Letters frozen in time arrive after 60 years

It took them three days, but their search proved in vain. There were no survivors from the 40 passengers and eight crew of the Malabar Princess, an Air India Lockheed Constellation bound for a stopover in Geneva on its way to London.
Now a British student on a field trip to the Alps to examine global warming has added to the legend after stumbling upon a mailbag from the Malabar Princess.
Remarkably, some of the letters it contained have survived sufficiently for Freya Cowan, a third-year geography student, to embark upon a project to reunite about 75 letters and birthday cards with the senders or intended recipients.
While walking away from her University of Dundee colleagues for a lavatory break Miss Cowan, 22, discovered the mailbag, which, due to rock falls and melting snow, had descended about 8,000ft over the years.
She found four bundles inside and the postmark on the letter at the top read: “Bombay, 1950”.
“I thought it was a joke, given that only moments before I had been talking about the crash,” she said.
A few letters from the Malabar Princess have been recovered previously but nothing on this scale. It would seem that none of the mail found by Miss Cowan was written by passengers on the plane, who were seamen bound for a new ship in Sunderland. The bag was destined for the US and the Dundee team has already succeeded in finding the owners of some correspondence.
26/07/10 Simon Johnson/The Telegraph, UK

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Foreign Jul 2010