A few weeks ago there was a message on my answering machine. This was unusual as for once it wasn’t from someone trying to sell me green energy or trying ‘to assist me to reclaim mis-sold PPI’. It was from someone who had discovered my website following his own discovery in his mother’s attic following her death. When he and his wife were clearing out th
e attic, they had come across a picture which his parents had bought many years before.
This was a nice, but not particularly exciting oil painting of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral. It had long ago lost its frame and had been left forgotten in the attic for numerous years.
However 
on the reverse there was a surprise – they discovered this beautifully illustrated ‘Address’ which must have been presented to my grandfather to mark his 21st birthday, which was only shortly after he had joined the Grenadier Guards. It is ‘signed’ by all the workers on the Didlington Estate and is a wonderful and rather unusual piece of family history.
It is perhaps interesting to see just how many Carters were working on the estate at that time – exactly how they were related to Howard Carter is currently unknown.
Also exactly how the Address found its way to that Suffolk attic and how it ended up as the back of an oil painting of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral is a mystery – one guess regarding the painting is that during the shortages of WW2 someone wanted to paint the picture and the only piece of board available was the reverse of the ‘Address’. It is a miracle it survived undamaged, and it is a miracle that it has come home!
That it has, is entirely due to the internet alerting one kind person that I might be interested in it – I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their persistence in tracking me down… thank you!