“CARPET SLIPPERS”

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 April 1934, Page 3

“CARPET SLIPPERS”

CRIMINAL’S DEATH RIDE. Scotland Yard has erased from its records the name of a man familiar to most London detectives as “Carpet Slippers.” They called him that because of liis cat-like tread. Strangely, by “profession” he was a cat-burglar. He is dead —killed in a car smash.

The man was one of the spectacular young men of the West End—glamorous, handsome, polished, and seemingly rich. That, at least, is how the women appraised him, save those -who discovered, too late, that the glamour and polish were merely veneer and his life just a masouerade. The police were never deceived. To them he was always “Carpet Slippers,” one of Borstal’s incorrigibles—burglar, swindler, forger, confidence man, and the rest.

Probably there are a score of youngwomen in London for whom the death of this masquerading man-about-town has meant disillusion and discomfiture. They are not to be blamed. “Arthur Leon Castledale”—the name by which they knew him—would have deceived anybody unfamiliar with his past.

In his spectacular life in the West End he posed as the son of rich parents in America, blessed with an inheritance and substantial allowance. Occasionally he flourished sufficient money to lend colour to the pretence. For reasons difficult to discover the man took a job last October as waiter in an exclusive Cambridge cafe, but refused to accept a wage. He was engaged by Miss Olga Gibb, a young lady related to Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish “Match King.” whose financial eclipse and suicide involved her mother’s fortune and her own. Miss Gibb established the cafe for university students in the hope of reclaiming something from the wreck, and “Arthur Castledale” joined her. He impressed Miss Gibb exactly in the same way as he impressed other women. At the end of the term he negotiated with a Cambridge motor firm for the purchase on the hire system of a powerful and expensive car. In this he went to London to resume the old mode of life with former friends and acquaintances.

CRASH INTO LAMP POST. One night “Castledale” picked up in his car at a West End restaurant three young people he had known only a few days—Mr Peter Evans.. Miss Peggy Foster, and Miss .1. Ogilvie—and offered to drive them to their respective homes in the Kensington district. Half an hour after midnight the car crashed into a lamp post near Marble Arch, and before morning “Arthur Castledale” lay dead in St. Mary’s Hospital. In the same institution M*iss Foster was detained with a fractured leg and thigh, which may mean the end of a professional career as a dancer and film artist. She is the only daughter of “Foster and Ninon,” once a familiar act on the music halls, and at the age of 21 had become the family’s breadwinner. This accident has robbed her of a position of dance hostess cabled to her recently by the management of a well-known hotel in Vienna.

On the night that “Castledale” was driving her home Miss Foster had acted as deputy for another girl at a dance club. Like Mr Evans and Miss

Ogilvie—-the two more fortunate members of the party—Miss Foster had only known the man a few days. Mr Evans, however,, did not escape injury. With one foot heavily bandaged, and supported by a couple of stout walking-sticks, he hobbled into the coroner's court at Paddington for the inquest on the dead vicum of the smash. The public accommodation was taken up almost exclusively by young women. The young women had a shock at Lie very beginning when Mr Ingleby Oddie, the coroner,- announced that “Castiedale’.’ was not the dead man’s name at all, but that he was Herbert Arthur William Young, aged 30, sometime carpenter, labourer, and cafe waiter. Still greater was their consternation when a police-sergeant unmasked the man as an incorrigible criminal, with nearly a dozen convictions for shop and house-breaking,

theft of motor cars, forgery, and false pretences. “I knew him very well indeed,” said the sergeant, “and personally arrested him on four occasions.” Then, briefly, Mr Peter Evans told the story of the smash. “Castledale,” as he knew the man, was perfectly sober, but d,x;ove much too fast along the Bayswater road, went .to the wrong side of a refuge to overtake another car, skidded, and crashed into the lamp post. A verdict, pf accidental death rang down the curtain, on the masquerade of “Carpet Slippers.”