A HOTEL is trying to track down the intended recipient of a postcard it has received 30 years after it was first posted.

The postcard, delivered by the Royal Mail and with a 1984 postmark, was sent anonymously, addressed to Celia Pagel of the then Accountancy Training Centre at Eynsham Hall.

General manager 34-year-old Shaun Bowles said: “I thought it was a wind-up at first.

“Our accounts department received the postcard and tried searching the internet to find the person it was sent to [without any luck] before passing it on to me.

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“My first thought was that it was in remarkable condition given it spent 30 odd years floating around and how cheap the stamp price was then at 12-and-a-half pence.”

Oxford Mail:

The postcard and its message to Celia Pagel.

Eynsham Hall is a country house which dates back to the 1700s. From 1946 the hall was used for police training by the Home Office for 35 years before becoming an accountancy training college in 1981. It was three years after this that the postcard was sent, on June 4, 1984.

A Royal Mail spokeswoman said: “We are very glad the postcard has finally been united with its destination after all this time.

“It is extremely unlikely that this item of mail was in our system all this time. It is difficult to speculate what may have happened, but almost certainly it was put back in a post box very recently, as we regularly check all our sorting offices and machines are cleared.”

The postcard, received on Tuesday, December 23, is a picture of Welsh girls in national costume with a humorous written message on the back.

The sender seems to joke about the late arrival of the postcard, writing: “See you yesterday or the day before Anon”, not knowing quite how late the card would actually be.

Mr Bowles added: “I have worked here for nine years and we have got some old things here but not that old. We actually have staff who would have worked here back then when it was sent, but nobody recognised the name.

“We wondered if we could do something to track down the lady it is addressed to.”

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