SHOT AT QUEEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 127, 1 June 1938, Page 8

SHOT AT QUEEN.

WOULD-BE ASSASSIN.

OLD WARDER'S MEMORY.

NEARLY A CENTENARIAN.

To live for two years in close contact with a man who shot at Queen Victoria was the experience of Mr. Job Humph- j ries. who, at the age of 98 years, lives a vigorous, independent life in his home in Alfred Street, Avondale. The man | was named Oxford, and when Mr. I Humphries came in contact with him I Oxford had been confined for thirty I years in the Broadmere Criminal Lunatic Asylum in England. Mr. Humphries was a warder there, and at the end of the two years he helped Oxford to carry his box down to Wellington College station, en route to Australia. 'He was a little man, whose surroundings had not been very good," said Mr. Humphries'. "He had picked up with a lot of 'bad eggs,' atld he always said that he wasn't to blame for the shooting. He had been bribed. . . . There's always somebody a bit deranged to do that sort of thing. Oxford suffered from delusions occasionally— thought he should be higher in the world than he was. After all, the Queen pardoned liim on condition that he should go to Australia and never come hack to England again. I helped him with his box down to the station, and that was the last I saw of him, but some time after I came to New Zealand I saw his name in the paper as having died in Australia." Crimean Days. It is quite a way back in history to the time of that attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria, but the memory of Mr. Humphries goes further than that. He was born in 1840, when the Crimean War was still raging, and his first memories are of troops marching, drums beating and flags flying. He was still a young man (and he must have been a big one, looking at his frame to-day) when he took a position at the asylum, but he stayed there only for the two years. "Then I fell in love, got married, and came out to New Zealand," he explains. That, too, was many years ago, for Mr. Humphries has the distinction of having turned the first sod on the railway line from Auckland city to Otahuhu. After that he applied for a job at the Auckland Mental Hospital, and was there for 17 years, rising to the position of senior warder. They were "bad days" in that institution, he said, not from the point of view of control or treatment, but of facilities. Even the water for the lios- j pital had to be carried from a stream, and there were other difficulties. Fifteen Months to 100. He recalls tlllat he had to deal with many violent cases, some of them murderers, and that on several occasions he was lucky to escape serious injury or death himself. He was cleaning out the padded cell once when he was attacked by the patient, and was under him on the floor when luckily another attendant came along. It was his own fault, though, he said. There were orders that the attendants were not to enter those cells except in twos. For all that experience Mr. Humphries has not suffered. His wife died "at the time of the 'flu," and he lives now in a little self-contained two-roomed house in Alford Street, adjoining the home of his son. He looks after himself—and is quite capable of doing it. Mentally alert, vigorous, and with slight deafness his only apparent physical' failing, he looks more like a man of 60 or 70 than a man who can say, "I want to live to be 100 years old"—and be looking 110 further into the future than 15 months!