A letter lost in the post in 1916 was finally delivered to a London address more than a century after being sent from Bath.
Bearing a penny George V stamp and Bath and Sydenham postmarks, it dropped through the letterbox of theatre director Finlay Glen’s Crystal Palace flat in 2021.
It was addressed to Katie Marsh, who was married to the stamp dealer Oswald Marsh, and was sent by her friend Christabel Mennell, who was holidaying in Bath, according to research by Stephen Oxford, the editor of The Norwood Review, a local history magazine.
It begins: “My dear Katie, will you lend me your aid – I am feeling quite ashamed of myself after saying what I did at the circle.”
Royal Mail said it remained “uncertain what happened in this instance”. But Oxford said it was likely the letter got lost at the Sydenham sorting office, which has closed. “I think it is being redeveloped. So, in that process they must have found this letter hidden somewhere, perhaps fallen behind some furniture.”
He said: “The Upper Norwood and Crystal Palace area became very popular with wealthy middle-class people in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The letter is from Christabel Mennel, the daughter of a local wealthy tea merchant, Henry Tuke Mennell. And she was friends with Catherine – or Katie – Marsh.
“Oswald Marsh is recorded in 1901 living in Crystal Palace as a lodger and as a stamp dealer. He was 20 then and I suspect he was being funded by his father, who was a quite wealthy architect who lived in Northern Ireland. They were a Quaker family.”
Oswald, who married Catherine in 1904, would become a highly regarded stamp dealer who was often called as an expert witness in cases of stamp fraud, and later moved from where the letter was addressed to a large Victorian house with stables nearby.
The house the letter was addressed to has long been demolished and is now a block of flats. Parts of the letter are difficult to read, but it mentions someone being unwell.
Glen, 27, said when he and his girlfriend, Lucy, first saw the date “we thought 2016, then saw it had the king’s stamp on it, and realised 1916 so thought it was probably OK to open it.
“We were fairly mystified as to how it could have taken so long to be delivered but thought it must have got lodged somewhere in the sorting office and a century later was found and someone stuck it in the post.”
Initially, they “shoved it in a drawer”. The envelope was in fairly good condition, although a bit weathered at the top.
“We held on to it and tried to decipher it, though some is hard to read. And then we got in touch with the local historical society, because I thought they might be able to tell us about the people involved.
“I had no idea that so many people would find it so interesting.”
