NOVEL LEGAL LINK

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 September 1934, Page 12

NOVEL LEGAL LINK

CRIME DRAMA RECALLED LONDON, July 23. Wednesday sees the centenary of the passing in 1834 of the Central Criminal Court Act. This brought into existence not, indeed, the Old Bailey, which as a court having local power and fame had been known for 500 years, but the Old Bailey as an assize court, with jurisdiction over the whole of London and parts of Middlesex, Kent, Surrey and Essex. There is still an interesting living link between to-day and the Central Criminal Court’s early years, before the present fine building was erected. A man who committed a murder 77 years ago (in 1857), and was tried at the Old Bailey, was defended by a barrister who is now a judge of the High Court —Mr. Justice Avory. On June 21, 1857, a ne’er-do-well named Jonathan Gaydon broke into a farmhouse at Chingford and murdered an old woman, Miss Mary White. Gaydon was well known in the neighbourhood and had just come out of prison, but though the countryside was searched he could not be found. Time went on and the memory of the crime faded away, but in the spring of 1879 a homeless and hungry man told a policeman at Horsham that he wished to give himself up for a murder — “some years back,” he thought in 1853 or 1854. The policeman was not disposed to take him seriously until he said, “If you don’t believe me, write to Scotland Yard.” IDENTIFIED AFTER 22 YEARS The identification of Gaydon, after 22 years, proved unexpectedly easy. A retired policeman and the deputygovernor o£ Chelmsford Prison picked him uot, from the cast in his eye and his limping gait, as the man who had been in their hands for horse-stealing just before the murder. More remarkable still, a man who had seen him in the neighbourhood on the Sunday of the murder happened to get into the same railway carriage as that in which Gaydon was being taken to Newgate. He knew nothing of Gaydon’s arrest, but he immediately challenged him as the long-lost man. It was therefore in vain that Gaydon retracted his confession at the Old Bailey, and in delivering him to the Sheriff of Essex for execution Mr. Justive Hawkins remarked what a satisfaction is was that the avenging arm of the law could bridge a gap of 22 years. Thus a man who committed a murder in the year of the Indian Mutiny was defended at the Old Bailey by a judge who is still living and working, after 59 years at the Bar and on the : Bench.