QUEEN OF BEGGARS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 106, 5 May 1923, Page 19

QUEEN OF BEGGARS.

CHAMPAGNE AND COUNTRY HOUSE. Behind the sentence of nine months' Imprisonment, passed by Judge Atherley Jones, K.C., on Caroline Tickers, at the Old Hailey, lies a remarkable story of fraud undetected for many years, Bays "Lloyd's News."

Described by the police as "a most persistent and cunning begging-letter -writer and a very dangerous woman," Mrs. Vlckers, It Is known, obtained £1033 from eight people alone. Of her early days the police can flnd out but little.

According to her own story, she was born In Lincoln, of good parentage; but tho police have fair reasons for believing that a Lincoln dairyman was her father. In. any case, she married In Lincolnshire, having run away from home and "married beneath her." Of her husband, a railwayman, there la now no trace.

Mrs. Vlckers lived In Canonbury, N., ana she lived there In good style. Cases of champagne were not an unknown luxury-

She had been known to chance a £50 note feot from one of her dupes) with her family t'oeer.

Sums of £10 find £1j were not Infrequent responses to her beCßintf letters, a trade which paid her so well that she was able to keep it polnp: from 1004 to 1821.

Then. In 1021, she hart »o altogether new idea—the one which led to her conviction. It was the very simple plan of posing as an authoress and advertising for a youns man to copy manuscripts of novels and film playe, the post being "permanent" at £3 a week.

But, as she had had a previous employee "walk off with her manuscripts," a security of £100 was required.

And, unfortunately, she got 4t. the cruelty of her fraud lying in the fact that practically all her victims were ex-Service men, who trusted her with their "little all."

In this wny she got as much as £200 and £300 a -week.

It was the size of the sume she netted that enabled her to pay her dupes for some I weeks, until she had nnhappUy to confess to them. Indeed, that "her trustee had died in France, so that she was unable to pay the Btaff." In addition to her Canonburv house she 1 hafl two places In the country—St. Margaret's Bay, Kent, and at Lelant, Cornwall. They were furnished on the hire system, the Instalments being paid out of her vie-