Postcards arrive at Maidstone address 50 years being sent

The mystery of who they're from and who they were originally intended for remains.

Transcript

00:00 Sending a postcard from your holidays might be a dying tradition, but ones just pop through this post box.

00:08 Steve ignored it at first, but on closer inspection, it was a bit of a surprise.

00:13 I picked it up again this morning, had another look at it and noticed it was a 4.5 pen stamp.

00:20 So I googled 4.5 pen stamp. 4.5 pen stamps were issued in 1974.

00:27 So this has taken 50 years to get from the north of Scotland to here.

00:33 The message on the card tells of a camping holiday and an upcoming hike,

00:37 but is addressed to the seemingly previous occupier of the house, Miss Freeman.

00:42 Now, if you thought that was strange enough, well, listen to what happened the next morning.

00:46 This morning, we got another one. This one has come from Denmark.

00:50 Again, quite clearly, clearly postmarked 1974.

00:55 But this is from a different sender. He is called Frank.

00:59 My thinking is he's been lost in a post office somewhere. But where? I don't know.

01:04 All those years ago, when the sender sent this card from Inverness,

01:08 it should have taken three or four days to arrive to the receiver, but it took half a century.

01:14 You might say it's snail mail.

01:16 Well, in fact, a snail could make that very journey from Inverness to Maidstone 28 times.

01:24 We've taken Steve's postcards to a Tunbridge stamp collector.

01:28 He's been collecting them since he was 10 years old.

01:32 He says these postcards are 50 years old, but he reckons they may have been re-sent through the post.

01:40 I can't fathom even a guess of why they would put these in the post.

01:46 If the individuals posting them didn't know the postage rate,

01:52 why would they stick odds stamps on that are way out of date?

01:57 But they may have been delivered to that address in '74,

02:02 and somebody, just out of amusement, stuck them back in the letterbox.

02:07 I can't explain it. It's puzzling.

02:10 A Royal Mail spokesperson said incidents like this are very rare,

02:14 and we are certainly curious about how these postcards came to appear in our system after such a long period of time.

02:20 Upon discovery, they were delivered to the address, as is our duty.

02:25 For these postcards, it seems that their sender, the receiver,

02:28 and where on earth they've been for the past half a century will have to remain a mystery.

02:34 Gabriel Morris for KMTV.

02:36 See you then.