Martin Henry

How would you like to receive your mail six weeks after dispatch, minimum? Assuming that you still bother with snail mail at all. There have been horror stories of mail, in the bad old days, taking weeks to just cross Kingston. But perhaps the record of delayed delivery goes to the letter of the World War I British soldier, whose letter to his sweetheart was only delivered to relatives last year.

Last week the postal service released a commemorative stamp to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Kern Spencer, Minister of State in the Ministry of Industry, Technology, Energy and Commerce, under which the Jamaica Postal Corporation falls, said the stamp was released in memory of our ancestors.

None of our African slave ancestors would, of course, get any mail. So it must be the European owners' ancestors.

Communication

One of the problems that the European over the seas empires faced was communication. Older overland empires had developed all kinds of means from fast runners and horse riders to smoke and drum signals from hill tops to convey messages quickly. The Persian Empire used shouters with stentorian voices to bellow messages from hill top to hill top.

A couple of years ago when our domestic telegraph service was closed by Cable and Wireless, since it was no longer viable, a team of three researchers from the University of Technology undertook to document the history of telegraphy in Jamaica, which, of course, took us back to postal services. The team consisted of then President Rae Davis, Martin MacLeavy from the telecommuni-cations division of the school of engineering, and myself. The telegraph was deliberately developed, using the new knowledge of electricity, in the 1830s/1840s to speed up message transmission. We'll discuss that another time.

The first attempt on record to organise a formal mail service between Britain and her West Indian colonies was undertaken by Edmund Dummer, surveyor-general of the British Navy. The service started in October 1702. Before that letter senders would simply have to find a ship captain going in the direction of their message.

Dummer obtained royal permis-sion to operate four vessels "which are designed to succeed each other" and whose "motions are determined to be very quick, because thereon lies the chief fruit that is to be reaped". Dummer's 'quick' meant a best time of 88 days round trip! A similar service between New York and Britain was established only a year after the West Indian service. Losses from storms at sea and the loss of ships from enemy action during the war of the Spanish Succession made Dummer's mail business unprofitable and the service was closed in 1711.

Jamaica was the first British colony to establish a postal service as a branch of the British Postal Service when the first post office was opened in the capital, Spanish Town, on October 31, 1671. The postal service remained an extension of the British Postal Service for the next 189 years until 1860 when an independent Jamaica Postal Service, issuing its own stamps and managing its own affairs, started operation on Emancipation Day, August 1. At the time there were only 49 post offices serving the island.

Photo stories

One of the major accomplishments of successive governments since internal self-government with universal adult suffrage in 1944 has been the saturation of Jamaica with post offices and postal agencies. The Gleaner up into the 1960s frequently ran photo stories of post office ministers opening yet another one. The post office became as ubiquitous as the elementary school, the most visible presence of the state in the community in the nooks and crannies of Jamaica. Hurricane warnings were issued from post offices before radio saturation made that mode more useful.

With the massive revolution in information and communications technologies which have dramatically speeded up and cheapened the transmission of messages, postal services all over the world are struggling to survive and have been forced to diversify services. Like the telegraph service, which became a mainstay of the post office, the traditional post office is fast disappearing. It would be interesting to see how many of the abolition bicentennial stamps sell compared to, say, Independence stamps. It certainly is going to be very interesting to see what the 21st century post office becomes.