A BOY’S SUICIDE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5482, 2 October 1929, Page 4

A BOY’S SUICIDE.

MESSAGE TO HIS FATHER. “YOU DROVE ME TO DEATH.” “ I won’t be a trouble to you, now now I’m dead, dad. It was you who drove me to my death, you cow.” That was the farewell note left by Percy Henry Harrington Sillence, aged 15 years and 10 months, who committed suicide at his father’s home at Enfield on August 26, according to evidence at the inquest by the Parramatta district coroner, says a Sydney paper. Percy Henry Sillence said his boy did not go to work on August 26. He complained that he did not feel well, but at 8.30 a.m. that day went to the Broadway, Enfield, where a carnival was being held, and did not return home until 2.30 p.m. At the dinner table that evening witness said to his son : “You stay home at night in future, and give up -smoking, too. You are not to ride ■your motor-bike again until you are 16.” Aftei’ dinner the lad went into his room, and witness said he followed him and examined his body. He also told the lad to bring his bed inside, so that he would know at what hour he got home each night. Half an hour later he heard his son groaning, and found him dying. Though given an emetic the boy died a couple of minutes after the doctor arrived. He said he had taken poison. The home had been a happy one, said witness, and he did not know why the boy had taken his life. Mrs Pearl Sillence, mother of the lad, gave similar evidence. Constable White, of Enfield, gave evidence of the finding of the note in the boy’s room, and of having discovered in his waistcoat pocket a small wedding ring, wrapped in a piece of paper, on which was written : “For Betty Sillence.” Arthur Tatham, a companion of Sillence, said the boy had always been “a jolly chap.” He had been “going with a girl at Croydon,” and about a fortnight before his death he had wanted to fight a boy named Wilkie because the girl had started “going with him.” This did not seem to worry him, however.

The coroner, in returning a verdict of suicide, said that evidently the boy had taken poison because he was angry with his father for having reproved him. He had no valid reason for writing such a note to his father.