Letter from 1916 arrives at London man's home

UPI ^ | FEB. 20, 2023 / 1:08 PM | By Ben Hooper

[Red Badger]

A letter mailed in 1916 arrived at its intended address in London more than 100 years later. Photo courtesy of the Norwood Society/Twitter 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.

[Songcraft]

Like you, I'm also pretty sure it wasn't paid for with American money.   (That post was just meant as a joke to the person who wanted that rare old stamp -- my post shows a front and back picture of a very rare "1909 S-VDB" U.S. penny, which would be worth a lot of money to coin collectors today.   For all we know, that 1-penny stamp might have been paid for with two old British "half-pennies", but I don't know which of those would be highly valued by today's "numismatists".)

[SunkenCiv]

Da**, the mail is slow. -- Newman.

Thanks Red Badger.

[Red Badger]

“Return to Sender! Address Unknown! No Such Number! No Such Zone!”...............

[Red Badger]

That explains my check from the Nigerian prince....................

[posterchild]

I’m aware I’m delivering this post late...I was struck right away your penny had an overstrike of the L on the rim. Was this common then or is that one of the things which make this penny rare?