Page 1 of 1
...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 6:48 pm
by MikeKozlowski
Letter from 1916 arrives at London man's home
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/02/20 ... 676915877/
Feb. 20 (UPI) -- A London man who received a letter addressed to a former resident of his home was shocked to discover it had been mailed more than a century earlier in 1916.
Finlay Glen said the letter arrived a couple years ago at his address on Hamlet Road in south London, but it was addressed to an unfamiliar name and bore an extremely old stamp and postmark.
"We noticed that the year on it was '16. So we thought it was 2016," Glen told CNN. "Then we noticed that the stamp was a king rather than a queen, so we felt that it couldn't have been 2016."
The letter was addressed to "Mrs. Oswald Marsh" and was made out to "my dear Katie." The sender was identified as Christabel Mennel.
"Once we realized it was very old, we felt that it was OK to open up the letter," Glen said.
Glen recently took the letter to the Norwood Society, a local history group that publishes the quarterly Norwood Review.
"It's very unusual and actually quite exciting in terms of giving us a lead into local history and people who lived in Norwood, which was a very popular place for the upper middle classes in the late 1800s," Stephen Oxford, editor of the Norwood Review, told the BBC.
Mennel wrote in the letter that her family was vacationing in Bath, England.
It remains unclear why the letter took so long to arrive at its intended destination.
"We appreciate that people will be intrigued by the history of this letter from 1916, but have no further information on what might have happened," the Royal Mail said in a statement.
I knew Royal Mail was having issues, but come
on....
Mike
Re: ...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:00 pm
by Craiglxviii
And they literally cannot explain how it got lost in the system.
Re: ...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:10 pm
by Belushi TD
On this one I'd say give them a miss. There's no way to actually explain why it took a hundred years to get this delivered. It had to have gotten lost behind/under something that finally got moved/disposed of, or ended up in someone's stuff and multiple generations later, someone took it upon themselves to drive by the house and stick it in the mailbox.
And besides, the original error was made long enough ago that everyone who could conceivably have been involved is dead now. which LONG predates the Royal Mail's current crop of problems. In fact, it probably predates the prior crop of problems prior crop of problems.
Belushi TD
Re: ...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:12 pm
by Craiglxviii
Belushi TD wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:10 pm
On this one I'd say give them a miss. There's no way to actually explain why it took a hundred years to get this delivered. It had to have gotten lost behind/under something that finally got moved/disposed of, or ended up in someone's stuff and multiple generations later, someone took it upon themselves to drive by the house and stick it in the mailbox.
And besides, the original error was made long enough ago that everyone who could conceivably have been involved is dead now. which LONG predates the Royal Mail's current crop of problems. In fact, it probably predates the prior crop of problems prior crop of problems.
Belushi TD
You’re far more forgiving than I
Re: ...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:33 pm
by Belushi TD
Don't get me wrong. I don't think I'm more forgiving. Being divorced from the immediate scene, I think I see the issue clearer.
If I had access to a time machine to go back in time and identify the buggers who did this, I'd go after them with period appropriate items and beat them until tenderized and then do it again.
However, heaping additional crap on the Royal Mail, for an incident that occurred so long ago its almost out of living memory, seems.... pointless. There's FAR more current and urgent things to beat on the Royal Mail about these days. Heap the scorn and abuse on them for the recent things. Then, bring this up as a "Whatthehelliswrongwithyoupeople?" kind of thing, and then say "You can do better. So, so much better."
Belushi TD
Re: ...From Our Correspondent In The UK....
Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2023 9:51 pm
by Zen9
So I remember how it was 20 years ago getting some Christmas money in as a Casual.
They had to bundle manually sorted mail up and slip a ticket in the rubber bands. Which was supposed to have date, time and sorter written on. This in sorting mail.
But of course, no one actually did that and it seemed a legacy from another era.
I did see a letter dated 1982 to somewhere in Iran......but it was return.
Funny what the memory recalls.