MAGISTRATE’S STORIES

Hokitika Guardian, 5 July 1926, Page 4

MAGISTRATE’S STORIES

LONDON, May 21. Walter Brocklcbank was selected out of 100 applicants for the job of fitter in a Camberwell works. His employers did not know that be had been convicted several times for larceny, and the knowledge was not shared by Constable 771 L, who met him carrying a bag'" in Crown street, Camberwell. “Bather heavy, isn’t it?” remarked the officer, pointing to the bag. “Just a bit,” agreed the fitter. “It’s only old metal left over from a job.” “Our inspector is keenly interested in old metal,” replied the officer ; “let us go and show it to him.” And when the inspector had seen the metal ho was so interested that he wanted to know where he could find more like it, and the fitter s film, who had lost, the metal, told him, whereupon Walter Ilroeklehauk, whose only excuse was that he had been to Calcutta, owned up to the theft and was sentenced to six weeks’ haul labour.

Every time Leo Loynd was hard up he stole and pawned the diamond ring belonging to tlio wife of a civil seivant who bad rooms at bis parents’ house. As Leo was frequently hard up the thing became monotonous. The Civil Servant’s wife grew tired of waiting for her ring while Leo’s mother redeemed it from the same pawnbroker. who always advanced the same sum, £2 10s. And Leo’s parents grew tired of Leo. who, after doing time for sundry thefts, had been sent to South Africa. But he returned m the spring time, which is ring time, and after his last visit to the pawnbroker be was arrested. Leo, who is only ~0, was very smartly dressed, and he said he pawned the ring to buy clothes m order to get a job. In the job that Mr Gill provided for him during the next three months his 'clothes will he supplied by the Government.

The scene was laid in Tower Bridge Police Court, when Mrs Susan Kent and Mrs Ellen Clifton were, not concerned with biting their thumbs at

each other but with biting each other’s thumbs. Mrs Kent graced the dork with a sore thumb and a baby, and Mrs Clifton posed in the witness-box with a painful thumb and a velvet coqt.

Hostilities began in a public-house, where a request by Mrs Kent for a loan was accepted as an ultimatum, and in a few minutes glasses wore being discharged at point-blank range.

The tide of battle then surged to Coxson’s-court where a mouth-to-lmnd encounter developed into a tearing ol clothes and a scratching of faces. Mrs Clifton’s face resembled an eccentric reproduction of Mercator’s projections. Mr Tassell, the magistrate,, decided that in the fight- honours were even, but ho fined Mrs Kent 7s Gd oil a further charge of having been disorderly.

This familiar episode in a Bermondsey ■ Saturday night reflected ike joy With which London’s Irish quarter received the settlement 'of the great strike. A score of “drunks” enlivened by an occasional fight, passed through the dock. The drinking may have been a mere reaction, but the fights wero a pleasant recreation. It is a way they have in Bermondsey, as a chivalrous but misguided little -mini found to his cost. Ho tried to stop two women from fighting in the Old ICeiit-rond, and bis costs, came to 7s Gd for insulting behaviour, because his excitement outran his gallantry.

After eight years of courtship a clerk decided that his love for a waitress .having coded, it would be natter for them to part. The waitress, however, had other views, which she eloquently expressed outside the Elephant and Castle.

Declaring that the fickle clerk was talking through his hat, the angry waitress seized the offending headgear, threw it in the road, and jumped on it. Meekly tlio clerk entered a convenient shoo and bought another hat, which speedily followed the fate of the other: lie retaliated by tearing tbe waitress’s coat, she countered with a grab at his' collar, and just when the argument was becoming interesting a constable oried “Enough,” and the magistrate fixed the price of moral and material damage at os each.

, Celebrating the end of the strike, a. young silksni.au (whatever that may mean) was discovered in Willow B alk Goods Depot surrounded by sixteen boxes of face-powder, which he had abstracted from a chemist’s consignment.

A railway constable who arrested him asked him the obvious question as to what he intended to do with the wholesale aid to (-canty. He replied that he \fis going’to put a new complexion on the strike. The puzzled detective took flim before a puzzled magistrate, who, learning that the silksman had a very good character, put him oil probation.

An informal argument in court as to what precisely, was a silksman was settled by an inspector, who' declared for “a, trainer of silkworms.”