A Post About Post

I recently listed a few of the abundant, high quality crop of novels published in 1932. 1847 wasn’t so dusty either: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair and The Macdermots of Ballycloran were all published. You haven’t heard of The Macdermots? Nor me until now.

It is Anthony Trollope’s first novel, published when he was living in Ireland and working for the Post Office. Forty-six more were to follow, including Hatchards favourite, The Warden. You might have expected him to relinquish his day job with such a prodigious output but in fact he remained working for the Post Office for another nineteen years until 1866, when he retired aged fifty-one.

He did not invent post boxes, although hitherto I thought he did. He saw letter boxes at the side of roads in France and Belgium and recommended that they be used in the Channel Islands. A year later, in 1853, one was installed in Carlisle and two years later they were introduced in London at five sites: Fleet Street, The Strand, Pall Mall, Piccadilly and Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge. The last breaks the Monopoly sequence, though it beats me why Knightsbridge isn’t on the Monopoly board. The history of post boxes is absolutely fascinating if you’re that sort of person, if you’re not, we’ll move on, after having a glance at the one in Rutland Gate today.

Dr Zhivago is on general release in its fullest version. The overture is almost five minutes and is played to a blank screen. Several people got up to complain that the projector had broken when I saw it at the Curzon, Bloomsbury.  The music is composed by Maurice Jarre, the script by Robert Bolt, and you know the director and cast. A couple of years previously, they both did the same jobs on Lawrence of Arabia for David Lean. As the water gushed from the hydro-electric dam at the end of the film more than a few of my tears fell. It’s a cliché to say that they don’t make them like that any more – but it’s true in this case.