CHANGE FOR HATRY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 98, 19 January 1935, Page 18

CHANGE FOR HATRY

Day at the Law Courts

Clarence Hatry, the meteoric financier whose crash in 1929 appalled the City of London, stepped a few weeks ago from the grim obscurity of a cell in Maidstone convict prison to move for a day in the world he once knew so well. He was accompanied by his fellow director, Edmund Daniels. Hatry was sentenced to 14 years’ and Daniels to seven years’ penal servitude in January, 1930. They experienced one of the rare breaks in these long sentences when they were called upon to be in attendance at an intricate commercial case before Mr. Justice MacKinnon in the King’s Bench Division. The case concerned companies in which they were interested, the plaintiffs being the Peterborough Trust. Limited, whose action concerned the allotment of shares in the respondent company, Steel Industries of Great Britain, Limited.

The whole of the day was taken up by the opening statement of .Sir William Jowitt, K.C., for the plaintiff company.

The two men had arrived at the Law Courts in separate motor-cars early in the morning, accompanied by four warders. and they were immediately taken by separate routes to a consultation room outside the court. There, papers and documents,, which each had handled in the years before 1929, were placed before them and they pored over them all day. Both men were dressed in the clothes usually worn by City men—black jacket and waistcoat and pin-striped trousers. Hatry was able to talk to Daniels freely, and to converse with barristers'

clerks, junior counsel engaged in the case, and others who came to him to elucidate various points. Luncheon was brought into both men on trays, and again, when the court rose for the day, a neat tea tray was brought in. It was the first time they had enjoyed such luxuries for four years.

After a consultation lasting nearly an hour, the four K.C.s engaged in the case took their leave. A bright smile and a handshake was the spontaneous gesture of Hatry to each as he left. Belling Hatty’s alert and incisive manner when giving evidence in court lies a story of his determination to build up another large fortune when he secures his release. He has told his fellow prisoners that first he has set his mind upon earning the maximum remission on his sentence by exemplary behaviour. If he succeeds in this he will be a free man again in the spring of 1940.

Meanwhile, Hatry is seizing every opportunity to maintain his brain at concert pitch. He reads widely. Soon after entering Maidstone Gaol he started to learn Spanish, and he now speaks it fluently. Hatry, those who know him believe, has already conceived the idea of leaving Britain for ever after his release to build up another fortune in South America. Hatry welcomes opportunities such as he had recently to assist him in unravelling abstruse financial problems . . . because they ail help him toward the achievement of his great plan. Every hour spent in consultation means an hour away from the deadly monotony of the daily prison tasks.