Letter arrives 105 years after being posted (extracts from an article in today's Times [of London])

[Valentine Mark Herman]

How late has your post been recently? A few days? Weeks? Maybe a month? Strike action may be causing significant delays at present, but they are nothing compared to the time taken for one letter to make it from Bath to Crystal Palace which has finally arrived 105 years after it was posted.

It was originally sent by a Christabel Mennell, who seemed to be racked by guilt and wished to make amends with her friend, Katie Marsh. Mennell was on holiday at the time and therefore posted the letter from a house in Bath in February 1916. Sadly, Katie would never receive it.

It finally fell through the letter box of 18 Hamlet Road in 2021, where it was picked up by the present resident, Finlay Glen, 27, a theatre director.

Confronted with a stamp bearing the image of George V, which cost a penny in 1916, Glen swiftly realised that the Bath postmark did not refer to February 6, 2016.

“We were obviously pretty surprised and mystified as to how it could have been sat around for more than 100 years,” Glen told the BBC.

Glen’s mystification was shared by the Royal Mail. “Incidents like this happen very occasionally,” a spokesperson said, “and we are uncertain what happened in this instance.”

The letter’s story has come to light after Glen kept it in a drawer for two years. Despite the legal difficulties of opening someone else’s mail, he felt that a 105-year-old letter was “fair game”.

Its contents seem to reveal an attempt to pour oil on the waters between two friends. Mennell, who was the daughter of a wealthy local tea merchant, writes on headed paper, where her presumably usual address of 31 Park Hill Rise, Croydon, is crossed out.

She writes to Marsh, who, perhaps ironically given this story, was the wife of a local stamp magnate who was often called as an expert witness at stamp fraud trials.

On today’s roads, the distance between Bath and southeast London is roughly 121 miles, meaning that the letter travelled at an average speed of 1.15 miles a year. A tortoise walking for eight hours a day would have covered that distance in just over 50 days.

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Great story. I wonder if the friends ever made up despite the waywardness of the letter. It's a question ripe for pondering in the night when questions out of the present lead to lack of sleep for the rest of the night, and so I like this story for a variety of reasons. Thanks Val!

 

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Thanks, Val, now I shall not complain that:

Holiday mail sent out to the USA from Greece on Nov. 20, 2022, before Thanksgiving,

is arriving this week "in time " for Valentine's Day! sigh...snail mail.

And is it because of  postal strikes, bad weather, low number of personnel, "lost' in a storage room?

All of the above  perhaps :-(

But such are the joys and surprises of mail art!

[CtlAltDel]

Tortoise-mail is faster than snail-mail then. 

[Carien van Hest]

What an nice story, thank you, Val.