Even by Royal Mail’s standards it must be Britain’s least effective postal service.

Ten years ago Stuart Conway, 45, set up a website offering to take people’s messages, put them in a bottle and lob them into the Channel from the end of Brighton Pier.

The self-employed data administrator has now “delivered” nearly seven thousand messages. He also made his program free for others to copy, helping to create nearly thirty other “message in a bottle” services from Australia to the coasts of the Americas, sending another 8,000 messages bobbing into the briney.

The sea may be beautiful and unfathomable, but these are not particularly useful qualities for a postman. As far as Mr Conway knows, only 20 or so messages have ever been found. This does not deter the senders, whose notes continue to pour from his printer in an upstairs room of his house in Hove. Some are general suggestions to no one in particular. “Don’t take anyone else’s advice,” advises a 14-year-old girl from Germany.

Others seek advice, such as the teenage girl who likes her boyfriend very much, but likes sleeping with another friend better, and the 17-year-old boy from Spain who thinks that his life is over and is contemplating suicide.

Mr Conway places messages mourning a death in champagne bottles, in the hope that they will last longer.

Many senders are placing lonely hearts advertisements. “Female, over 40, full of dreams,” runs one. “If you are male, over 40, full of dreams, contact me.”

An Italian woman aged 22 is moving to Brighton and hopes to find friends. “It was tempting to reply saying ‘I’ll take you for a drink, sweetie’,” Mr Conway said, but his free service carries a promise of confidentiality, and he never tries to contact the senders.

He says that when he reads their messages he often feels like a priest hearing a confession. At least a third of them concern unrequited love, mainly from women who still care for a former husband or boyfriend.

What is perhaps more surprising is the many thousands of notes addressed to specific individuals. An old man from Brazil writes to his two daughters who now live in Japan.

“I still hope that you will come back to Brazil some day before I die,” he writes. “If you happen to see this message, please get in touch.”

Some of the messages are addressed to American soldiers serving in Iraq, and there are many from people seeking to contact a former lover. They do not have the address, and seem to believe that a message in a bottle is the next best thing.

To provide bottles, Mr Conway is forced to drink a lot of beer, and scrounge from friends and overflowing bottle banks. As the tide turns, behind the Waltzer at the end of the pier, he leans back and throws them into the yellow-brown waves. The bottles set off in the direction of Cherbourg, but each day they will be dragged ten miles east and west by the changing tides.

A lucky few may make it into the Atlantic, and on towards Iceland, but of those that have been found, most have landed on sandy beaches in northern Brittany, the Netherlands and Germany. One made it through the Strait of Dover, and washed up among fish boxes on the North Sea island of Amrum.

Only one reached the intended recipient without delay. “It was to a Swedish language student in Brighton, from her boyfriend,” Mr Conway said. “I went and put it on her doorstep. It seemed stupid to throw it in the sea.”

Over and out

- In 1914 Private Thomas Hughes, later to die in the trenches, threw a bottle into the Channel from a troop carrier. It was found in the Thames Estuary in 1999, and the message delivered to his wife, by then 87 and living in New Zealand

- In 2005 a four-year-old girl’s message in a bottle travelled from Morecambe Bay to Perth, Australia, in six months

- The same year a US coastguard’s message in a bottle from New York was found on a beach in Poole Harbour by a man who wrote back accusing him of littering

Source: Times database

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