CRUEL MOTHER.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 88, 13 April 1912, Page 13

CRUEL MOTHER.

Annie Ridgewell, wife of a stoker in the Royal Navy, living at 15, Maxwellroad, Fulham, was sentenced at West "London Police Court to three months' hard labour on a charge of cruelly illtreating her eight-year-old daughter, Mabel Stokes, born before marriage. A neighbour gave evidence that the defendant hit the child with a stick, and when remonstrated with said, "I'll murder her before I've done." At another time she kicked the child and struck her on the nose until blood came. She had also hit the girl with a poker. A boy of eleven years said he saw the defendant scrubbing the child in a cold bath with a sink scrubbing brush and holding her under the tap so that the cold water ran into her mouth. H« also saw the girl standing in a corner with her hands above her head, and- two hours later she was in tho same position. A doctor said the child had been subjected to considerable suffering. The child was called into court. She said her previous statement to an officer of the Society for the Prevention .of Cruelty to Children was untrue, but she admit' ted that her mother had spoken to her about the case. The defendant denied having hit the child with a poker, or put her in* a cold bath. She did not remember saying she would like to murder the child. Mr. Garrett said she had been guilty of a long and • deliberate course of cruelty, and he directed that the child should be taken to the infirmary.