A British student on a field trip to the Alps found a mail bag from the Malabar Princess, an Air India Lockheed Constellation which crashed killing 40 passengers and eight crew members 60 years ago.
The third year geography student was on a three day trip to examine global warming and added to the legend of the popular French film Amelie, which say Audrey Tautou’s character create a fictional letter from a lover who died in the crash, for a lonely female concierge after hearing about mountaineers finding similar letters.
And some of the letters contained have survived leading student Freya Cowan to embark on a project to reunite about 75 letters and birthday cards to senders or intended recipients.
Miss Cowan, 22, discovered the mail bag which has descended about 8,000 ft due to falling rocks and melting snow.
Inside she found four bundles and the postmark on the letter which read, “Bombay 1950.”
“I thought it was a joke, given that only moments before I had been talking about the crash,” she said.
Over the past years a few letters from the Malabar Princess had been recovered but nothing on this scale. None of the mail was written by passengers on the plane who were seamen bound for a new ship in Sunderland. The mail bag was heading for the US and the Dundee team has already succeeded in finding the owners of some of the correspondence.
Tim Reid, a glaciologist who was also on the trip will be forwarding a letter to the daughter of Captain Hank Smith, a US pilot who died in 1999 but wrote a colourful account of his time working in India. “Hank’s letter tells a fantastic story about how he was working in Bombay and the Middle East,” said Mr Reid.
“He had a charter to Basra but had trouble with the aircraft and came down near a British Army encampment. They didn’t have much fresh water so he drank a lot of beer.
“He was there for three or four weeks while the plane was fixed, but needed the help of the Army to fend off Bedouin tribes looking to steal the plane’s equipment.”
It is not known to whom the letter was sent, but Mr Reid traced Mr Smith’s daughter in Texas. “She was absolutely astonished,” he said.
He aims to send her the letter after work to preserve it.
Another student, David Barratt, traced the intended recipient of a letter sent by D Jones, a Salvation Army officer, to her bother, Harlan Cleveland. He is now in his 90s and lives in a Salvation Army retirement home in St Petersburg, Florida.
Just five days before the crash on the night of October 30th 1950, the letter describes her missionary work in India and asks her brother for money for a camera.
Two other typewritten letters and two handwritten ones, all in the same envelope from ‘Myra’ who also appeared to be a missionary is one of the letters that Miss Cowan is keen to deliver. They were sent to a Mrs Georgianna Roadaswell in Ohio, possibly within the village of Haskins.
A letter dated on October 30th 1950 addressed for a Lady Moore, ironically - considering the letter never arrived - says, “I do not often take the time to answer a letter in less than an hour after it arrives but there are some things in yours that I want to talk about with you.”
Her problems in India were discussed in the letter saying, “There is a growing anti-missionary feeling among some of the folks.
“I feel it is all from one source entirely and I have prayed so often that she might be led into the Light.”
