WALES FAMILY REUNITES AFTER A 121 DELAYED POST CARD
A postcard was sent from Lydia on the southern coast of Wales to Ewart on the eastern coast in August of 1903. Even though it would only take them roughly 1.5 hours to travel that distance now, Ewart's message took 121 years to reach its destination. In August 2024, a manager at the Welsh financial institution Swansea Building Society was taken aback by the long-overdue postcard. The building society, along with the help of local experts and sleuths, managed to bring Ewart and Lydia's descendants back together over the long-lost note.
The front of the card, which is addressed to "Miss Lydia Davies" of Craddock Street, features a grayscale image of English painter Edwin Henry Landseer's 1844 work The Challenge. The exquisitely old-fashioned script on the reverse says: "Dear L. I could not, it was impossible to get the pair of these. I am so sorry, but I hope you are enjoying yourself at home. I have got now about ten [shillings as] pocket money not counting the train fare, so I’m doing alright. Remember me to Miss Gilbert and John, with love to all from Ewart."
The building society received a lot of feedback and advice after sharing pictures of the endearing card on Facebook, including from the addressee's descendants. A small group of historians and scholars, including those from the West Glamorgan Archives and the Royal Philatelic Society London, determined that Lydia, the addressee, was one of the six children born to tailor John Davies and his wife Maria. Lydia's great-niece Helen Roberts was the first surviving Davies family member to get in touch with the building society.
It was found that Ewart and Lydia were, in fact, siblings as word got out and the inquiry got deeper. 13-year-old Ewart had written to his 16-year-old sister Lydia, a postcard collector. It is believed that the "pair" that Ewart alluded to may have consisted of two postcards, possibly both created by Landseer. English artist Landseer specialised in paintings of both wild and domesticated animals. There are still a few other old Landseer postcards in circulation, some of which feature similar stag imagery.
Four of Ewart and Lydia's relatives were eventually located with the aid of social sharing: Ewart's grandson, Nick Davies; two of Lydia's great-nieces, Helen Roberts and Margaret Spooner; and Lydia's great-granddaughter, Faith Reynolds. To reunite in Swansea, they all travelled from all over the United Kingdom. Nick Davies told the building society that the reunion was "extraordinary."
This note's extremely delayed arrival truly takes the meaning of "snail mail" to the limit. "It is most likely that this postcard was put back into our system rather than being lost in the post for over a century," an official from the British postal service, Royal Mail, stated. For instance, the card may have been acquired secondhand and deposited in a mailbox. Several other postcards from the same era that were sent to Lydia Davies on Craddock Street have subsequently come up for auction.This isn't the first time a letter has been delivered decades later; in 2021, for instance, a letter written by a WWII soldier was delivered 76 years after it was posted.