BETRAYED TRUST

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 872, 16 January 1930, Page 1

BETRAYED TRUST

RAILWAY PORTER’S THEFT OF LARGE CAKE FINED AND CENSURED A large and Heavily-iced cake adorned the table before ChiefDetective Hammond, at the Police Court this morning. Edward Charles Burgess, ex-railway porter, who admitted stealing it, was fined £5 and severely censured by the Bench. Burgess was charged with stealing a cake valued at £1 from Elinor Smith on December IS. Mr. R. E. N. Mathews entered a plea of guilty on his behalf.

Chief-Detective Hammond said the cake had been jconsigned to complainant from Okaihau. Accused, who was a porter at the Newmarket railway station, had received the parcel, securely boxed, and taken it to the parcels room. The next day the box was delivered, but Burgess bad removed the cake. “All that was delivered was the place xvhere the cake should have been,” added the chiefdetective.

“His was a position of trust,” commented Mr. F. K. Hunt, S.M. The chief-detective said he would tell the court of another instance which would go toward showing defendant's dishonesty. There was not sufficient proof for the police to bring a charge, however. A firm in the City had consigned a bicycle to Dargaville. It was found, on transhipment at Helensville, that a lamp, wrapped up as a separate package, was missing. A lamp, identical with that missing, had been found in defendant’s house, but he had said that it belonged to a brother, whom he had not seen for two years. “This was a very mean theft,” Mr. Hammond concluded.

“Yes, his country trusted him,” said the magistrate. Mr. Matthews said defendant had served eight years in the Railway Department, but was now suspended. He had been drinking, and the theft was really a piece of drunken mischief. Burgess was a married man with a sick wife. The woman had been knocked down by a motor-cycle and had been laid up for about six months. Several things had been missed from the station.

The Magistrate: There won’t be so many now that this man has left.

Reiterating his opinion that the theft was due to drunken mischief, Mr. Matthews urged that neither Burgess nor his wife ate cake. He had lied to his wife, saying that he had won the cake in a raffle, and she had intended to keep it for her birthday. Burgess was fined £5, in default one month’s imprisonment, and given 24 hours in which to find the money.