WOMAN AS MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXV, Issue 217, 10 September 1904, Page 13

WOMAN AS MAN.

AN EXTRAORDINARY CASE:. iFroin Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, August .". A life-story, so strange that if told In fiction it would have been rteridtd as impossible, was disclosed this week in a Loudou police court. A frail-looking old man. neatly dressed, with a pale, wrinkled face, sad eye.s. ami grey liair closely cropped, was charged with drunkenness, and to the astnnishe«l officials made a mo>t remarkable con/eesion. The tired-looking little old "man" was really a woman, by name Catherine (,'oomo. aged t*S. For the past 50 years sho had been leading a man's life in many lands, wearing a man's clothes and assuming a man's name She had worked as :i captain's el«rrk aTid as house-painter. had been twice ••married" in church to other women, and knocked about the world for the greater part of her life In masculine guise, and only once before — in a

workhouse—had her secret been discovered. To an ••Express" representative who bailed out Catherine from Holloway Prison on Tuesday, the old woman told the story of her life. Incidentally one may reflect upon the multifarious duties of the twen-tieth-centrnry reporter. To bail oat an accused person in order to secure an inter-

view strikes mc as something new In Journalism, but it Is a feature which seems to have possibilities before ir.

To return, however, to Catherine Coome. It was the cruelty ft her hnsband whirh drove her to run away from him and sink her identity by disgnisin? as a boy. For three and a-half years she sailed the Mediterranean as ;i ouptnin'rf olerk, and then apprenticed herself tn ;i bouse-painter in an English viliagi-. The maid of thp vicar's wife became her "sweetbeart!" "I had to have company somehow or other." said Catherine, in telling the story. Four years later sno "Tnarrteil" the girl. '"The wedding," she narrates, "took place at St. Harseret's. Westminster, and we had been happily married for four years when my poor wife died. Pn»" had hren ailing before I married her. At Huddersfield I married agaxn—tills time Miss Peters. dressmaJrer, whose parents 'ived in Jersey. We were married for "21 years, and I do not believe a couple were ever so happy as we were. Incredible as it may seem. I believe that she never guessed I was a woman." Latex In life Catherine Coome became a decorator on the P. and O. Company's ships, and made several voyages to Australia in that capacity. Latterly accidents and lllhealth have darkened her chequered career, and sent her more than once to tie workho«3e and the infirmary. Such la tier amazing stoiy. fflseioeed after a lifetime of mae,ttuer«de.