In the age of next-day deliveries and speedy shipping from all corners of the world, the days of waiting around for a letter or package were thought to be over. In Swansea, however, staff at a building society were taken aback after receiving a postcard that was delivered 121 years late.
The card is believed to date back to 1903 but was only recently received by staff at Swansea Building Society in Cradock Street.
Printed on the postcard is a work by the 19th century English animal painter Edwin Henry Landseer titled The Challenge, which shows a stag standing in snow on the banks of a body of water with mountains in the distance.
The addressee, Lydia Davies, is believed to have lived on the street more than a century ago and would have been 16 when she was supposed to receive the card.
Henry Darby, the building society’s marketing and communications officer, said how the postcard ended up at his workplace remained a mystery, but he hoped to find those related either to Davies or the sender, written only as Ewart.
“We can put out a nice little post and see if anyone knows any more about Miss Lydia, or maybe what life was like on Cradock Street 121 years ago,” Darby told PA Media.
“The plan is to get it back to someone that may be related to Lydia, and for it to be a keepsake for them that they can pass on for generations to come.”
Darby was surprised by the discovery because the postcard arrived “not in a separate envelope, not with a note” on 16 August. “It’s just not what you expect to do when you come into work. It’s definitely changed my week,” he said.
The postcard is written in black, joined-up handwriting and has a green halfpenny stamp featuring the portrait of Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910.
Darby said census records from 1901 suggested Davies lived on the street with her parents and five siblings. He said proving who could be related to her may be tricky because the surname was common in Wales.
He said the census revealed Davies married a man from London who “owned a hotel in Pall Mall, so potentially Lydia’s family might not be local to Swansea any more, and it could be this postcard has come from further afield”.
Darby said staff at the building society had “no concept of how it actually ended up back here”.
“No one’s come forward to say, ‘Yeah, I found that in an antique shop’ or ‘I found that in a book’, ‘I found it in the charity shop and I just put it in the postbox’,” he said. “That’s the one kind of spooky element, that we’re still not sure how it came back to be here at 11 Cradock Street.”
Staff and social media users have helped to decipher the postcard, in which Ewart told “L” they were “so sorry” because they had had trouble finding a “pair” of an unknown item.
Ewart wrote: “I hope you’re enjoying yourself at home,” before mentioning he had around 10 shillings “as pocket money, not counting the train fare so I’m doing alright”.
A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “It is likely that this postcard was put back into our system rather than being lost in the post for over a century.
“When an item is in our system, we are under obligation to deliver it to the correct address.”
