In January of this year, I was fortunate enough to be in Barbados and took the opportunity to continue a philatelic passion of mine. Over the past ten years, I have regularly sent myself registered letters from Barbados, trying each time to send them from different Post Offices on the island.
The idea behind this is simple; modern registered letters are typically sent in plastic envelopes which, on arrival, are normally thrown away by the recipients. Historically, registered letters were made from wove paper with a linen lining, giving them extra strength to withstand the rigours of transport over thousands of miles. This made them easy to keep and collect, but sometime in the 1980s this stopped, and a new plastic envelope was introduced.
Think about the mail you receive in your household; if any of it is in a plastic wrapper, do you keep that wrapper? Virtually no one keeps plastic wrappers in which they are sent mail these days, so I decided to change that.
If you look at any auction house selling Barbados material you will regularly find registered envelopes from the reign of Queen Victoria up to George VI available to buy, but once you get to QEII and the change from paper to plastic envelopes, few, if any, are available. These old registered envelopes are very collectable, and often make up superb displays illustrating postal rates and routes from years gone by. But what about more modern material?
So, in January I sent myself six registered letters, two of each size that are currently available (A4 and A5), from the post offices in St John, St Philip, and St Joseph.
On my return to the U.K., I waited and sure enough, within two weeks four of the six had arrived, but of the letters from St Joseph, there was no sign.
Life moves on and in truth, I completely forgot about them until early July, when suddenly, both registered letters arrived from Barbados.
I was astonished. Six months on from being posted they had finally arrived. But where had they been?
As they were registered it was a fairly simple process to go online and track the number on the Royal Mail website and when I did I was astonished to find that they had been in a black hole for all that time. Simply, they disappeared.
The tracking data shows that they were entered into the registered mail tracking system on 4th January 2024 where they then made their way to Bridgetown. From there, an unexplained delay of two weeks was noted before they were tracked as leaving Barbados on 16th January.
Flown out of Barbados on 16th January they then inexplicably land at Heathrow on Monday 8th July 2024.
So, where have they been?
I contacted Royal Mail to try and see if they could shed any light on the topic but their answer was that they received them on 8th July and delivered them to my house the following day. They suggested that I contact the Barbados Postal Service.
This, of course, is a good idea, but for an average person not living in Barbados, quite difficult to do. They don’t have a website and other than a general phone number (£4.20 a minute from my phone provider) and a generic email address, there is no other way to contact them. I did try a couple of other online mail tracking portals but all they could tell me was the same data that Royal Mail had given me. I have emailed them but as yet, no reply.
So, it remains a mystery as to where these covers were for six months, or to be specific, 187 days or six months and five days. Tucked down the back of a cabinet no doubt, or hidden in the cargo hold of a place being ferried back and forth across the Atlantic.
Wherever they were, they are now safely tucked up in my collection. And next year I am going to try and get covers from the last few offices on my checklist, after which I should have a nice display and a decent story to tell about the time it takes to send registered post from Barbados to the U.K.
PS – If I ever find out I will update this story!