Night Mail (1936) UNABRIDGED FULL DOCUMENTARY
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- ARCHIVAL REUPLOAD
At long last, the famous and beloved classic is finally here! Until now, only remixes of the rap from the end were on YT, so I took it upon myself to upload the full 23-minute film.
It seens the reason it wasn't ever uploaded was because although it's clearly in the public domain, some copyright troll tried to put it in Content ID, so I had to dispute their claim.
File source: archive.org/de...
More info: en.wikipedia.o... - เกม
I've had a great idea for a scene in an adventure movie. The main characters need to get somewhere with a strict deadline, so they hitch a ride on a TPO. The sorters all chant Auden's lines as they work, and they even let the protagonist swing the mailbag out.
it wouldnt work.
A pioneering documentary that introduced us to Auden, Britten and Britain's earliest Rapper!
👍🤣
Here, in Australia, it was known as the Traveling Post Office.
TPO services ceased operations here on the 19th September 1975.
I worked for the Post Office back in the late 1960's - early 1970's. I can still recall dropping off and picking up mail bags at the local railway station.
There is a railway museum near where Iive. There is a TPO rail carriage in their collection.
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).
A marvellous glimpse into a time before, when things still worked properly and people were dedicated to their communities... Thank you for uploading this.
Royal Mail is now being turned into a Gig Economy job with brutal attacks on the terms and conditions of postal workers, the race to the bottom has begun 😢
@@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
As a viewer from across the pond I found this fascinating and someways very moving. A time that seems long past and yet not really all that long ago but my the changes we have seen in that time!!
"...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
A classic indeed! I believe the production team had used up most of their budget and so employed two students, W.H.Auden and Benjamin Britten, to write the poem and the music. The poem, Night Mail, is an absolute gem using the ryythm of the wheels and appears in many anthologies. I remember being taught it at school. The film also broke new ground in that it allowed working men to speak unscripted. It may sound stilted to modern ears but this was pioneering stuff! Add to this the superb footage of a railway system that has faded into history and you have a wonderful record of times past.
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 .........
Thanks for uploading a classic. I often think about the massive changes, that was just around the corner in 3 years from when this film was made. How many of the people that are in this film were alive in 1945. Remember, the past generations
Isn't it amazing the mail back then was probably quicker than it is today
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.
Amazing. Everything is working so well, and not a bloody computer in sight!
That's why everything was working well 🙄
Nope see earlier post. Paper and pencil or chalk and using ones brain. Unlike today?
This was just fantastic. What a great system The Royal Mail had to get that mail out, sorted and delivered on time. You could tell one of the bosses was pissed that there would be a four-minute delay. Four minutes!
Four mins was a bit late in those days , unlike today 😂
Once upon a time when steam was still king of the rails!
Stil is.
Those like me who remember the "clanking" one heard as a locomotive moved along, wonder at how Britten captured this in his music. The poem by W H Auden has that wonderful line "tugs whooping down a glade of cranes". The tug whistles you heard where always a series of "Whoops". Sadly we'll never hear them again, so my memory will die with me. Then there is that wonderful final line - "for who can bear to feel themselves forgotten"
I first saw this film in about 1954 at a Saturday cinema for children where I lived with my family in Tadley, where the estate for the Aldermaston atomic weapons establishment was set up in 1951.
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.
Just love this documentary and years ago searched the tube for it, got different versions but not the real one, thanks for posting it
Although there's hardly any left now mail trains use to come under class 1 head codes when I worked on the railways.Class 1 is fast passenger and mail with class 2 being slow passenger.Although class 9, which was added for Eurostars,was later used for fast passenger too.0,3, 4,5,6,7 and 8 were light engine, empty stock,civil engineering and various speed of freight.
Born just as the microprocessor took over the World (1978), I can't help but feel that we've been _cheated_ out of opportunities to develop our _brains_ and our _character._
Don't get me wrong: I don't yearn for "good old days" that never were...I simply feel that people need to feel useful, and that having actual _tasks_ to perform leads to a better state of mind, a sharper intellect and a sense of purpose.
When everything is automated and knowledge is at one's fingertips at all times one becomes flabby and lethargic in mind and body...critical thinking suffers...one is beholden to computers.
It may behoove us to study the recent past for an insight into a stronger future.
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
Learned the poem as school nearly seventy years ago, I can still remember it word for word but cannot recite it at the required speed towards the end.
Well done ! A real classic.
Forever in our hearts and minds.
Decopunk 1927, you beauty! Where did you dig this one out from? I happened to watch this one as a graduate student in mid 1970s in India as part of the topic Documentary in a Film Appreciation Course. The smoke of the rattling track sound trying to match the cadence of Auden haunted me till now when I accidentally bumped into your TH-cam channel. This is a documentary that set the gold standard in documentary making together with two or three legendary docus in cinematic history. Basil Wright and Harry Watts are legends to all those who know a bit of history and aesthetic of cinema. Perhaps Auden penned his Night Mail for this documentary. How difficult will it be for the present generation to understand the Mail system, and of course WH Auden!
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.
It is also available on the 'internet archive' and I downloaded a perfect copy earlier in the year. There are many other items and videos of great interest, so take note. I suspected copyright for this old documentary but the BBC are still blocking good documentaries for no good reason. This documentary was available until a year ago on TH-cam and I downloaded it but they took it off again. Happy viewing.
Peter
North London
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.
Thank you so much for posting this complete version of Night Mail. Such an insight into 'the mail must always get through'. It is definitely worth watching John Grierson's other brilliant film Drifters, as well.
The GPO Film Unit could not afford to record live sound on film. All the dialogue in exterior locations is 'wild' and post-synced, which is why speakers are mostly in long shot, facing away from the camera or with hands concealing their mouths. The sequence of sorting on the TPO was recreated in the studio, though.
Really love this stuff, and the print is just excellent!
Hard workers..... and efficient! Can we find any workers like that today?
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
Also love the earliest rap song I am aware of at 20:00.
Rossini wrote a rap section in the Marriage of Figaro in 1816! It is part of the aria, "Largo al Factotum" (Cavatina)
This was wonderful. Thank you.
How could Hitler ever imagine he could defeat that sort of efficiency!
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.
THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!🎉✅🏆🥇🎖️
The days when things worked as they should - and men worked as they should and a letter would arrive after the day it was posted. What went wrong?
Wow thank you very much for this upload.
The loss of life must have been immense without Hi-vis clothing.
What a wonderful reminder of days gone by. A world that no longer exists. I have seen before many, many years ago and enjoyed another look, there is always different that catches the eye, the supervisor in his 3 piece suit, the caps worn by every member of the track work gang, even the young men looked old unlike today, the pit head wheels in action as the train sped by,smoking chimneys and much more.
The GPO Film Unit was based in a former Victorian school at the end of Blackheath Grove in South East London. The building had a small assembly hall just big enough for them to build a mock up of the sorting carriage interior, loaded on a spring base.
By the time of the Second World War, the unit was repurposed as the Crown Film Unit and became a producer of public information films to support the war effort. There was a real sense of poetry to these films.
The modern Post Office version:
Horizon's on and working fine, the balance is wrong so it's a crime. Ten thousand daily is short by plenty, (not sure how in a village of twenty). Can't make it match with a calculator so chuck 'em in the clink and we'll sort it later. Okay, some died, but it's not our loss, and I've got me bonus, so I don't give a toss. OH NO an enquiry in December! What a stroke of luck that I can't remember.
Now that there's such little mail left
Spotters of these trains are bereft
Spotters of the locos,
Spotters of the carriages,
Spotters of the white fluffy bottoms of the hares, I guess.
Most have faded,
More have gone.
Please come back, you did nothing wrong!
Thank you for up loading this film bring back good memories of working on the dowm TPO from Eusten in the late 80s .Had to train at the mount for 6 mouths
Same i was at KEB St Pauls. Trained at Old Street. 500 cards into the frame with a very small percentage allowed for error. Loved being a postman in late 80s London. learnt every street EC1 to EC4 /City of London.
A wonderful and captivating film about mail on the railroad in England ! A very well done film !!
Fascinating piece of history. I had never seen it all the way through before. Interesting that only a tiny part of it towards the end is the W H Auden poetry which is all that is usually seen when Night Mail is featured in other documentaries.
Super! Is that a track pan @3:15, also visible a few seconds earlier with the track gang. Very enjoyable film.
Thanks for this educational nostalgia - wonderful ‼️👍👍✔💯
This is great!
Now i know what happened to my crystal cut vase i ordered...it's half over Carnforth lol
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...
Good to see this video back. I had watched it a couple of times and then it vanished. Now from the description I know the reason.
Indian Railways too had a similar system RMS (Railway Mail Service) , with a similar purpose and postal crew doing the sorting during the run etc. This system now is abandoned.
Love the scene of the mail pickup and drop at speed. Characters indeed.
What a great documentary! I remember seeing this in Film School back in '78.
I worked for the GPO and then royal mail for over 30 years but could never get on the TPO's and was there when they were stopped and the mail service in this country has gone downhill since, soon to hit rock bottom!!!!!!!
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..
So, how do those heavy leather bags get back to where they came from? Amazing that postage on 500 million pieces of mail could pay for all those workers, supplies, the train. Government subsidized?
Presumedly they'd fill the mailbag with the outgoing mail and put it back on the hook the next day
I love this movie, it’s a wonderful memory of how the steam days of the mail train were before times take place, it would be wonderful to see the steam mail train back in service again, with permission granted that is
In just under 90 years we have gone from this to the recent scandals in the Post Office. I’m lucky I started work when the Pension scheme included the Post Office, Civil Service and the Telephones BT . But within a few years all new starters were forced into a new PRODUCT that is completely useless!
Loved it, thanks
Thank you for posting this.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be inside a TPO vehicle when a bag came in.
Well done, sir-- that was enjoyable. I suppose we had a mail carriage at least for the NZ Post Office, but never seen hide nor hair of one preserved.
I remember in 1962,, being in Form 2 /Yr 8 then, that on about the third page of our "Poems of Spirit and Action" there was most if not all of the poem.
I've had this on DVD fantastic film thank you
Has anyone mentioned the band Public Service Broadcasting who made a cool song out of this? ‘Night Mail’
Magnificent. Still a wonderful insight into rail and the mail.
Great movie
GPO Films at their very best.
Brilliant!
Those royal scots (pural because it must have been a collection of shots of various trains), were in fine form pulling that postal train.
That was great!
Fascinating. All those wonderful jobs. Certainly a past era.
Thank you.
This is awesome😂
Wish I could time travel back to the 1930’s
THe 80s would do me chap.?
All I get for mail... is junk! No rush.
The United States Post Office did the same type of on-board mail sorting in Post Office cars attached to scheduled passenger trains but I don’t think the USPO ever chartered a whole train.
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.
I loved the rap toward the end!
Wow people were much more friendly and hard workers, now everyone doesn’t care about there job, except a few people.
Attempting to compare this to our current system leaves me somewhat speechless....
I always think how old some of these people look. They must have been hard days.
A simpler more understandable world. Far from the chaos of today. We had less worldly goods but I still yearn for that time. I was born in 1939 so I remember how it was. Happy times in spite of what young people may now see as hardship and deprivation .
Beautiful
Amazing! Very efficient👍❤️
The rhythm of that poem...
Is that where rap started
This was the 1930s
What are the influences
From Jamaica in 'the colonies'
Migrated to New York City?
Busting a rhyme
With Busta Rhymes?
It's uncanny
Believe me
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.
absolutely brilliant better than computers
Nice video. Just a few wierd entries in the transcript, though... at 6:00 "... must be old Fred's coupon night" is written as: ' must be old Fred's Cuban knife'! Surely not... not old Fred!
Yeah, that's the transcript that came with the archive.org download
All gone ,pools Thursday night ,still can’t understand what the farmer shouts to “Charlie”!
According to the official subtitles, he says "Can you come around five to two?"
@@Decopunk1927 thank you👍
My guess is that it's something to do with horse racing odds ("five to two"). He clearly has an associate on the train who is getting the latest information to him, and when he looks at the paper, he seems to be pointing at the "racing latest" or "racing results" section running down the right hand side of the page. When he shouts to Charlie he makes the same sort of hand- and arm-waving gestures one associates with track-side bookies when they are sending messages to each other - so presumably Charlie will get the message OK! Also, this little segment of this wonderful film is introduced by a horse walking along - so the "theme" is appropriately introduced. Just a suggestion, and best wishes!
@@stewartfleming7254 Oh that makes sense. I thought he was just asking Charlie to visit at 1:55 lmao
Now we wait 5 days for a first class letter!!!!!!
I love night mail 1936😊
Wonderful.
Forever ib our hearts and mind.
All done with strict health and safety. 😳🤠
Thepostal special then the elizabethanjust abrillway of spending a rainy afternoon in doors with a
Huge mug of steaminhot tea!
20:00 Posh rap.
TY.
AT LAST THE PW WEAR HI - VI `S ON THE TRACK THESE DAYS
Les années 30 des services du chemin de fer Anglais Allemand et Français étaient du sérieux. Aujourd'hui tout le mondes s en fout.
If the Nazis had seen this film, and "gotten" it, they would never have attacked Britain.
😍😍
I'll just send a text now
This wasn't scary.
Will Hay would of made a better job of it lol.
But would he have said "would of"?
TH-cam was made for videos like this. Top quality, thank you so much for posting....
Young people these days often wonder how we managed before the days of automation and computer technology. Well this explains it, we managed very well the whole process using nothing more technical than telephones, pencils and paper and of course the magnificent people. It could almost make you cry to think all this, including thousands of miles of railway have now gone.
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
One of the few raps I can understand! 😄😆
Same here bud, you in your sixties?
This was shown on Channel 4 back in the early 80s and I recorded a copy on VHS. Still have it in my video rack along with The Prisoner, Hancock's Half Hour and many more oldies. Great stuff. TV was fun back then.
Excellent a nostalgic look back in time to when life was simpler and we produced everything ourselves: now china america and india are causing all the pollution.
Even though we know it was a hard and dirty job for the train crews, porters, postmen and those sorters working in rattling and swaying TPOs in the middle of the night, there's still something romantic about a night mail train that just isn't there in an automated sorting office or a 44-tonner thundering down a motorway. It's depressing to think that nearly ninety years later we pay a fortune to Royal Mail so they can line their shareholders' pockets and get a far less reliable service.