a result folks who work for minimum wages are kicked out ...... fun game after all god didn't create everyone with Spanish eyes woes of studying post graduation and graduation ........... five hundred million letters via this mail .........

Four mins was a bit late in those days , unlike today 😂

They did. When the Boston and Maine abandoned passenger trains in the early 60s they still ran trains of mail and express cars for a few years.

@@tub43 live and learn.

👍🤣

Yes , like sending post with the Pony Express instead of texting someone , so much easier .

Those were the days!

There are those who ‘yearn’ for a simpler time, but they also want free WiFi.

@@Dad-Gad Yeah, nowadays ignorant people can send dozens of messages per day to express their thought. Yes, singular because it is always the same one. In yesteryear, people only sent messages when they actually had something to say.

@@Dad-Gad ah yes, of course there are far more job opportunities in texting as opposed to the old mail service. Look at all the working men employed doing a job they could take satisfaction from in this film. I've been a postman in the early 80s and although the pay was poor still it was a job. Who could say there's any job satisfaction in sending a text - especially when the sender can't spell or comprehend the function of punctuation

Same here bud, you in your sixties?

I missed out on the TPO’s so did my time in Redfern in the 80’s.

They were also called Travelling Post Office in Britain. One interesting point was that they had a letterbox on the side where you could post letters but you had to add extra postage (and if the train wasn't going to part of the country where your letter was headed it would probably be delayed a day or so).

i can send a letter to my relatives in Scotland from my home in London and it will get to it in 4 or 5 days. its amazing being alive in this technically advances time like these. :)

I posted a letter in County Durham to Stoke on Trent and it took TWELVE days to arrive ‼️‼️🤬🤬🤬

@@joline2730 yep thats the modern post office for you mate. you should have walked it over it would have been quicker. :)

@@tommyfred6180 Top Gear once raced a Porsche Panamera against the Royal Mail from Scilly to Orkney. The letter beat the car by a few minutes.

@@Decopunk1927 yep i remember seeing that and it was a bit of a giggle mate. but even then people posted comments on the top gear web page complaining they could wait weeks for a letter to get delivered from just down the road. the fact that the system works well 90% of the time. is no reason, with the billions of pounds the post office gets, to not complain about its unreliability. remember even by the post offices own reckoning they are misplacing, delaying or losing some 4,000,000,000+ items a year. pre war less then 1% of letters arrived late and they had almost no losses. the post office cost less than 20% (as a percentage of the GDP) than it does now. employed about the same number of people. but wages, in real terms, are now less than half what they got even in the 80s. as well as being a staggering 70% less than they got in the 1930s. its like cheering because your front door lasted twenty years before it needed replaced. but the school down the road front doors are two hundred years old and still going strong. we have lowered expectations to the point crap is considered an expectable industry standard and jobs providing less than a living wage is ok.

Well, when I was a child I had a book about famous trains, which quoted the poem in the page header for the West Coast Postal. The memory was recently unlocked whilst writing some train-related poetry of my own, which lead me to the documentary's Wikipedia article. I then immediately looked for it on the Internet Archive.

Stil is.

Rossini wrote a rap section in the Marriage of Figaro in 1816! It is part of the aria, "Largo al Factotum" (Cavatina)

do they get a house today ? or do you expect work for nothing ?

You can find those workers easily just go to the office of world-beating firms like apple Microsoft and Google there's a reason those firms are on top and it's not because they have better chairs or better desks

"...not really all that long ago" relative to what? The Battle of Hastings? The Bill of Rights? Battle of Britain? FIFA World Cup 1966? I know what you mean but... This film is from 1936. It's 2023. Another thirteen years and it's been a whopping hundred years since the film was made. That's three generations. And yes: an awful lot of things that have changed since...

​@@renderizer01 1936 but it could have been later , I remember buildings etc like that and I was born in late 50s , some of it reminds me of my childhood , I remember the signal boxes and watching from a bit away the signalman pulling the levers

So great to find someone who uses "behoove" - and correctly too!

Beautifully written and absolutely right regarding the need for proper tasks rather than instant knowledge at the click of a button.

In the late 1970s/early 1980s I was train crew on the London Underground. Trains with completely new braking systems were being introduced which reduced the skills needed by the driver. When I mentioned to an engineer that he and his colleagues meeting their challenge was removing the crew's challenge he admitted he hadn't looked at it like that. Now we have trains where the driver does almost nothing.

Something I've been considering , work and effort , being useful and part of a community is good for the brain . Pleased there's more than me thinking that it's the way forward

Same

Passenger rail service had been partially subsidized by the government paying for mail cars - so when the government stopped using mail cars - it became economically challenging for rail companies to compete with air travel

@@sgabig Understandable. Thank you.

Yes, the one from Internet Archive was the one I put here, best website ever. The copyright claim when I tried to upload wasn't BBC but actually from a known copyright troll called Lasso Group. This film has been in public domain since 1986. Glad everyone enjoys it.

Betjeman was a rapper, or a wrapper ? I'd never thought of it like that before !

Racial superiority of all those Nordic Germans. Lol. All three of them.

That is an excellent and poignant point. Three years after this pioneering masterpiece was made most of the men we see would have been in uniform -- like it or not.

Presumedly they'd fill the mailbag with the outgoing mail and put it back on the hook the next day

That poem alone a real gem. Any time you feel bad about the mail this brings you to admire the workers who handle it.

that 'clanking' was the result of wartime and austerity cuts in the maintenance budget. a well adjusted locomotive doesn't clank.

Why couldn't you get on them? They were crying out fro men (and women) from London, especially on the Special.

@@peterknight6535 Because I didn't live in London, the nearest TPO was Derby and you had to have a relative already on there to get you on.

@@nigelphillips7405 Ahhh, the Derby - Bristol - Derby. Now I understand what you mean.

@@peterknight6535 yep, did manage to do overtime at EMA at the weekends tho' segging on a Saturday night and unload and load the planes on a Sunday, all long since gone! I took ill health retirement in 2014, glad I did, don't know what you think about what's goin on now?

@@nigelphillips7405 Not a lot. I parted company with R.M. in 1995 after 30 years, pleased I did now I see whats happening..

That's why everything was working well 🙄

Nope see earlier post. Paper and pencil or chalk and using ones brain. Unlike today?

Doubt it, fragile items were not despatched via the "appo"

@@peterknight6535 It's called " light humour" wasn't mean't to be serious, i mean why would i post a vase by Royal Mail knowing it would be a jigsaw at the other end. Tut...silly me...

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Because using a keyboard is not work. And, at the end of the day, work was done, folks were physically tired and slept.

THe 80s would do me chap.?

The last TPO services went out on the night of 9 January 2004, marking the end of sorting of mail on trains in Britain.

They ceased in the UK in 2003, a sad day for the Post Office as they lost a lot of knowledge and experience. Most men too EVR, few went into the office.

This was just convergent evolution. Modern African-American rap has a more direct antecedent in certain types of blues recorded over a decade before Night Mail, such as Talking Blues (1926) by Chris Bouchillon.