Postcard finally arrives in Swansea 121 years after it was first sent

Henry Darby, marketing and communications officer for Swansea Building Society, said he was sorting through the post when the postcard dropped out, and that he had found limited information about the intended recipient online.

“So we thought we’d pop it on our social media and thought maybe someone locally may be connected to her, a few generations down,” he said.

Andrew Dully, from West Glamorgan Archives, has established that a John F Davies was the head of the household at the address, where he lived with his wife, Maria, and six children.

“The oldest of them was Lydia. She would have been 16 when this postcard was sent,” he said.

He added that the picture shows a young girl “dressed in the fashionable, white frilly dress… and that could just as well be Lydia”.

A spokesperson for the Royal Mail said: “It is likely that this postcard was put back into our system rather than being lost in the post for over a century.

“When an item is in our system, we are under obligation to deliver it to the correct address.”