“THE WIND UP”

Taranaki Daily News, 16 June 1921, Page 5

“THE WIND UP”

BOY’S STORY OF ASSAULT. REMARKABLE IMAGINATION. By Telegraph -Press Association. Auckland, Last Night. It was reported to the police at Tuakau on Sunday that the previous night a railway cadet named Ellis C. Bowbyes had been accosted and brutally assaulted on a lonely part of a road between the railway station and the boardinghouse at which Bowbyes lodged. A prompt search of the district was made by the Pukekohe police and later De-tective-Sergeant Hammond made enquiries at Tuakau, not only on the scene of the alleged assault but also the story of Bowbyes was closely examined for a clue, and some unexpected discrepancies in the account of the affair led the detective to concentrate on obtaining confirmation of the story. It was established that one night before Saturday a resident was accosted at the place concerned and the matter had been the subject of discussion at Bowbyes’ boarding-house. Then Bowbyes, a youth of 17, was invited to describe minutely the course of the assault he said he had suffered and to explain how the kicks, definitely alleged to have been dealt on his body and the suspected blow from a sandbag, had left no mark on him. Under cross-examina-tion and scrutiny the youth failed to sustain his tale and he eventually confessed that it was a hoax, suggested by the incident of the other man being accosted, and it was perpetrated because he was nervous of having to pass this point of the road in the dark and in the early hours of the morniug in the course of liis railway duty. In military parlance the previous incident had “put the wind up him.”

The first report of lhe inciden£stated: Ellis Cecil Bowbyes, a railway

cadet, was knocked down in the street at Tuakau on Saturday night, by a man who suddenly sprang upon him and administered two kicks which rendered Bowbyes unconscious. On recovery he found himself in the scrub where evidently he had been dragged by his assailant. Bowbyes had been struck heavily on the neck but is not very seriously injured. The police have traced footprints for two miles but lost track of the supposed assailant in some grass. It is presumed the motive of the assault was to obtain the keys of the railway station.