A "Vicar" With A Record

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 300, 18 December 1937, Page 3 (Supplement)

A "Vicar" With A Record

WEARING a serene expression and walking with a firm step, one of the most amazir.g figures of the underworld passed out of the dock at Middlesex Sessions, to serve another term of penal servitude. For five years the outside world will see nothing of J. Bloomfield Wood, 65, poet and eelf-styled representative of the underworld, whose audacity, whether in crime or otherwise, knew no bounds. Wood was charged in the name of Charles Waters with fraud. Dressed a* a clergyman, he represented to a shopkeeper that he was vicar of a local church and wanted a camera for social purposes. That was the last seen of the camera or the benign "vicar." Wood's criminal record dates back to 1895, and he has been in nearly every prison in the country. Even his hardened companions in crime were amazed by the incredible audacity of the man. Proud of Proficiency He was proud of his proficiency with the pen, and wrote to judges, expressing the underworld's, approval of their appointment to the Bench, and signing himself, "Convict No. ." As the representative of the underworld, he attended the funerals of Sir Ernest Wild, a former Recorder of London, and Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, the famous K.C. When Mr. Eustace Fulton, the present chairman of the London Sessions, was appointed to the post, Wood wrote him a letter of congratulation. They were not his personal feelings, he declared, but he was writing on behalf of the underworld. Wood's favourite pose was that of a clergyman. He had a gift of wearing the cloth with perfect poise. In church he often mixed with judges who had sentenced him and counsel who had prosecuted him. While in Brixton Prison, awaiting trial recently, Wood wrote the following verse for a friend: — Here we suffer grief and pain, Sheltered from the wind and rain; Let us loose just once again, We beseech thee, hear us. Wood is one of the few people who know the secret of how two coiners made moulds of coins in prison unknown to the authorities.