MOTHER AND SON MEET AFTER 20 YEARS

Shannon News, 2 July 1926, Page 4

MOTHER AND SON MEET AFTER 20 YEARS

WOMAN’S MYSTERIOUS PAST A dramatic meeting between mother and son, after twenty years, and a surprise piece of evidence invalidating the mother’s second “marriage,” were features of an unusual case heard at Marylebone Police Court. A feeble and nearly blind woman of 75, giving her name as Lydia Rushton, and an address at Hasborough Street, Paddington, summoned Charles William Rushton, dentist, of Praed Street, Paddington, alleging that he had deserted her in June, 1925. She was married to Mr. Rushtoil, she said, on April 5, IS9I. Mr. Rushton told the court that she was not legally his wife, He said lie had evidence that the first husband was living in New York. He was her third. To the evident astonishment of the old woman, he then called her son by the firct marriage to corroborate him. Herbert Edwin Davies, of Rainbow Hill, Worcester, asked if the old wOi man was liis mother, looked at her intently, and then said that so far as he could recollect she was. “You see,” he explained. “I have not seen her for nearly twenty years, and she seems smaller.” The last time he saw his mother was at the .funeral of her father, nearly twenty yeasr ago, and he last saw his father in 1911, when he returned 'to Worcester from America aftan absence of nineteen years. Mr. Folkes Jones, the woman’s solicitor, said she told him she had not seen her first husband for. 52 years, as she left him shortly after the birth of this son. In reply to the magistrate, she admitted that the witness was her son by her firs.t husband, and the case was dismissed, the magistrate suggesting tha tthe son should do what he coulld to help his mother. “I am afraid I cannot,’ ’he. replied “I don’t want to say anything in open court, but if I could you would be astonished.”