Maximum Fines For Poison-Pen Letters

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28263, 29 April 1957, Page 9

Maximum Fines For Poison-Pen Letters

(Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, April 27. When Frederick Henry Bessemer Clark heard of children killed in accidents, he wrote anonymous letters to their mothers. Their deaths, he told them, were an advantage to Britain.

To mothers who gave birth to twins or triplets, he wrote: “Every brat born is a drain on the country.” His letters yesterday cost him £4O in fines, a penalty “quite out of date and altogether unsuitable,” said the Magistrate, “for the vilest and most contemptible crimes anyone can commit.” Clark pleaded guilty at Sevenoaks to four charges of sending grossly offensive letters to women, newspapers reported. He was fined the maximum of £lO on each, ordered to pay £lO 10s costs and was bound over on his own recognisance of £lOO and a surety in a similar amount. He asked for 21 other letters to be taken into consideration. Clark, aged 76, a retired businessman, is a grandson of the steel inventor. Sir Henry Bessemer, who died in 1898. The poisbn-pen writer was found after three and a half years of investigations. His

letters were typewritten but signed in a graceful curling, oldfashioned script. It was the writing of a postscript in one letter three months ago that finally helped detectives to recognise it in the register of a hotel in Sevenoaks, where Clark has lived since his wife died five years ago. Their only son was killed in an accident six months later, said Mr H. Y. Anderson, counsel for Clark The prosecutor, Mr N. K. Cooper, told the Court of some of the letters sent by Clark. * To Mrs Dorothy May Meades, of Twickenham, whose five-year-old son was drowned last year, he wrote: . . If more brats died there would be more room in which to live and move about the country.” After Mrs Dorothy Mabel O’Donnell, of West Ealing, London, gave birth to triplets, she received a letter telling her: “You should be ashamed of your foolish and unpatriotic action.” To an expectant mother injured in a railway accident he wrote: “If the railway accident causes your brat to be stillborn it will be a good thing for Britain.” Defence counsel said it was clear that Clark had a “bee in ■his bonnet” about overpopulation.