LOST LONDONERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 138, 2 December 1911, Page 10 (Supplement)

LOST LONDONERS.

HOW SCOTLAND YARD FINDS •MISSING MEN. To ninety-nine persons out of every hundred New Scotland Yard that massive fortress-like red brick building which frowns down on the Thames at Westminster—is the great rallying Centre of the sleuth-hounds of justice, whose mission it is to track criminals to their lairs; and the heart of London's great police system, which spreads its tentacles over 700 square miles of Greater London for the safeguarding of something like 7,000,000 people. But New Scotland Yard has other duties than solving crime-mysteries and directing its blue-coated legions; and one of the least-known of them is that of probing the mystery of lost persons and restoring tliem to their friends and their relations. Every year, incredible as it may seem, nearly 40:000 persons are lost in London, which is truly called the finest hiding place in the world. They drift away from their homes —often for good reasons, often without any apparent cause at all—and are merged in London's millions, in her labyrinths of streets and slums, as a pebble is lost when flung into the sea. It is said that 00 per cent, of them are married men who seek to escape from their responsibilities. Many are criminals driven by the lash of a guilty conscience; others wander aimlessly away and lose even their identity. And Scotland Yard is the great agency —one of the several, including the Salvation Army, which does excellent work in his direction, often dealing with as main* as "2000 cases in a week —for tracing these derelicts and runaways. This excellent work New Scotland Yard performs tne year round—quietly, unostentatiously, often without thanks even. It is all in the ordinary routine, in the day's work, they will tell you; but it is a wonderful and most praiseworthy work. Think of it for a moment! Think of trying to find, among 7,000,000 of humans scattered over 700 square miles, a solitary vagrant, whose description is perhaps of the slenderest, and often misleading, especially when that individual, more often than not, is exercising all his ingenuity not to be found. In comparison, the hunting for a needle in a bundle of liav seems an easy task. But let us see how New Scotland Yard attacks these thousands of problems. Let us take a solitary case. A resident in the suburbs is alarmed to find that his son does ont return home one night. He is a steady, well-conducted young fellow, who has never stayed away all night before. The parents are alarmed, and naturally fear the worst. Enquiries the next morning at his office discloses no clue to his disappearance. He left work at the usual hour, in good spirits, presumably to return home as usual. What can have become of him?

Consumed with anxiety, tho father hurried to the nearest police station to toll his story and to ask for help to discover the missing son. The inspector smiles at his fears. "Don't worry," he says, encouragingly; "he'll soon turn up. You leave it to us, and we'll find him for you right enough. Sow, what is his description?" The relieved father describes his son's appearance and dress as minutely as possible, while the inspector enters the information in a book; and, with a final word of clieer to the father, bids him ''"Good day." Before the father has well left the station the, description of the lost youth is being telegraphed to every policestation in Greater London. and also to New Scotland Yard. Within a few minutes of tho disappearance the circumstances and the description of the lost are in the possession of hundreds of inspectors and station sergeants. The first step has been taken. This done, tho buoyant inspector summons from an adjacent room a couple of "special enquiry officers," who are experts in quests such as this, and who know every shady, obscure corner in their district, and puts them in possession of all the fucts. Tn a few minutes they are on the trail, like a couple of bloodhounds, scouring every likely hiding place for the fugitive, after making enquiries at every hospital to make sure that no accident has befallen the young man.

l'.y the. time the brace of sleuthhounds have well started on their hunt Scotland Yard has the matter well in hand. All the particulars are put swiftly into type, and incorporated in the ru'xt issue of (lie flazette (of which three or four issues are printed daily), and in an inconceivably short time the Yard's printing presses are turning out copies by the hundred. These are, distributed. hot from the press, to every police station in London in 1 the swiftest. ways possible, many of thorn being conveyed by mounted, policemen, (in receipt, of the. Gazette, the officer in i-barge of each station takes the matter seriously in hand. As each batch of constables, before proceeding on duty, is paraded before him. hi 1 reads aloud the description of the. missing man; and every constable starts on his round with a. picture of him in his mental eye, complete to his "small dark moustache" and his "glace kid lace boots." Thus, within a few hours of the anxious father's visit to the police station. a vast army of constables, parading thousands of miles of London's streets and alleys, are as familiar with his son's appearance as he is, and anxious to he the first to discover and restore him to his parents. Tu three cases out of four the cheery inspector's optimism is justified. The young man is found ,aml within a day or two is once more safe under the

parental roof, giving such cxi.kiua Lions as lie can of his wanderings. If cv;mu au-ipuciuU, Scotland Yard sets another part of its complex machinery to work. The Criminal Investigation Department takes the matter up. A detective-inspector and his clever subordinates set to work, bringing all their shrewdness, experience and knowledge of the seamy sides of London life to bear on the task. They interview the young man's employers, his office colleagues, all who have seen or spoken to him shortly hefore his disappearance. In various disguises, from city clerk to omnibus conductor, they shadow anyone suspected of a hand in the disappearance; and, sooner or later, if crime has played any part in the vanishing, they discover it and its victim, whether he has been lured to a shady lodging-house and drugged and robbed, or, in an extreme ease, has been done to death. Thus, in thousands of cases during a year, the vast machinery of New Scotland Yard works ceaselessly, doggedly, to track and restore the missing ones of London. That the world at large knows little of their work and its results, that rarely a line in the newspapers makes it public, matters nothing. It is part of their regular routine, their daily task. They do it as a duty, and expect no thanks.