SON SUES MOTHER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 666, 18 May 1929, Page 13

SON SUES MOTHER

STRANGE LIBEL CASE £I,OOO DAMAGES AWARDED A .case described as one of the strangest that ever came into court was heard at Manchester Assizes, when Mr. Horsley Jones, aged 35, of Prestwick, sued Iris mother for libel. Mr. J. C. Jackson, K.C., said the libels were contained in two letters, and were most wicked and gross. They were apt to ruin the son’s career and his whole life. Mrs. Clara Jones, he added, was a person of strong personality, who had built up a fortune, and now had an income of between £6,000 and £7,000 a year. She was very vindictive when she did not get her own way. She owned practically all the shares in the Eaton Hill Dye and Printing Company at Radcliffe. Her son, until 1926, was manager of the mill at Radcliffe, and had a good future. In 1926' he thought it was his duty to interfere in something that affected the family honour, and from that time the mother, who did not care for his interference, started a most malevolent course of persecution against him that she had carried on with a vindictiveness that was really fiendish. “Diabolical” Action A man wrote the letters to Mrs. Jones’s dictation. They were addressed to the son’s father-in-law, and signed anonymously ‘Well-wisher.’ Her son was accused of having been guilty of an assault on a young woman and having to pay £SO to settle the matter. Other allegations were that Mr. Jones had got his father-in-law to invest money and that he and his wife were going to cheat him out of it. Mr. Jackson described the mother’s action as “diabolical.” Damages and costs amounting to £I,OOO were awarded to Mr. Jones.