New Delhi: A letter from 1916 was delivered over 100 years late to its address in London, from Bath in the United Kingdom, The Guardian has reported.It bore a penny George V stamp and Bath and Sydenham postmarks, and was received by theatre director, Finlay Glen, at Crystal Palace in 2021. The letter was addressed to Katie Marsh, the wife of a local stamp dealer named Oswald Marsh. The sender’s identity was found to be Christabel Mennell, who at the time was on vacation at Bath, according to Stephen Oxford, the editor of The Norwood Review, a local history magazine.It began as so; “My dear Katie, will you lend me your aid – I am feeling quite ashamed of myself after saying what I did at the circle.”, along with Mennel stating, that she was “quite ashamed of myself after saying what I did…miserable here with a very heavy cold”.The events Mennell is referring to have not been revealed, perhaps are unknown. The BBC reported that the Royal Mail has taken the stance that it is “uncertain what happened in this instance”. Oxford, however, has a theory that the letter got lost at the Sydenham post office, which has been 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 claims. After further research, Oxford elaborated that “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 Marsh eventually became a stamp magnate, who could be called upon to investigate cases of stamp fraud. He and his wife later moved to a Victorian house with stables nearby. The house itself has long since been demolished and replaced with flats, one of the post boxes in which this letter ended up. Deciphering parts of the letter proved to be quite the task, but there are mentions of someone being under the weather. When asked about his initial reaction, Glen said that he and his girlfriend just “shoved it in a drawer”, until they realised that it was from 1916, not 2016. He went on to further say, “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.”The letter was hard to read, he added.After being asked if relatives of the sender or recipients got in touch, Glen replied “It’s an amazing piece of their family history that has turned up – if they want to, they can come round.”
