A MUSIC HALL TRAGEDY. A FATHER REVENGES HIS CHILD'S ILL-TREATMENT. A SAD STORY. (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) London, June 27.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 395, 21 August 1889, Page 6

A MUSIC HALL TRAGEDY. A FATHER REVENGES HIS CHILD'S ILL-TREATMENT. A SAD STORY. (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) London, June 27.

A rROFOusn sensation was created at the Canterbury Music Hall (which is one of the largest and smartest in London) on Friday night about eleven o'clock, when it became known that the head of the Letine tioupe of acrobats, for whose turn the audience r were even then waiting, had been stabbed and mortally wounded whilst getting out of a cab at the door a few minutes previously. His murderer, so the story went, had shot himself with a revolver after knifing Letine, and both men had been carried ofr" to Westminster Hospital in a dying condition. The circumstances of this crimo (if indeed crime it can be called) proved on inquiry to be very peculiar. Letine says the "Daily News" of Monday had given a performance at the Paragon Music Hall, in the Mile-end Road, and had di iven from thence to the Canterbury Music Hall in the Westminster Bridge Road, in company with his wife and his * troupe ' of three young girls and a child. They travelled in a private omnibus, and Letine had no sooner stepped out than he was attacked by Nathaniel Currah with a formidable knife, andsuch wounds were inflicted in the abdomen of the unsuspecting performer that he only lived half -an -hour or so after reaching St. Thomas's Hospital, which was not very far off, and to which he was promptly carried. What was said by the assailant on confronting his victim is variously repotted, but it was something to the effect that ' ' I have waited for you for a long while, and now J have got you." According to one account, he added, " You killed my Baatie, and I'll kill you. '' Thei-e can be not the least doubt that the man had for a long time past been fretting under the conviction that his child had died | in consequence of ill-usage on the part of Mr and Mrs Letine. We are not, ot course to be understood to give at present the slightest support to any such charge, but there can be no doubt at all that Currah believed it. As a matter of undisputed fact the girl bad left home a handsome, well-de-veloped, spirited child of thirteen, and she was brought back by Mr and Mrs Letine in about twelve months a mere wreck. "As coon as I saw her get out of the train," said her brother on Saturday, "says I to myself, you'll be a corpse any day/ and medical examination proved that she was suffering from enlargement of the heart, acute bronchitis, congestion of the lungs, and pleurisy, and that she was altogether in a very emaciated condition. Crayford is a village -in Kent, about sixteen miles from London Bridge. It has a population of four or five thousand inhabitants, and for twenty years and more Currah has been engineer of the small waterworks supplying the neighbourhood. Everybody knew him and his children, and down there it is universally allowed that the changein the child wasashockingone. They are all agreed, too, that he was a steady, respectable man, of rather a lively, jocular disposition. He is said to have been very averse to the girl's proposal to join Letine's troupe ; but she and a young schoolfellow had seen the advertisement, and were crazy to go. The schoolfellow's father stoutly refused his consent, and kept his girl at home ; Currah reluctantly yielded, and when his bright, handsome girl came home to him shrunken to a skeleton and fatally shattered in health, some degree of remorse evidently mingled with his indignation. The girl received medical attention and went for a time to a convalescent home, but she lived only for nine or ten months, and died last February. By general testimony the man was fond of his children, and proud of them, as he might well be, for they are exceptionally handsome. Currah felt the death of his child most acutely. As she lay inthecoffinhewasseen to passiiis handsoftly over her brow, " in a strange way," said the narrator, " and he said, c My poor child ! you've been murdered !' " Ever since February last ifc is agreed on all hands that Currah has been an altered man. His son — an intelligentlooking young fellow, found on Saturday in charge of the waterworks, to, which his father wa3 expected to return for duty on the day he was lying in ambush for Letine — says that he became strange and rambling and excitable in his manner, and all his neighbours testify to the same thing. They say he was morose and churlish, and would frequently talk in a rambling, incoherent way. He became, in fact, quite another man. Of course Mr Currah's belief that the ruin of his child's health and her early death weredue to the treatment experienced under the hands of Mr and Mrs Letine may be entirely a delusion. There are some facts which certainly would suggest ths belief that it must have ,been so. After this girl Beatrice had been with Letine some time, an older sister, Gertrude, engaged herself with him. Mr and Mrs Letine and their troupe lived in a goodsized, old-fashioned house— more than comfortably furnished, if the drawingroom affords any criteron, at the foot of Denmark Hill. Relatives on the premises affirm that all the troupe had the run of tHe house, were treated in all respects as members of Mr Letine's family, that they travelled professionally in a private omnibus, and at other times in a carriage and pair, an arrangement probably tound needful, as they usually gave five performances at different halls in one night. They were always treated with kindness and liberality, and those who know them in the music-hall world speak well of them. There are, however, statements on the other side which ao doubt will have to be examined in opan court, and the public will have an opportunity of judging for themselves as to the alleged wrongs of Beatie Currab. It is quite certain that Currah himself believed his daughter had been ill-treated, and it is, moreover, a matter of newspaper record that the fact of the girl's engagement with Letine and return home in ruined health came to the knowledge of the Society for, the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who appear to have had reason to believe that a libfcle boy ab that time in his hands was illtreated and neglected. A' summons was taken out at Lambeth Police Court, and the girl, whose health was alleged to have been ruined in the employment, appeared as a witness against the Letines. The case, however, was dismissed. Five months Jater the same society brought another charge against the acrobat .trainer, at Cardiff, which was the last place at which the poor §irl had performed* before going home to ie. The society represented themselves in a position to prove that Beatrice Currah had been brought from her bed and compelled to go through a public performance when she was ill, and that in order to give proper roundness to her shrunken limbs her tights were carefully padded. But here again the case broke downj though this time without-having been fully heard out, the prosecution collapsing on some point of dates. It seems certain that Currah had from the prat resolved to be revenged for what he be-

lieved to bo the iU-usageof his t daughter,,and probably if these charges against Letme had Boea sustained, he would have beenfin a certain sense satisfied. „ But >they, failed, and," that," said an intimate friend..of his on Saturday, " made him more excited and irritable than .ever." His son says thatfof late he had acquired all sorts of strange habits, such as nervouslytying knots in bits of string, aud incessant^ talking to himself. He would break • out in the niosb violent passion, and would swear.in a why he never was . accustomed to do, and on more than one occasion he was evidently contemplating suicide. He had written to Mrs Fawcett, having heard of her interest in performing children, and gavo her an account, which she afterwards" published, of the sufferings of his child. It is said that he would brood for hours upon a picture over his mantelpiece in which some children were represented hanging flowers on a cross , bearing the inscription, " Our little one, 5 which he would occasionally murmur to himself. He called some six weeks ago at the office of the society in Harpur-street, Bloomsbury, and appeared to be in a very distressed condition. He couldn't sleep, he told them, but thought of his poor child night and day. i Last week he was seen wandei'ing in the ' fields n6ar his house without his hat. On Friday last his son says he was like a madman, and from his appearance he had, on the morning of that day, evidently been crying, In this frame of mind Currah started for London on Friday morning, having, it is said, made his will, in which he leaves what he possesses to his present wife, whom he mai'riod before the death of his cjiild. It seems that he also drew up some sort of a statement of his intentions, but all concerned in the matter are naturally vory reticent about this. With or without such written statement, however, there can be little doubt that he started from his home with the desperate purpose of taking his revenge, in which he was only too successful. Mr Letine, when he stepped out ot the vehicle, wore his professional " tights " and spangled costume under a coat and trousers. Currah's stab was low down in the abdomen, and the blade gashed upwards in a frightful manner. A relative of the victim thinks there must have been two thrusts. However this may have been, Letine seems to have made a step or two after his assailant as he turned to 'walk 'away, and then had only time to gasp, "I am dying!" and fell to the ground. An instant after Currah put a pistol to his own mouth and fired and also fell, and the murderer and murdered lay weltering in blood in the roadway. Both were conveyed to St. Thomas's Hospital, where, as reported in "The Daily News," Mi* Letine died within half an hour of his admission. His assailant had been less successful in his attempt on his own life, and seems likely to recover. The general feeling in the neighbourhood of Cray ford is one of regret taat the revolver should have failed to effect its purpose. Whatever may be the degree of moral responsibility under which the deed was committed, the unhappy rcan unquestionably was actuated by a real or imaginary grievance of the gravest possible kind, and a grievance, moreover, for which he had failed to bring retribution in a court of law. On inquiry being made at the hospital at a late hour last night, it was stated that Currah had so far recovered that he had been removed to the Clayton Small Waid, where he is in custody and watched by the police. Yesterday afternoon his wife paid him a visit, but she only remained a short time. Currah appeared quite rational, but did not realise his position. He spoke principally of his dead daughter Beatrice. He seems to , have no recollection of the deed he committed.