© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

World War 2

Read more about the article A BHP mail-room boy and shipping clerk remembers

A BHP mail-room boy and shipping clerk remembers

When Neville Chant started work as a clerk at the BHP Company's Newcastle steelworks in 1936, he was allocated to the correspondence department as a mail-room boy. He'd just finished his school leaving certificate and he started at the BHP just before Christmas. It was a different world from that of 2021, but although communications technology might seem primitive compared to today's, it was capable of great efficiency. While BHP's headquarters were in Melbourne, it had important interests in many parts of Australia. The BHP steelworks and its satellite industries were a huge presence in Newcastle,…

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Read more about the article Before email there was V-Mail

Before email there was V-Mail

In World War 2, Allied troops sent and received a lot of mail. So much mail it became a headache for military authorities to handle the huge quantities. But nobody wanted to impose overly strict limits on mail, since being able to communicate with loved ones at home was a massive prop to the morale of troops. In 1941 the British came up with a solution. The idea was to photograph letters, send the negatives to an area close to the intended recipients and then print them out again. The reduced-size negatives took up a lot…

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A bed-time story for children about to die

Once upon a time there was a civilised country. Its people were intelligent and reasonable, by human standards, but it suffered the misfortune of acquiring some leaders who saw some advantage in leading them astray. These leaders used an age-old method of getting, increasing and keeping power: the old trick of persuading most of the population that a minority of “different” people in the country were bad and dangerous.  This trick almost always works for any population of humans. The trick works best of all when the “bad and dangerous” people own something valuable that can…

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