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Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 40, 15 August 1918, Page 8

When jurymen were being called at the Supreme Court this morning the following failed to answer to their names :—Patrick Kennedy, Frank Hodgson. George , Childs, and Alexander Smith. As there was a possibility of the hour of attendance having been mistaken, his Honour Mr. Justice Hosking decided to hear the explanations of the missing jurymen at 10 o'clock to-morrow morning.

It was stated by Mr. T. S. Ronaldson, Assistant Public Trustee, in giving evidence before the Military Service Board to-day, that about one hundred and twenty members of the Public Trust Office staff are now at the front. The Department, he said, was looking forward to some of them returning to their duties at the conclusion of the war. In the meantime, lie added, the office was losing one or two additional officers every month—chiefly young men coming ■ of military age.

In a letter to the Dunedin Star, relative to the case in which Captain Robert Fraser, Assistant Superintendent of Mercantile Marine at Dunedin (formerly of Wellington), was fined £10 on a charge of obstructing an armed guard, Mr. J. A. Howden says: "It was with surprise and indignation that I read the report in your columns with reference to the charge laid against Captain Fraser, Shipping Master at Port Chalmers. I have no brief for him, but I have known him intimately for the past seventeen years, and I most emphatically declare that I never heard him utter an oath. Mr. Bartholomew, in giving judgment, states that by his conduct in the witness box 'ha was evidently a most excitable person.' If Mr. Bartholomew was accusedl of giving utterance to such language, what would his conduct be? Would he treat it serenely? There is not a business man in Port Chalmers but would as soon believe that his, Worship would repeat the filthy expression from the Bench as that Captain Fraser should have made use of it to the guard. Both are impossibilities. Unfortunately for Captain Fraser, Captain Dowell was not there to refute this evidence. The sympathy of every shipping man in Port Chalmers goes out to Captain Fraser in this matter, and everyone here, knowing him, believe it is only persecution on the part of the military guard. I aefc you, sir, as a matter of common justice to a much wronged citizen, to publish this lel(ter." .