Widow distressed after receiving second 'Brown Bread' letter

A widow has been once again left upset and disgusted after receiving a letter which addressed her late husband as “Brown Bread” - Cockney rhyming slang for “dead”. The thoughtless letter was intended for Sheila Delhoy’s husband Ken who died in February 2008 aged 60 after a battle with throat cancer. Ken was a plasterer with 40 years’ experience in the trade. Following his death Sheila made contact with as many suppliers and clients of her husband to let them know the sad news.



But in 2010 she received a letter from Northumberland-based wholesale plastering suppliers Wack addressed to Ken, with the words Brown Bread written above his name. And if it was not bad enough for it to happen once, three years down the line Sheila has once again received the same thing from the same company. “I was bouncing - I was so upset when I saw it,” said Sheila, 64, who lives in Normanby. “I just couldn’t believe it to be honest. When it happened last time, the company said it would not happen again but they obviously haven’t done anything about it because it has.”

Sheila added: “When my son Tony found out he rang the company straight away. He said to them ‘are you going to make this an annual thing to remind my mum her husband is dead and make her upset?’” A spokesman for the company said they source contact data from an external company, and in the case of Mrs Delhoy the words “Brown Bread” in the contacts details were not detected when the first incident happened. The company said they then removed it from its system but due to “data corruption” with the contacts database, they have had to use a previous back-up to restore data - causing the details to be re-entered and therefore used once again.



“Once again the moment we were informed by Mrs Delhoy’s son regarding the repeated incident we immediately contacted Mrs Delhoy and expressed our deepest apologies,” the spokesman said. “We have now made extra steps in our database management that will prevent an incident like this from ever happening again. We are truly sorry to Mrs Delhoy for the unnecessary stress and grief that this may have put her through.” Sheila said: “The company has promised me that they will take it off the computer and hard drive. I just don’t want this to happen again but I said that the last time.” Sheila’s solicitor said they will now be writing a letter of complaint to the company.