CROWD TRIES TO MOB ARRESTED WOMAN AND POLICE

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 August 1949, Page 5

CROWD TRIES TO MOB ARRESTED WOMAN AND POLICE

LONDON, August 16 (Rec. 9 a.m.). —A “shouting, screaming, and very hostile crowd” of 1200 attacked a woman and the police who arrested her in Islington, North London, last night, after she had allegedly thrown scalding water on her two-year-old child. The .story was told in court today by Police Sergeant Donald Gowan, when Joan Mills, 'aged 25, a typist, was remanded in custody for a week for her own protection after being charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a child. Gowan said he and other officers went to Mills’s'home in Islington in response to an emergency call. They found the police there unable to control a hostile crowd. After forcing their way into the house, two sergeants brought the typist into the street. “As soon as the crowd saw her,” he added, “they went completely mad. The police were powerless. The crowd broke the police cordon and rushed another sergeant and myself off our feet. They pulled out Mills’s hair. I received a blow at the back of the neck. The other sergeant was slashed on the finger with a razor blade.” He added that after a very tough time they got the woman into the police car, only to have the mob try to overturn it. When charged, Mills said: “It’s the tenants. I don’t know what possessed me to throw the water over the child.”