The family of a globe-trotting butler who mingled with royalty have said it was a stroke of “magic” after they were reunited with postcards he wrote in the 1920s. Frank Hills died in 1962, but spent the majority of his working life as either a valet – a personal attendant – or a butler for various affluent people.
As a valet, he got to visit Egypt during the period that King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered, in 1922. A series of eight postcards documenting his travels while on a grand tour in the 1920s, and addressed to his wife and baby daughter, ended up at an antiques fair on the Isle of Wight, seemingly lost to time.
However, Jim Rayner, 50, who set up a Facebook group called the Forgotten Messages Project – to reunite families with postcards, bought them for £15 as part of a bundle. After tracing Laura Parham, Mr Hills’ great granddaughter, he sent the postcards to the family on December 28, which she described as a “late Christmas present”.
Ms Parham, 44, who lives in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and works in the food industry, told the PA news agency: “It was Christmas Eve and I found a message from Jim that had been sat in my Facebook Messenger junk messages for six months, so it was sort of magic that I’d stumbled across this message.
