A handwritten letter hits different when the recipient is no longer alive to read the note. A man residing in Crystal Palace, London, received a letter addressed to a previous resident of his home. The startling fact about the letter was the date as it was mailed more than a century ago in 1916.
Finlay Glen got to travel back in time with this letter that had an old stamp and postmark that wasn’t relevant to the current time. Glen couldn’t recognize the name on the letter that was intended for someone by the name of Katie. The letter was sent from Christabel Mennel to Mrs. Oswald Marsh, who was later determined to be “my dear Katie.”
“We noticed that the year on it was ’16. So we thought it was 2016,” Glen said. “Then we noticed that the stamp was a king rather than a queen, so we felt that it couldn’t have been 2016.”
“Once we realized it was very old, we felt that it was OK to open up the letter,” Glen said.
Although Katie never saw the mail, a larger online audience got a peek inside the letter. Glen decided to drop off the letter to the Norwood Society, a local history group, and the organization shared the letter on their Twitter page.
“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, said.
As for the content inside the letter, Mennel indicated that her family was on holiday in Bath, England.
People haven’t got a clue as to why the mail took so long to reach the designated address. Sometimes the timing of the mail is simply out of the sender’s hands. Better late than never.
Source: https://twitter.com/NorwoodSociety/status/1626132826688028672