A letter has finally reached its destination – more than a century after it was written.
Sent in February 1916, the mail arrived at the intended address on Hamlet Road in south London, much to the bewilderment of the current occupants.
“We realized the year was 16. So we thought it was 2016,” Finlay Glen told CNN on Thursday (16).
“Then we realized the seal was a king instead of a queen, so we felt like it couldn’t be 2016.”
Glen said to CNN that the letter arrived at the estate a few years ago, but only recently did he take it to the local historical society so they could research it further.
The envelope has a 1 pence stamp with the head of King George V.
The letter was sent in the midst of World War I – more than a decade before Queen Elizabeth II was born.
“Once we realized it was really old, we figured it was okay to open the letter,” said Glen, 27.
Under the Postal Services Act 2000, it is an offense to open mail not addressed to you. But Glen said he “can only apologize” if he commits a crime.

After realizing that the letter might be of historical interest, he gave it to the Norwood Review, a local quarterly.
“As a local historian, I was both surprised and delighted to receive the details of the letter,” Stephen Oxford, the magazine’s editor, said in a statement.
The letter was addressed to “my dear Katie”, who, according to Oxford, was the wife of local tycoon Oswald Marsh.
It was written by Christabel Mennel, daughter of tea merchant Henry Tuke Mennel, while her family was on holiday in Bath, in the west of England.
In the letter, Mennel writes: “I am very unhappy here with a very bad cold.”
The South London borough was a hub of commercial activity at the time.
“Many wealthy middle-class people moved into the area in the late 1800s,” Oxford told the CNN .
Oswald Marsh, the former resident of the Hamlet Road estate, “was a highly regarded stamp dealer, often called upon as an expert witness in stamp fraud cases,” according to Oxford.
The Norwood Review is producing a full report on the letter. However, it remains a mystery as to how the letter arrived at Glen’s apartment.
“Incidents like this happen very occasionally and we are not sure what happened in this incident,” a Royal Mail spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Thursday.
“We appreciate that people are intrigued by the story of this 1916 letter, but we have no further information about what may have happened.”
Oxford noted that the letter was postmarked “Sydenham”, an area in south-east London.
He thinks it “may well have been lost sitting in a dark corner in Sydenham’s sorting office and only recently discovered”.
Glen said he and his girlfriend would be happy to turn the letter over to a local archive if it has “serious historical significance”.
But if it’s deemed more “innocuous,” he said, “it would be nice if we could keep it.”
Glen, a theater director and playwright, said he doesn’t often include strange twists of fate in his plays. But after that fortuitous delivery, “maybe the next one will.”
Source: CNN Brasil

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