The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

by James Wilson Hyde

"A person complained of delay in the receipt of a letter which appeared to have passed through the Post-office twice. It transpired that the letter had, in the first instance, been duly delivered at a shop, where it was to remain till called for, but that it had accidentally been taken away with some music by a customer, who had afterwards dropped it in the street. Subsequently the letter must have been picked up and again posted, and hence its double passage through the Post-office."

"A barrister complained of the non-delivery of a letter containing the halves of two £10 Bank of England notes, stating that he had posted the letter himself; but he shortly afterwards wrote to say that the letter had reached its destination. It appeared that, instead of putting it into the letter-box, he had dropped the letter in the street, where, fortunately, it was picked up by some honest person, who posted it."

A business firm having frequently failed to receive letters which had been addressed to them, made complaint on the subject from time to time; but the inquiries which were instituted resulted in nothing. After much trouble, however, it was at length discovered that a defect existed in the letter-box in the firm's office-door, and fifteen letters were found lodged between the box and the door, some of which had been in that situation more than nine years.

A letter said to contain a cheque for £12, 4s., addressed to a London firm, not having reached its destination, inquiries were made with respect to it. At the end of three months it turned up at a papier-mâché factory, whither it had, no doubt, been carried among waste-paper from the office at which it had been delivered.

In 1883, a registered letter sent from Dunkeld on a given date was duly received in Edinburgh, and delivered at its address, which was a bank, the postman obtaining a signature to the receipt-form in the usual way. Some little time afterwards complaint was made by the manager of the bank that the letter had not been received; but the Post-office was able to prove the contrary by the receipt, the signature to which, on being submitted to the manager, was acknowledged to be that of the wife of the housekeeper of the establishment. Yet this person could give no account of the letter, nor had any one else seen it; and as the letter was stated to have contained four £1 notes and a bank deposit-book, the fact of its disappearance gave rise to a state of things which can be better imagined than described. The Post-office, in the circumstances, offered the suggestion that the bank's waste-paper should be carefully examined. As it happened, however, a quantity of this material had just been cleared out, having been purchased by a waste-paper dealer; and the fact made the chances of recovery in that direction all the more remote. Yet the housekeeper was set to work: he traced the bags first to the store of the dealer, then to the premises of a waste-paper merchant in another part of the city. With assistance he carefully examined the contents of the bags filled at the bank, and his efforts were rewarded by the discovery of the registered letter, which was in precisely the same state as when delivered, never having been opened. It had very likely fallen from a desk in the bank on to the floor, and by a careless person been brushed aside with used envelopes and scraps of paper, thus finding its way into the waste-paper basket.

In April 1873, a letter was posted in a certain village in Ayrshire, addressed by a wife to her husband, who was in command of a vessel bound for New York. The letter was properly directed to the captain by name, it bore the name of his ship, and was addressed to the care of the British Consul, New York. The captain never received the letter, and this circumstance gave rise, upon his return from sea, to what is described as a "feud" between him and his wife,—he, reposing perhaps greater faith in the Post-office than in the dutiful attentions of his wife, believing that his better-half had not written to him, since he failed to receive the letter on application at its place of address in New York. Time, with its incessant changes, hopes, fears, joys, and disappointments, winged its hurried flight for a period of eleven years ere the matter which had caused the feud came to be fully understood. At the end of that time the same letter was returned to the writer through the Dead-letter Office, having (according to the stamp upon it) been unclaimed at New York. It was stated that the return of the letter had "put all to rights" between the couple concerned, though it is to be hoped that the healing hand of Time had already done much in this direction, and that the return of the long-lost letter did nothing more than put the finishing touch to restored confidence. In connection with this matter, it was afterwards ascertained that the letter was one of over 4000 similar letters returned to the New York Post-office from the offices of the British Consul in that city, upon a new appointment being made to the Consulate,—the "new broom," as one of his first acts, having made a clean sweep of this accumulation of letters, some of which had been lying there no less than seventeen years. How far the failure of these letters to reach the persons addressed was due to their not having been called for, or to the negligence of clerks at the Consulate, is not known, nor will it ever be ascertained what heart-burnings and misery may have been occasioned by this wholesale miscarriage of correspondence.

In March 1880, a letter plainly addressed to an individual by name, and bearing the name and number of a street in a certain district of London, reached the Dead-letter Office, whither it had been sent by the postman of the district, owing to the person to whom it was directed not being known at the address given. When opened, with a view to its return to the writer, the letter was discovered to contain a Bank of England note for £100, together with a short memorandum suggesting the return of the note to some person, but in such vague and general terms that no one who had not had previous information on the subject could have fully understood the purport of the message.

The memorandum was, moreover, without head or tail—it had no superscription to indicate whence it had come, nor had it a signature to show by whom it had been written. The circumstance being one of an exceptional character, special steps were taken with a view to trace the owner, and an advertisement was inserted in several of the metropolitan newspapers—bringing up, it is true, a responsive crop of claimants for lost notes, but without eliciting any such claims as would warrant the surrender of the note in question. From the terms of the memorandum in the letter, and the fact that it was anonymous, the suggestion readily arose that whoever had had the note last had not come by it in the regular way of business; and this idea was strengthened by the discovery that the note had been paid over by a bank about eight years previously to a person whose name and address were endorsed upon it; and from that period the note had evidently not been in circulation. It was thought probable that the endorser had lost the note in some way shortly after receiving it, and that coming into the hands of some individual who feared to put it in circulation, it had been kept up during these eight years. Meanwhile, the right to receive the note not having been established by any one, the amount was paid in to the Revenue.

In the Postmaster-General's report for 1881, further mention was made of the finding of the note in the Dead-letter Office, and several claims again reached headquarters, one of which proved to be so far good, that, when the facts had been fully investigated, the amount was paid over to the claimant.

It appeared that the person whose name was endorsed on the note received it in part payment of a cheque cashed by him in 1872, when he was bought out of the business in which he had till then been a partner. Two years afterwards—viz., in 1874—he died, and his widow was unaware at the time that the note had been lost. From circumstances which this lady was able to prove, however, there seemed to be every reason to believe that her husband (whose practice it was to endorse notes when he had received them) had by some means lost the note, or that it had been carelessly left by him in some old book or other papers which were sold as waste-paper after her husband's death; and thus the Post-office was made the means of restoring a considerable sum of money to the rightful owner, while the person who had without title possessed it in the interval dared not claim it.