The fragments of a 1941 love letter to a woman named Iris, found nearly three miles under the ocean in a shipwreck, have been painstakingly pieced together by experts, 80 years after it was posted, says an article published in The Guardian.
The Letter of Romance
“Look after yourself my darling, not only for your own sake …….. for mine also,” wrote the unknown serviceman stationed in the Waziristan region, now part of Pakistan. “Imagine that I have my lips tight against yours with my arms around you tight … let us hope that this bloody war will soon be over.”
Undelivered Love
The letter is one of 717 that were never delivered by the cargo ship, the SS Gairsoppa, which was destined for the US. The ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat on 16 February 1941. Of the 86 crew on board, only one survived.
2011 Discoveries
The ship lay nearly three miles deep until 2011, when Odyssey Marine Exploration, an US firm that won the contract from the British government in 2010 for salvage, discovered it. The company recovered more than 100 tonnes of silver from the wreck, along with the letters, which stayed mostly intact because they had been sealed within the hold under tons of mailbags and sediments, protected from light, currents, heat and oxygen.
Conservator’s Messages
“It’s an anaerobic environment so the corrosion is slowed down completely. And because there were so many mailbags together, a massive percentage of the whole post office mail would have been destroyed, but a central part of all this big bundle of mailbags has survived – just 700-odd letters, there would have been so many more,” said conservator Eleni Katsiani.
Postal Museum Letters
While a handful of the more complete letters from the ship were displayed in an exhibition at the Postal Museum in London in 2018, the museum’s archive team have been working on some of the more damaged missives over recent months, piecing together fragments to reveal glimpses of wartime lives.
The letters were immediately freeze-dried after the discovery, to stop the decay process, then washed in freshwater to desalinate them, said Katsiani, “an intense and time-consuming process for each letter but one that secured their current condition.”
The Postal Museum’s senior paper conservator, Jackie Coppen, came across the letter to Iris, which she described as “a tender testament to love and longing”, written on “incredibly thin and fragile” paper.
Hope in the Past
“Like many of the letters, it has suffered, but despite missing areas, enough remains to appreciate the sentiments,” Coppen said. “It talks of hope and the future, it professes dreams of embracing tightly and being together again. Not only does it evoke a romantic past, when the handwritten word sent through the post was often the only means of sustaining long-distance relationships, but it is particularly pertinent in present times when many of us, longing to embrace our own loved ones, have also reverted to the written word as a means of reaching out.”
A Father’s Love To His Daughter
Two other letters are from a father to his daughter and son at the Hotel Inglewood in Torquay, where the museum believes they may have been evacuated, written on 1 December 1940. The father writes to his daughter Pam: “You can be quite sure that mummy will send you back to Wycombe as it becomes practical politics. Meanwhile we all have to make the best of things as they are: the war has upset most peoples dreams and modes of living – including mine!”
Father-Son Bond
He sends his son Michael a collection of used stamps from around the world, along with some fatherly encouragement: “Your handwriting in your last letter is much better than I’ve ever seen it keep it: well done: keep it up and try to improve your spelling.”
“He also writes about how he’s happy his son is enjoying his bike, and how he’s pleased he’s going to be joining the Cubs,” said Katsiani. “It’s such a nice letter.”
Second World War Period Letters
Under half of the letters have now been worked on by the conservators, giving, as the museum puts it, “insight into the lives of ordinary people, living in extraordinary circumstances during the second world war”.
A Remarkable Snippet in Life
“There were missionaries, business people, soldiers and generals writing, ordinary travellers who had gone to India,” said Katsiani. “The letters are talking about life, love, faith, business – and the weather, of course.”
“It feels somewhat poignant and appropriate to be uniting these letters on the 80th anniversary of the ship’s sinking,” said Coppen. “It is inevitable that while piecing the letters together I have come to form an intimate relationship with them – they are mesmerising and capture a remarkable snippet of life during a most significant period.”
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Source : The Guardian
