One Who Volunteered

Britain's leading liberal newspaper reports on a "poignant exhibition" at the Remember Who Won museum in London. The exhibition commemorates "the impact of the war on the Post Office, when 75,000 young postmen, sorting office staff and clerks volunteered to join up: 15,000 never came home", perhaps because the Post Office had not yet been privatised; although on the bright side "the cost of the penny post went up by a ha'penny, the astonishing 10 deliveries a day in some parts of Britain were slashed, and neither ever returned to its prewar level". Among the exhibits is a four-page letter from the Official Number One Greatest Ever Briton Ever, Winston Churchill, which is on display along with the correspondence of various persons not worthy of mention. Churchill's letter consists of a few lines of melodramatic Victorian prose about love, death and the nobility of woman's heart, preceded by three pages about the beneficiaries of Churchill's perennial and primary concern, namely the finances and future reputation of Winston Churchill. The letter was written in 1915, before Churchill departed for his stint as an embedded politician on the Western Front (he became bored with it after four months and went back to Parliament) and, according to the newspaper where comment is free but facts are sacred, was "still among his papers when he died 40 years later". Churchill died in 1965.