More than 100 years after it was sent, a letter from February 1916 has finally reached a south London apartment.
The letter, which bears a Bath postmark and a 1d (1p) George V stamp, was delivered to Finlay Glen’s apartment in Crystal Palace’s Hamlet Road in 2021.
“We were obviously pretty surprised and mystified as to how it could have been sat around for more than 100 years,” he said.
According to Royal Mail, it is still unclear “what happened in this instance.”
The letter was written when King George V had been in power for five years.
Later that year, future prime leaders Sir Edward Heath and Harold Wilson were both born.
The theatre director claimed he felt it was “fair game” to open once he realized it was from 1916, not 2016, despite the fact that it is illegal to open mail that is not addressed to you under the Postal Services Act 2000.
“If I’ve committed a crime, I can only apologize,” the 27-year-old continued.
Stephen Oxford, publisher of the Norwood Review, a quarterly local history magazine, claims that the letter was sent to “my lovely Katie,” the wife of regional stamp tycoon Oswald Marsh.
March, a well-known stamp dealer, frequently served as an expert witness in trials involving stamp fraud.
While on vacation in Bath, a family friend named Christabel Mennell, the daughter of rich local tea trader Henry Tuke Mennell, wrote the letter.
Ms. Mennell said that she was “miserable here with a really heavy cold” and that she felt “quite ashamed of myself after saying what I did.”
In terms of providing us with a window into local history and the individuals who lived in Norwood, which was a very popular neighborhood for the upper middle classes in the late 1800s, Mr. Oxford said the letter was unusual and exciting.
“Crystal Palace generated a huge influx of very wealthy people and so to find out about someone who moved to the area for possibly that very reason is absolutely fascinating,” he said.
When asked what he would do if the sender’s or recipient’s relatives contacted him, Mr. Glen responded, “It’s an amazing piece of their family history that has shown up. If they want to, they can come around. ”
A Royal Mail representative stated that incidents like this happen infrequently.
“We appreciate that people will be intrigued by the history of this letter from 1916, but we have no further information on what might have happened.”
