The Christmas card addressed to a certain Lydia Davies had never been delivered. 121 years after it was sent, the Welsh agency where it was delivered is looking for the woman’s relatives.
Who is this Ewart who wrote to Miss Lydia Davies 121 years ago? The mystery remains. A Christmas card was delivered on Friday, August 16 to 11 Cradock Street, where a Welsh company, the Swansea Building Society, is now located, reports the BBC. The letter was written during the reign of King Edward VII, whose figure adorns the stamp of the precious mail. On the back, an illustration by a 19th century English animal painter, Edwin Henry Landseer, entitled The Challenge, shows a deer in the snow near a mountain lake.
“It looks like something that should be in a museum, that’s for sure. The calligraphy is incredible,” said Henry Darby, communications manager for the Swansea Building Society on the television show “As it happens”. The card arrived “not in a separate envelope, not with a note,” he told the British news agency PA Media. “It changed my week,” he said. No one can explain how the letter got there. “No one came forward and said, ‘Yeah, I found this in an antique shop,’ or ‘I found this in a book,’ or ‘I found it in a charity shop and I just put it in the letterbox,’” Darby said.
The Royal Mail, the UK’s postal operator, said it was likely the postcard had been “reintegrated” into its system, rather than having been “lost in the mail for over a century,” saying that “when something is in our system, we have a duty to deliver it to the correct address.”
“I’m so sorry”
In the card, a man named Ewart tells a woman named “L” that he is “so sorry” that he can’t get a “pair” of an unknown item. “But I hope you’re enjoying yourself at home,” he adds. The author is said to have about 10 shillings (the old currency in the United Kingdom before the pound sterling, editor’s note) “pocket money, not including the train fare.” “I’m doing well,” he writes before asking the young woman to “remember me by Messrs Gilbert and John, with love to all.”
Henry Darby told the BBC that he was sorting through the mail when the postcard fell. The agency’s staff are hoping to trace the relatives of a certain Miss Lydia Davies so that they can return the mail. “We decided to put it out on our social media and thought maybe someone in the area could have a connection with her, a few generations back,” the official said.
Lydia “must have been 16”
At the time the card was sent, in all-powerful England in the early 20th century, a certain John F Davies lived at the address given with his wife Maria and six children, reports Andrew Dully of the West Glamorgan archives. But the surname is common in Wales, reports The Guardian. Lydia could be the eldest of the siblings. “She must have been 16 when this postcard was sent,” Andrew Dully said. The so-called Lydia Davies is thought to have been born around 1887, the same year as the last Austrian emperor Charles of Habsburg and the poet St. John Perse, when Queen Victoria celebrated her golden jubilee.
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