121-Year-Old Postcard With King Edward VII's Stamp Gets Delivered In Wales

You might have often heard about posts arriving late due to distance or letters getting lost in the post office. But people in Wales witnessed a strange incident when a postcard as old as 121 years got delivered. Swansea Building Society employees couldn’t believe what they saw when they went through the mail at their Cradock Street headquarters on August 16. Reports suggest that amid a pile of regular mortgage and savings letters, there was a postcard with a King Edward VII stamp from August 3, 1903. It was intended for a lady named Lydia Davies, who most likely resided there when they had houses rather than banks in the area.

The postcard reportedly had a black and white photograph of the artist Edwin Henry Landseer’s masterpiece The Challenge. It is considered to have been sent by a man named Ewart and bears the postmark of Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. The postmark is marked AU23 03, which most likely refers to the date — August 23, 1903.

Henry Darby, the Swansea Building society’s marketing and communications officer, told Sky News that the arrival of this unique postcard was quite “exciting.” He stated, “It’s a little bit spooky, I’m not a huge fan of touching it because it feels like an antique. It feels like it needs to be in Perspex or something. But there’s lots of great stories on our social media, lots of comments we’re getting, and people clearly really passionate about the city and what it once was and what stories there are to be unlocked.”

The publication reported that one of the individuals who has contacted the building society is a relative, thought to be Miss Lydia Davies’ grand niece. The official told the news portal that they haven’t figured out how it ended up back in the circulation of the Royal Mail, and how it came to them with an ancient stamp.

A Royal Mail representative told Sky News that the postcard was most likely put back into their system rather than being lost in the post for over a century. The person added that when a post is in the system, they are under obligation to deliver it to the correct address. Hence, this old postcard reached, after decades, its original location.