Posted on 02/16/2007 4:03:21 PM PST by blam
Postcard delivered 90 years too late
By Nick Britten
Last Updated: 9:40am GMT 16/02/2007
When Private Walter Butler posted a card to his sweetheart from the trenches in the First World War, neither thought too much about it when it failed to arrive.
Pte Butler, who was fighting on the Western Front with the Dorset Regiment, went on to marry his girlfriend, Amy Hicks, and the pair lived long and happy lives in Chippenham, Wilts.
Last week the card mysteriously reappeared when Martin Kay, a postman, found it had been placed in his delivery sack. With Pte Butler and his wife now dead, he tracked down their only daughter, Joyce Hulbert, 86, and delivered it, 90 years too late. Mrs Hulbert said: "I would love to know where it has been all this time."
Pte Butler's card mysteriously re-appeared in a postman's delivery sack
Awesome.
Signed,
Intha Pink.
Maybe this is why that UFO appeared at O'Hare a few months back?
Time travel has always been more of an art then a science and so to be off by 90 years is about as dead on as it gets.
But still, you can see why the UFO Express was abandoned shortly before it was invented.
It's a nice touch he made it home and they got married. A lot of WWI stories didn't end that way.
Ironically, the Postcard concludes: "I have received no letter from you for a long time."
WOW, FRIGIN WOW!
That is amazing!!!!!!!!
That's an interesting card. Sort of covers all the bases in that informal Army way without having to think too much or know how to write. It never ceases to amaze me what the Army will come up with.
They don't teach us to write like that these days....
Wow. Beautiful handwriting.
What it reminds us is that censorship is a necessary evil during times of war. My grandfather's letters to my grandmother always had cuts in the most innocuous places. Imagine true censorship today.
Interesting British check box form letter.
Makes it sound as if Private Butler may
have been a prisoner of war.
Too late for what?
It seems to me a needless use of the word 'too'.
I suspect that those little blotches of what looks like machine oil on the card tell the tale on where this was all those years. Has that post office been doing any renovating recently?
I'm happy his daughter was alive to receive it.
Especially British Stories....
Since this was sent from the trenches of the western front it could easily been in the custody of the British Army as well. Someone cleaned out some old army storage facility and this was found.
Someone checked an old sack. The USPS no longer uses mail sacks because mail gets stuck in them. All plastic bins and boxes.
Could have fallen behind or under something in some mail processing facility.
Weren't these called "penny cards" back then?
This guy had beautiful handwriting.
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