James Elder

@jameselder

Business archivist by day; rowing club archivist by night. So, quite a lot of 19th and 20th century British history, and grumbling about digital and A/V preservation. Not the UNICEF spokesman. Be nice, I'm trying my best.

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James Elder@jameselder· 29d

This is the one in Alta.

James Elder@jameselder· Jul 4

The Saturday Henley Royal Regatta programme has got into the spirit of things.

THE AMERICANS AT HENLEY
Marking 250 years of Independence
The very first foreign entry at Henley was an American named E. Smith of Atalanta Rowing Club, New York, who entered The Diamond Challenge Sculls in 1872. Smith won two heats bur was beaten in the third round.
His nation was just 96 years old. Today, as the U.S.A. marks 250 years of independence, there are 72 entries (including composites) in the 2026 Regatta across 22 events, made up of 42 open crews and 30 women's crews.
The Early Years
Smith's entry made the Regatta a pioneer in international sport: there were no precedents in rowing; among amateur sports in Britain only cricket had made an informal tour to Canada in 1859 and Australia in 1860. The frst sizeable foreign entry at Henley, all from the U.S.A., came in 1878 and there was immediate trouble in respect of the amateur and professional argument.
By Henley standards it transpired that of the two American scullers, G.W.
Lee of New Jersey and G. Lee of Boston one was certainly a professional and the other at best a very doubtful amateur.
In the same year the Shoe-wae-cac-mette Boat Club of Monroe County, Michigan, entered The Stewards Challenge Cup. In front of a crowd of around thirty thousand pcople on the banks of the Thames, or in pleasure boats on the river, these French-Canadian lumbermen beat a crew from Columbia College, New York, but lost the Final against London Rowing Club. "The Shoes' were naturally disappointed to lose the race Back home the press suggested that "these men did not know how to tow The New York Times went onto criticise their clothing and the fact they drank whisky as well as beer! Cartoons at The Shoes' expense appeared in American publications.
The same Columbia College crew was also entered in The Visitors Challenge Cup where they beat University College,
Oxford, and Jesus College,
Cambridge in a hear (this being the period of many races being three abreast), and went on to win the Final against Hertford College, Oxford.…

James Elder@jameselder· Jul 3

Hooray, #Silo is back for Season 3 - with Season 4 (the final one) already shot, we know we’re going to get a well-planned story with a beginning, middle and end. If you’re not watching, it’s one of the best things on Apple TV - which is high praise.

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 30

I am reading Jeff Hecht “City of Light: the story of fiber [sic] optics” for work. Very good, and contains this great nugget about the dangers of American exceptionalism.

It is not enough for an inventor to show that he or she was the first to have an idea. The inventor must apply for a American patent no more than a year after the idea is first described in public anywhere in the world. The American Optical legal department had interpreted the handwritten date in American style as December 6, 1953, which gave them plenty of time to file their application. They didn't remember that Europeans write dates differently, with the date before the month. When the lawyers filed the patent application November 19, 1954, they had missed the proper deadline by over five months. "We knew the game was up" when the copy of the cover arrived, recalls Siegmund. An angry Brian O'Brien felt cheated.

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 30

Henley #Henley

View of the River Thames from Henley Bridge on the first day of Henley Royal Regatta 2026

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 22

Slightly off-topic but I have recently returned to Charles Perry's excellent 'The Victorian Post Office' for work and have been reminded that a sense of superiority among HMT officials goes back a long way.

later in 1868 when Robert Lowe became Chancellor of the Exchequer. As his most recent biographer has written, ‘From the moment Lowe came to the Treasury, the department gained a reputation for tactlessness and discourtesy. ’26 Tilley, with over thirty years’ experience at St Martin’s le Grand, would have readily agreed. In 1872 he complained that until ‘the present Government came into power... there was a manifest desire on their [the Treasury’s] part to consider our propositions favourably and after requiring explanation where explanation was necessary to approve them if they possibly could’. 27 Tilley further observed that the old practice of informal discussions between Post Office and Treasury clerks, in which problems could be solved in an amicable fashion, had been replaced by a pattern of icy correspondence in which St Martin’s le Grand was thrown on the defensive. ‘I am not very thin skinned in official matters, ’ Tilley wrote, ‘but these rude scolding letters from the Treasury are a little too bad. We attempt to make improvements and we are told we are idiots and don’t know our business. ’28

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 20

If the forecast proves to be to right, this week in London is going to be hell.

A weather forecast showing Mon-Thu max temperatures of 31, 38, 38 and 35.

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 20

A subset of my list of history books to read for work. There are lots more. And a separate list of books, articles and courses on AI, Knowledge Graphs, Linked Open Data etc. Not entirely clear how I will get through all this while, y’know, doing my job.

16:51
Sat 20 Jun
‹ Work
Q Find a book....
City of Light
The Story of Fiber Opt
Jeff Hecht
Jeff Hecht
City of Light
Simone Fari
Victorian
Telegraphy Be...
ANO FELON ON CEINTY COUNSE
Helen Glew
Gender,
Retoric and...
BRITAIN'S SHIELD
RADAR
AND THE DEFEAT OF THE
LUFTWAFFE
PAD ZIMMERMAN
David Zimmerm...
Britain's Shield:
Radar and the...
where wizards
stay up late
THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET
katie hafner
marchew ivon
Katie Hafner, Ma...
Where Wizards
Stay Up Late:...
CAMPBELL-SMIT
MASTERS OF
THE POST
THE ROYAL MAIL
Duncan Campbe...
Masters of the
Post: The Aut...
HELEN
The
]Walls
THave
Ears onom
Helen Fry
The Walls
Have Ears
THE ZIMMERMAN Y
TELEGRAM
Thomas Boghardt
The
Zimmerman T...
MENENSTT
Maria kikihanskowd
THE GLOBAL
WIRELESS
Maria Rikitianska...
The Global
Wireless
NO TRADESMEN
AND NO WOMEN
Tăc Origins ef ibe Britist Civil Service
MICHAEL COOLICAN
Michael Coolican
No Tradesmen
and No Wome...
MAGIC
RAYS
OF LIGHT
A Brief Histor
of the Future
THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET
John Naughton
John Naughton
A Brief History
of the Future
PEGULAN
9 CASE
- of the
ELECTRIC
CONSTABLE
PASSION, FOLSO & PERSUIT
*CAROL BAXTER)
Carol Baxter
The Peculiar
Case of the El...
STAFF RELATIONS IN
THE CIVIL SERVICE
R
Henry Parris
Staff Relations
in the Civil Ser...
John Wyver
Magic Rays of
Light: The earl...
CCODE
LUAL
STATER
PETER
HENNESSY
Peter Hennessy
The Secret
State: Prepari...
GPO STARE N 1916
Stephen Ferguso...
GPO staff
in 1916
JON AGAR
CONSTANT
TOUCH
A Global History of
Jon Agar
Constant Touch
SERVING A
WIRED WORLD
Katie Hindmarch...
Serving a
Wired World:...
PROGRAMMED
INEQUALITY
Mar Hicks
Programmed
Inequality: Ho...
FAXED
The Rise and Fall
of the Fax Machine
Jonathan Coopersmith
Jonathan Coope...
Faxed: The Rise
and Fall of the...
VPN 27% O
##:
THE PROJECTIO V
OF BRITAIN
A HISTORY
OF THE
GPO
FILM UNIT
Etal ly Sutt Antey and Jamu G Manst
Scott Anthony, J...
The Projection
of Britain: A Hi...
toa
INVISIBLE
WEAPON
International Politics
(1851-1945 |
DANIEL/R HEADRICK
Daniel R. Headrick
The Invisible
Weapon
RADIO
WAR
THE SECRET SPIONAGE WAR OF
THE RADIO SECURITY SERVICE
DAVID ABRUTAT
Dr David Abrutat
Radio War: The
Secret Espion...
DENISES
AT WAR
LULU HAU INE
DAWIUR THE DIDITAL ADE
David A. Price
Geniuses at
War: Bletchley...

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 17

Odd, after months of political reporters repeating awed whispers from anonymous Labour figures about the alleged brilliance of Al Carns, to see him spouting nonsense like this. Doesn’t speak very well of anyone’s critical thinking.

alcarns
LABOUR
WAS CHISELLED OUT OF THE MINES
HAMMERED OUT OF THE SHIPYARDS
FORGED IN THE FACTORIES
THAT IS THE TRADITION
I SERVED

James Elder@jameselder· Jun 12

RIP David Hockney

The 1989 Bradford Phone Book with cover art by David Hockney.

James Elder@jameselder· May 31

Nick Higham is good on the corporate structures of water companies.

Corporate structures became fiendishly convoluted, as though designed to maximise
shareholders' freedom of manoeuvre and minimise scrutiny by regulators, investors or journalists.
Shell companies were routinely established, some in offshore tax havens. Until it promised to
improve the simplicity and transparency of its structure, Thames had nine main group companies,
two registered in the Cayman Islands and a number of other subsidiaries, including one in
Guernsey. 1º In 2021, Thames told me that all the companies in the group were now registered in the
UK; an 'abridged version' of its structure listed six holding companies between the ultimate
shareholders and Thames Water Utilities Ltd, the company that actually delivers the water.
Affinity Water, which now owns those three statutory water companies serving the Colne Valley,
Rickmansworth and the Lea, has (at the time of writing) an even more labyrinthine structure and a
similar history of being bought and sold. Today Affinity serves a wide arc round London, from the
south-west to the north-east, along with parts of Essex and a stretch of the Kent coast from Deal to
Dungeness. First, the original three companies merged as Three Valleys Water. Then, in 1987, Three
Valleys was bought by the French multinational Veolia. In 2012 Veolia sold the company, which by
then included several other water companies and had been renamed Affinity. The buyer was an
infrastructure investment consortium led by two leading City institutions, who in turn sold it in
2017 to another consortium of three investors, one German, one Dutch and one British. An
organogram on the company's website shows the three partners jointly control a vehicle called
Daiwater Investment Ltd. From there on, the chart reads like an Old Testament genealogy, with
'owns' in place of the 'begats'.
Daiwater owns Affinity Water Acquisitions (Investments) Ltd, which owns Affinity Water
Acquisitions (HoldCo) Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Acquisitions (MidCo) Ltd, which owns
Affinity Water Acquisitions Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Capital Funds Ltd, which begat six
subsidiaries, one of which, Affinity Water Holdco Finance, owns Affinity Water Holdings Ltd, which
in turn owns the Ofwat-regulated company that actually delivers the water, Affinity Water Ltd.20
You don't have to understand the purpose of this maze of companies to know it has nothing to do
with the efficient delivery of potable water.

James Elder@jameselder· May 21

Have to say, from my viewpoint here in the UK, this all feels a bit...

A screenshot from the episode of The Simpson 'Bart Gets An Elephant'. The scene is the Democratic Convention where banners read 'We hate life and ourselves' and 'We can't govern!'

James Elder@jameselder· May 14

More on Girobank for you Chris.

Radio, one of the first commercial broadcasting stations, set up in 1973.) Dearing did not disguise
his personal disappointment; nor did he really succeed after 1982 in finding a successor to
Walmsley who could offer the Post Office's marketeers the same calibre of leadership. Dearing
always set great store by having people at the top with a vision of what they wanted to achieve, and
this mattered to him. There was, however, another individual whose marketing achievements had
been making a notable difference to the Post Office for a few years, as Dearing had acknowledged
in making him Deputy Chairman in October 1981 - an appointment that also signalled very usefully
the importance of the (relatively small business that he ran. Sam Wainwright was the Managing
Director of the Giro and Remittance Services, which since 1977 he had rejuvenated as the 'National
Girobank'. His leadership had more or less single-handedly transformed a lacklustre money
remittance network with a doubtful future into a fully fledged banking business, with possibly
profound implications for the role of the Post Office in local communities across the country.
Wainwright had been hired by Ryland and had joined the Post Office several months before
Barlow's arrival in 1977. A Whitehall committee had for some months been looking into the
feasibility of merging the Giro operation into the Treasury-controlled National Savings Bank.
Unaware of its existence until after he had accepted the position of Managing Director, Wainwright
was confronted with a report from this committee recommending an amalgamation. He opposed
this vehemently and made clear he was ready to quit immediately unless allowed to expand the
Giro as a self-standing business.S A 52-year-old former financial journalist and successful City
banker, he had accepted a halving of his City salary in order to pursue his own vision of a 'National
Giro' as a popular 'bank for the unbanked'. This made him a forceful protagonist on its behalf, and
the Treasury's report was shelved.* Dearing, who may have had a hand in his appointment in 1977,
backed Wainwright's plans enthusiastically. The two men became close friends, and Dearing spent
much of every Friday at Wainwright's head office in the City's Milk Street, a short walk from St
Martin's. With the Chairman behind him, Wainwright proceeded to assemble - in the face of
constant objections from the Treasury and a series of political rows triggered by vested interests in
the financial services industry - all the moving parts required for a viable commercial bank.
The organization was re-christened, and better agency terms were negotiated with the Post
Office's Counters Department. Retail deposit accounts were inaugurated, followed by the issuance
of certificates of deposit, corporate deposit-taking and a full range of funding activities in the
money markets. Overdraft and personal-loan facilities were developed, along with personal-
insurance products sold by National Girobank as the agent for third-party suppliers. When the
Thatcher government imposed a windfall banking tax in 1981, to recoup some of the profits made
on the back of abnormally high interest rates, Dearing joined with Wainwright to try to persuade
the Government that National Girobank was subtly different from the clearers. Their point was
taken, and ministers agreed to an injection of public funds to compensate for the windfall tax
surrendered. Nonetheless, by the early 1980s National Girobank was a fully subscribed member of
the clearing banks' club, with access to all the standard arrangements for cheque-clearing and
inter-bank payments. It had computerized back offices to match any in the industry, and was one of
the pioneers of free banking, for customers in credit, of credit cards and of ATM machines. (It
collaborated with the Co-Op Bank and two building societies to establish an ATM network called
'Link'.) By 1984-5 what had been a loss-making operation in the 1970s was making almost £20m a
year and a highly respectable return on net assets. Its profits were small in the context of the Post
Office's finances as a whole, but that was not the point. National Girobank was ubiquitous and open

at convenient hours, including Saturday mornings. It provided Post Office customers, especially in
rural areas, with a banking service equal to most of their needs, and it was as trusted as the Post
Office itself. By 1985, it had 1.8 million customer accounts.
4. LESS PEACE, MORE EFFICIENCY
In 1977, when Wainwright had arrived at the office on his first day as Managing Director, he had
almost brought the entire operation to a halt. He vividly recalled stepping out of the lift that
morning and noticing immediately that the hall clock outside his office door was an hour slow. 4 To
the considerable surprise of his new office staff, Wainwright pulled across a chair, stood up to
reach the clock and was about to adjust it when he felt a hand on his shoulder. One of his new
colleagues, better versed in the workplace conventions of the day, warned him in all seriousness
that touching the hands of the clock would be regarded by the POEU as a cause for unofficial
industrial action: no manager could usurp the job of a union member, and adjusting clocks would
unquestionably fall into that category. Word of the clock adjustment would travel fast, and the
Managing Director might have an engineers' strike on his hands before lunchtime. Utterly
bemused, Wainwright ceded the point - and in retirement, could reflect that his colleague had been
absolutely right. Throughout his time as Managing Director, Wainwright had to struggle with
industrial relations crises that more than once seemed to him - justly or otherwise (and he was an
inveterate worrier) - capable of closing down his business altogether. They were especially bad at
Bootle, where the lower grades of the CPSA and SCPS unions were heavily infiltrated with
supporters of the Labour Party's Militant Tendency faction, based in nearby Liverpool. For the
Chairman of the Post Office, however, Wainwright's difficulties were just a small part of the wider
problem.
Dearing did not begin his chairmanship resolving to confront the unions, but he very soon
decided some abrupt change of tack was urgently required. He had watched over Post Office affairs
as a civil servant since 1975, but the power of the Union branch network and its influence on daily
operations had still come as a shock in 1980: 'I hadn't realized the depth, pervasiveness and
strength of it. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission's report on postal operations in Inner
London, commissioned in the summer of 1979, was published just in time for Dearing's move to the
Post Office, and it provided a crash course on a key dimension of the problem.* The central
question addressed by the MMC was simple: why, given a 30 per cent fall in Inner London's mail
volumes over the previous ten years, had its postal workforce shrunk by only 10 per cent? The gist
of the answer was that 28,000 postmen were manning a regime tantamount to 'a state within a
state', where the Post Office's writ scarcely ran at all. Local UPW representatives called the shots,
despite the fact that Inner London comprised the hub of the national postal service. And branch
committees had stymied most attempts to reduce the size of the workforce. Part-timers were still
completely excluded. As for work-measure tools, a boycott at the national level even extended in
London to a total ban on time-clocks. But if local representatives enjoyed such power, what was the
position of the UPW and its Executive Council? Strikingly, the report thought they shared the same
objectives as the Post Office's management. Unfortunately, given the paramount importance of the
Union's Annual Conference and the constitutional right of branch officials to second-guess every
policy at the point of implementation, the Union had no ability to deliver its side of any significant
agreement. In the Post Office itself, the report identified many individual failings - including a

James Elder@jameselder· May 8

He’s been a Councillor for a long, long time (and his ward begins on the other side of the road from my flat). I can’t remember if he was ever in the Borough Cabinet when he was a Conservative - I think so? When I bought his local history book he delivered it in person!

A book:

THE STORY OF A COUNCIL WARD WEST HILL AND WIMBLEDON PARK SIDE
BY MALCOLM GRIMSTON

James Elder@jameselder· May 6

The section of Duncan Campbell-Smith’s ‘Masters of the Post’ on Tony Benn’s time as Postmaster General is fascinating and at times hilarious. He really was, for good and ill, quite something.

In reality, he was a man fired with creativity and imagination, but was no executive. He had a
dozen ideas before breakfast on an average day, and the resulting lists that descended on German
and his team soon came to be dreaded. Some were substantial proposals. Benn was especially keen
on the idea of using postmen and post offices for additional non-postal services: he wondered why
post office counters had not been used, for example, as the basis of a money remittance system
along the lines of the Giro banking networks familiar in many European countries. Always
fascinated by new technology, he suggested post offices might run computer facilities which could
be rented out by the hour to small businesses. And perhaps some post offices could be used to
house mini art galleries. The Solicitor's Department initially baulked at the whole idea of straying
beyond the traditional activities of the Post Office, but eventually retreated. Benn was confident of
his ground by July 1965 and happy to tease the lawyers: 'I even said I thought that if we caught fish
from our cable ships and sold them in post offices there could be no objections'.!' He stopped short
of this, but regularly pushed the notion that postmen might work in harness with the social
services: each postman might be equipped, he thought, 'with a guide to local social services which
he would be able to use if asked for advice by the people whose homes he served and who might
need help. Nothing came of it in the end. Allowing mail vans to provide local transport in remote
areas of the country was another of his proposals, and fell on more fertile ground.* Most notes for
the attention of his officials, though, were more interrogatory. In his first twelve months, Benn sent
the Director General more than a hundred minutes - many of them aimed at the 'continuing and
probing review' of the Department's work that had been foreshadowed in Labour's election
manifesto. Detailed questions and requests for information rained down on the staff at every level,
while the PMG himself scurried from one initiative to another at a pace that his officials could only
try to view with a wry detachment. (As one of them, Tilling's successor in the private office, would
recall twenty-five years later: 'Sir Ronald German would come in after an ample lunch, sink into an
armchair... and say, "What has that young man been up to today?" 13) Some of Benn's innovations

James Elder@jameselder· May 4

Finally finished the BookNook.

A diorama of a train compartment on a bookshelf.

Close up of a detailed train compartment diorama.

James Elder@jameselder· May 2

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/02/britain-pioneered-comfortable-retirement-golden-age-end?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other This is wrong isn’t it? IIRC state-funded universal old-age pensions began in Germany under Bismarck?

Britain was the first country to pioneer an old age pension, funded by the state and targeting the poorest, who could claim it from the age of 70. But it was only after the second world war that a period of leisured old age become an ordinary expectation for most British workers.

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 26

Is that Princess Margaret on the left? The man is oarsman and coach Julius Beresford.

A man in a suit and a woman in a fur coat.

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 25

So, with the use of the last of the book tokens, my 50th Birthday book haul is now complete.

ON FRIENDSHIP - ANDREW O’HAGAN
LOUDER AND FUNNIER - PG WODEHOUSE
AT HOME - BILL BRYSON
THE BEATLES 101 - VIKKI REILLY
STAYING ALIVE REAL POEMS FOR UNREAL TIMES - EDITED BY NEIL ASTLEY
THE BLOODAXE BOOK OF 20TH CENTURY POETRY - EDITED BY
EDNA LONGLEY
WHY IS DOWNING STREET PANTED BLACK? - JONNIE FIELDING
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE - DOUGLAS ADAMS
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY - DOUGLAS ADAMS
"THE COMMONERS" - NICK MANNING
A MAN ON THE MOON
The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts - ANDREW CHAIKIN
SOUTH BANK ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN - DOMINIC BRADBURY
The 1990s - HENRY CARROLL

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 24

Rebought your book (in ebook form this time) for the office recently.

Scott Anthony, James C. Mansell
The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit
Simone Fari
Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization
Duncan Campbell-Smith
Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail
Michael Coolican
No Tradesmen and No Women
Carol Baxter
The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable
Katie Hindmarch-Watson
Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital

Daniel R. Headrick
The Invisible Weapon
Helen Glew
Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation
Helen Fry
The Walls Have Ears
John Wyver
Magic Rays of Light: The early years of television in Britain
Henry Parris
Staff Relations in the Civil Service: Fifty Years of Whitleyism
Mar Hicks
Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

Dr David Abrutat
Radio War: The Secret Espionage War of the Radio Security Service 1938-1946
David Zimmerman
Britain's Shield: Radar and the defeat of the Luftwaffe
Thomas Boghardt
The Zimmerman Telegram
Peter Hennessy
The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010
Stephen Ferguson
GPO staff in 1916
Jonathan Coopersmith
Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 17

From ‘Masters of the Post: the Authorized History of the Royal Mail’ which I happen to be reading for work.

locations was practically impossible thereafter for large numbers of men deployed in about 120
mobile columns, tracking down Boer guerrilla forces across a vast area. This was not a style of
warfare conducive to postal efficiency, but the verdict at the end of hostilities in far-off South Africa
was nevertheless that the Army Post Office Corps had more than proved its mettle. Given a combat
zone with clearer front lines and shorter lines of communication, the capacity of the Post Office
and the War Office together to bring mails to the brink of the battlefield could hardly now be
doubted.
The partnership arrangement was restructured in the years that followed. A fundamental
reorganization of the army in the years after 1906 ('the Haldane reforms') included the setting up of
a Territorial 'Army Postal Service'. After some years of confusion, this emerged as REPS.*
Responsibility for REPS was handed to a Territorial officer, tasked with organizing a mobilization
plan: the postmen reserves, in Royal Engineer uniforms and subject to full military discipline,
would need assigning to all divisions of the regular army in the event of war. (The 24th Middlesex
was meanwhile transformed into the Post Office Rifles, which remained quite separate.) The man
appointed as the first 'Director of Army Postal Services' was William Price, who was given a full
establishment of 300 officers and men - enough, it was reckoned in 1913, for the six divisions of
any Expeditionary Force likely to be sent overseas. Price himself would be attached to the Army's
Inspector-General of Communications and would report to the Quartermaster General. Here at last
was a structure that looked equal to the demands of the hybrid concept. By the time those first REPS
men set off with the BEF in August 1914, confidence in its effectiveness was high.!
Two nasty shocks followed, much as they had done in South Africa - and identical in nature. The
scale of the action had been badly underestimated, quickly leaving Price with far too few men. This
problem, though, was soon redressed: several hundred more were recruited in haste from the
ranks of the POR battalion (a return, ironically, to the model left behind with the 24th Middlesex),
so trebling the size of the REPS force in France. The second early crisis sprang from the speed of the
enemy's advance in the opening weeks of the war. The Germans' push for Paris engulfed several of
the first postal facilities, established in and around Amiens; no sooner had others been set up than
they had to be hurriedly abandoned, and thousands of bags of mail were hastily shuttled back from
the front lines by train, lorry and rented boats ever further to the west, ending in near chaos at the
port of Nantes on France's west coast.13
Once the Germans' Schlieffen Plan had failed to win an abrupt victory, a very different prospect
opened up. The static warfare of the trenches - whatever its horrors in every other respect - posed
the kind of logistical challenges that were meat and drink to the men from the Post Office. The
BEF's layout, while embracing ever more army divisions, could in effect be treated as stationary
from the Channel to the front line. Of course, individual units were still shuttled regularly between
different locations, but most of those locations themselves remained as fixed as London suburbs.
After some initial months of trial and error, REPS built a delivery system to match. By the onset of
the winter in 1914, it had raised its force from 900 to 1,500 to cope with a huge increase in the mails
for Christmas. The result, amid the grimness of the Western Front, often verged on the bizarre.
Letters were usually reaching addressees in the trenches on the second day after being posted, and
London newspapers (also sent over in great numbers) were being widely distributed within a day
or two of their publication. As one officer confided to his diary on 30 December 1914: 'I got three
letters posted in Ireland on the 26th and in England on the 28th, this afternoon, so letters are
reaching us as quickly as if there were no war. It's really rather wonderful. "4

2. POSTAL SUBURBIA ON THE WESTERN FRONT
To say that postal services on the Western Front marked the high-water mark of the Victorian Post
Office might be stretching a point - but not by much. The REPS contingents working with the BEF,
though they grew steadily through 1914-15, never numbered in total more than a few thousand
men. (The numbers recruited into the Signals Service, and later the Royal Flying Corps, were much
greater from the start: telephones on the Western Front relied on the work of some 19,000 men
from the GPO.'5) Yet this modest postal force was able to impose order on a vast network of
interwoven roads and railways that linked London and the Channel ports with up to five army
groups, each of them roughly representing the needs of a provincial city the size of Southampton.
Losses of mail due to accidents or enemy action were extremely rare. Of course, the task
demanded courage and initiative in the ranks far beyond anything normally expected of peacetime
sorters and postmen. But it was also achieved on the back of traditional strengths that made the
GPO a natural partner for the Army - harnessing the meticulous attention to detail, the strong
internal disciplines and the by-the-book culture that were all so central to the Victorian postal
legacy.
Plainly, outward mail could not be sent directly to a serving soldier or sailor using any normal
address. The Post Office issued a series of notices advising the public on how to address letters to
men at the front. Only the details of the addressee's fighting unit could be used, and all letters for
the British Expeditionary Force were then diverted by the Post Office to a clearing centre where
they could be sorted for onward despatch. This was 'Home Depot', an operation that came
eventually to employ 2,500 staff. It also handled inward mail from serving men and trained around
5,500 recruits, who went off to join the swelling ranks of REPS men serving in France and other
overseas postings. The Depot was under the nominal command of the Army and employed many
uniformed men, but it was controlled by the GPO: it was run by the pre-war postmaster of the
capital's WC district, now installed with the pay and allowances of a REPS captain.! It began life
scattered among different buildings, but by the end of 1915 had been pulled together in a vast hut
erected across five acres of Regent's Park, reputedly the largest wooden edifice in the world. A
fleet of 220 three-ton army lorries was eventually kept busy ferrying mailbags to and from the
trains which linked London to Folkestone and Southampton. Several steamers a day left these ports
for 'Base Post Offices' in Boulogne/Calais and Le Havre respectively, where formal responsibility for
the mails passed from the GPO to the British army. Most outward bags were loaded onto trains that
plied back and forth across Picardy under cover of darkness, some of them to be dropped at
stationary 'Army Post Offices' along the way, linked to the Lines of Communication, or at large troop
placements (such as labour battalions or artillery placements) that were a semi-permanent fixture.
The remainder went on as far as the railheads that serviced 'supply trains' to individual divisions;
every railhead eventually had its own post office, running a branch network between the railhead
and the trenches. The mails usually left the railhead in special REPS lorries, which took them to the
spots designated for the collection of all divisional supplies, known as 'refilling points'. Here they
were taken up by the Brigade HQs. The final stage of their journey was described in an article in the
St Martin's-le-Grand Magazine of July 1915 by 'F.H.W. - the newly appointed head of REPS on the
Home Front, Frederic Williamson, just back from an initial tour of the lines to see for himself how
things worked:

At some pre-arranged point, the regimental post orderlies drive down [to meet the motor lorries from their
Brigade HQI to receive their mails. The mails are stacked and sorted by the roadside; the long line of carts
comes up, each in turn to receive its quota of the mails from home; and each orderly then clatters off with
his letters and parcels, which he carries to his comrades right up to the firing line.19
It was normal practice in the trenches for each day's post to be handed out with the evening meal
by ration parties. These would also collect the men's letters and postcards for home, which - unlike
in the Boer War - could be posted without charge. They were generally first collected together at
'Field Post Offices' - large black steel boxes, usually sporting a pole with a distinctive red and white
striped flag, which were relocated from time to time as the need arose. Most FPOs had all the kit to
provide a good range of the usual counter services available from a village post office in England,
from the sending of registered letters to the buying and cashing of postal orders; after the summer
of 1915, they even sold war savings certificates and war loans. Letters were stamped with a field
postmark, from January 1915, showing the date and an APO or FPO number (and making rich
pickings for collectors in decades to come). Then the postmarked letters were sent up the line via
the Divisional Railhead Post Office and Base Post Office for the return journey to Home Depot.2°
Four years after the war was over, the British Army made a thorough study of the Field Postal
Service that had been used by the Kaiser's army. It had been substantially bigger, and had delivered
about four times as many bags of mail each month. The resulting 200-page report nonetheless
compared it unfavourably with REPS on many counts. It concluded without any reservation at all
that there was little of value to learn from the German experience'. " For all their prowess in many
dimensions of military planning, and despite their experience of three nineteenth-century wars of
their own, the Germans seemed to the authors of the report to have spent the second half of the
war constantly reorganizing their posts and scrambling to copy a British model that had endured to
the end and proved significantly more efficient. It was a proud boast - but not an empty one. Of
course, the division of responsibilities between REPS and the Post Office did evolve over time, and
developed in some ways that were not remotely foreseen at the outbreak of the war. The
Postmaster General, for example, agreed to answer in Parliament for the whole operation. This had
not been anticipated, but seemed sensible given that the GPO not only provided many of its
personnel but also made all of the transport arrangements as far as overseas Base Post Offices." In
general, though, the structure laid down by the end of 1915 needed few substantial changes. And
through the remainder of the war on the Western Front - leaving aside the temporary crises
precipitated by the Germans' spring offensive in 1918 and the final Allied counter-attack - it
expanded steadily without serious mishap.
The critical importance of letters to the morale of the troops was acknowledged from the outset:
as everyone agreed, letters came close behind food, leave and suitable clothes, and the press wasted
no opportunity to remind readers of this truth. At an early stage in the war, one of the London
papers published a letter from a soldier in the trenches saying he was lonely and would appreciate
a letter. In the ensuing weeks, he reportedly received 3,000 letters, ninety-eight large parcels and
three mailbags of smaller ones? But even the Post Office was taken aback by the vertiginous
growth of the three main categories of outward-bound post to the Western Front.4 (See Appendix
A, Chart 4.) The Christmas peaks were scarcely less impressive than the growth from one year to
the next: not far short of 5 million parcels went to France in the month before Christmas, 1916.
Supplies of tobacco and cigarettes - given duty-free status by the French from the start - remained
a staple item at all times of the year. (Matches to light them with were a more complicated matter.

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 11

Have you read MacAskill’s Longtermism book? I may be repeating myself but I was not impressed with it.

There was an almost complete lack of awareness of how the world works now and how improvements might positively impact on the problems MacAskill worries about. For example, he worries about future technological stagnation.
Surely, one way to tackle this would be to try to achieve greater levels of social and economic equality, increased access to education, better equality in the workplace etc so that more people get the opportunity to realise their potential?
Overall there was a marked naiveté, coupled with tunnel vision, about the realities of life for people outside his own circle of philosophers (and perhaps also tech billionaires). The section towards the end of the book about how to choose one's career to maximise its longtermist impact for good seemed particularly unmoored.
How many people, in the current economy have the luxury of being able to choose their career according to these lofty ideals, to frequently return to education, and to periodically change direction? It might be possible for some - but for those with dependants and no financial safety net it's a pipe dream.

I also lost confidence in the book early on when he made a statement about something I know about from my own career. In the context of talking about Al he says:
"In Chapter 1 we saw that Shakespeare and Horace really might have achieved immortality through their poetry. Information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny. But software is just complex information. It can be replicated easily. For example, one of the first commercially available computer games was Pong by Atari, released in 1977. You can still play it today online. Though eventually all original Atari consoles will rust and crumble, Pong will live on. The software that defines Pong is replicable, and if every future generation is willing to pay the tiny cost of replicating this little piece of history, it will continue to persist. Pong could last as long as civilisation does.

This statement tacitly assumes that:
- All information is held digitally.
- All digital information can easily be copied.
- If a copy of some digital information exists, it can be accessed and read.
- All of the above is vanishingly cheap to achieve.
MacAskill additionally assumes that this is true not only for information but for software.
Not a single one of those assumptions is accurate, as anyone involved in archives, libraries or conservation of analogue or digital
information objects could tell you. Preservation of information, whether in the form of manuscript paper records, newsprint, cellulose acetate film, magnetic tape, unstructured collections of digital files, structured databases, websites or software takes time, expertise and money on an ongoing basis.

In my view, two of the bad characteristics of some of the intellectual groups with which Will MacAskill is somewhat associated are 1) a tendency to be naive or ignorant about factors involving economic, social and political imbalances, and 2) a tendency to be dismissive, ignorant and blasé about fields of expertise that aren't core to their interest. Possibly I'm being unfair but I think those faults are how MacAskill can end up with a statement so freighted with error as "information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny."

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 8

Realised in decluttering my desk that I still have a copy of this (arrived in a transfer a few years ago; not produced by us so not accessioned). Thank goodness all of this is ancient history eh? 😐

PROTECT AND SURVIVE
This booklet tells you how to make your home and your family as safe a possible under nuclear attack

James Elder@jameselder· Apr 3

Very pleased to announce that BT Group Archives and UCL Department of Information Studies have a fully-funded PhD on offer. It's a really exciting one: to investigate how new computational methods can be used to get the most out of a digitised audiovisual collection. www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 31

Suddenly reminded of Ernie Bevin's words about the British atom bomb.

That won't do at all .. we've got to have this .. I don't mind for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs .. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.

Remarks at Cabinet Committee GEN75 (25 October 1946), about the development of the British atomic bomb, quoted in Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb (2007), p. 48

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 29

This remains one of my favourite bits of harmless trolling.

A railway station sign which reads:

Welcome to Cambridge
Home of Anglia Ruskin University

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 28

The UL - a powerhouse of knowledge and a building I love.

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 28

I see that the Cambridge History Faculty building and Seeley Library - designed by James Stirling, beloved by architects, Grade 2* listed but with a hell of a lot of problems for day-to-day users - is being refurbished. Hope it works better for the history students of the future.

Sign for the Stirling Building Refurbishment

Sign reading Welcome to Project Stirling

Sign reading Stirling Historical Library Community Notice Board

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 26

Found it:

Children were a special category too – at least until they left
school. Babies, children and adolescents received virtually the same
rations as adults, though with no tea for the under-fives and half the
meat ration for children under six, and they were also entitled to
extra foods like milk and eggs that were necessary for healthy
growth. Babies between six and eighteen months were allocated
three eggs a week, when older children and adults were lucky to get
one. Children under five were entitled to 7 pints of subsidised or free
milk a week, and from 1942 such children were entitled to
subsidised or free orange juice and cod liver oil. With the exigencies
of evacuation and rationing, school meals lost the stigma of poverty
that they had had before the war, and every child received a third of
a pint of milk a day at school at a subsidised cost or free, plus an
extra 3½ pints at home. During the war working-class children from
industrial towns and cities were drinking as much milk as children
from higher-income groups had in the 1930s. After the war, the
Labour Party was able to point to the contrast between the 1940s
and the 1930s and claimed ‘in spite of shortages, the children are
rosy cheeked, well clothed . . . They are taller, heavier and healthier
than before the war’ and, though again this was part of a longerterm trend, infant mortality rates for England and Wales fell from 51
per thousand in 1939 to 46 in 1945 – but environmental factors for
the poorest continued to militate against the gains of ‘fair share’
rations.

James Elder@jameselder· Mar 8

@illuminations.bsky.social Found this while sorting through photos at my rowing club and thought it might interest you!