A letter found in a secret floor safe by renovators in New Zealand is finally making its way to the addressee, more than 30 years after it was written.
Thanks to helpful Stuff readers, our story about the secret Lower Hutt safe was passed to a close relative of Alfred and Muriel Clench, the now-deceased couple who installed the safe and wrote the letter.
New owners found the Clenches’ letter at the bottom of a locked vault, cemented into the foundations under a false floor in a wardrobe, when they were working on their Korokoro home two years ago.
It contained two items: instructions on how to reset the safe and a detailed letter from the Clenches, outlining the eight separate banks they kept their money and valuables in – including wallets and a canvas bag of jewellery.
As well as being a treasure map of sorts, the letter contained a personal message to their granddaughter – so the new homeowners were keen she receive it.
Eventually a newspaper clipping of the Stuff story about the vault’s discovery made its way into the hands of Rosie Hislop, whose father helped Alfred Clench build the house and install the safe decades ago.
As well as being a treasure map of sorts, the letter contained a personal message to their granddaughter – so the new homeowners were keen she receive it.
Eventually, a newspaper clipping of the Stuff story about the vault’s discovery made its way into the hands of Rosie Hislop, whose father helped Alfred Clench build the house and install the safe decades ago.
Hislop was friends with the Clenches’ daughter, Pamela Clench, who died in 2015.
She said Alf and Muriel Clench moved to Australia in 1991, where they lived with Pamela Clench and her husband Merv Doyle.
It came as a shock to Doyle that there had been anything in the safe, as he thought his father-in-law had cleaned out its contents long ago.
“That’s where they kept all their valuables,” he said, speaking from Boyne Island in Queensland.
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“It’s obviously something that he missed when he was cleaning out the safe.”
Doyle laughed when he heard the vault had been jackhammered out of the concrete – saying the new owners didn’t need to cut the safe open if the original curtains were still hanging.
“On the bottom of the curtains [on a nearby window], sewn into the hem, was the combination to open the safe,” he said.
Alfred and his brother Henry became well-known in Lower Hutt when their carpentry business took off. Muriel balanced the books in the early years.
When they eventually retired and decided to move to Australia to be nearer their daughter, the family reunion didn’t last long, Doyle said.
Months after the move, Muriel died from complications from an undiagnosed brain tumour.
Her husband lived for another 16 years, then eight years later Pamela died as well, Doyle said.
He hasn’t told his stepdaughter about the letter and hopes it will be “a nice little surprise” when he hands it over.
The woman who found the letter is putting it in the post.
This article originally appeared on Stuff and is republished here with permission.
