Greene guile Sir : I do not at all approve
of Mr Auber°r) Waugh's suggestion of attacking the Ms° Ryland by putting firecrackers in letterboxes. Not only does this smack of viole0ce. but it will help Ryland in his Plan t° deliver as few letters as possible at the highest cost. Our object should be t° bankrupt the Post Office, so that it maY be taken over quite cheaply by some efficien! business organisation—say, Marks a° Spencers. My plan is very simple and costs Prae,ti‘ cally nothing. Let 10,000 readers of tile Spectator (as a beginning only) niedg,e themselves to post one letter a week tO friend in an empty unstamped enveloPe; first warning the friend to refuse delivery the surcharged envelope, and to reply by one similar letter a week. Any urgent message can be conveyed on the flap of the enveloPe: 'Aunt Helen seriously ill'. 'Off to Lyill Regis with the children for a fortnight'. I the postman is inquisitive and catches reading the flap, there are plenty of reason' for refusing the letter and the surcharge. 'Don't know these people from Adatili Mine's a very common name', 'Oh Yes' know the writer only too well. Been Pester; ing me for years. I've warned her she Os write only through my solicitors'. 20,000 letters a week-140,000 letters 3 year, 140,000 surcharge stamps, 1413.°°2d letters returned to be dealt with by the Pe" Letter Office—but of course that's onlY a be: ginning. Let the idea catch on, and le' 100,000 people adopt my method of CO munication, and you have, at no cost to arlYa one but the Post Office, nearly a million et,14 a half letters a year trundling to and fro. 1 (-,',11
course sooner or later the man Ryland W1_, get a Bill passed through Parliament for
bidding any words being written on the flap of an envelope. Well, that Bill will cost a Pretty Penny, and while it is being read three times in the Commons and passing through the House of Lords, there is plenty of time to circulate an agreed code of signals. The missPe. Illog of a name will mean something, the misspelling of an address something else, besides more work for the Post Office.
, My dream begins with 10,000 readers of
Spectator but if the snowball rolls and we have a million letter writers and their friends—then more than a hundred million letters will have to be delivered and serviced and returned in the course of a year with ,UnbOdY contributing a penny to the cost. I uegin to be sorry for the man Ryland. l'aharrl Greene Antibes
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