SYMBOLIC SUIT

Press, Volume C, Issue 29498, 27 April 1961, Page 6

SYMBOLIC SUIT

Reminder To Criminal (Special Crspdt N.Z.P.A.) LONDON. April 26. The novelist Ethel Mannin. author of 68 hooka, went into a witness box at the Middlesex sessions wearing a slate blue suit of Irish tweed which, she said, had been made from a suit belonging to her husband who died two years ago. The suit was a symbol—a reminder to a man in the dock accused of housebreaking—of a promise he had made to her husband that be would go straight. After Mannin's evidence. Frank Arthur Stanley, aged 58, who had 21 previous convictions, was released on two year’s probation. He W’as warned by the Bench, “If you ever come before a Court again in all probability you will spend the rest of your life in prison.” Mannin said she and her husband first met Stanley “via our diningroom window” when a quantity of property was stolen from their home in 1954. For this offence and others Stanley served seven years’ preventive detention. “My husband decided to try to help this man. We visited him in prison and after his release last October I got him a job at a hospital which he kept until January of this year. “Although there is this evil side to his personality he also has a great deal of good in him. He wants to do good by society.

“He learned that on* of the articles stolen from our home in 1954 was an Irish tweed suit of great sentimental value. When I told him about it he became upset and later sent me £lO to replace the suit I went to Ireland and bought some tweed which was made into a suit. When my husband died, instead of throwing the suit out, I had it made into a-suit for my. self.

"This suit to me is a symbol. Stanley told my husband he would go straight until the suit dropped off him. I still wear it in the hope it will make him remember that promise. When my husband died I gave Stanley his watch. He has never sold it although he is destitute,” said Mannin. Asking the Court for leniency, Stanley said: “I am disgusted and ashamed of letting Mrs Mannin down. She has been a wonderful friend and so was her late husband.”