ADVENTURESS'S CAREER

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LX, Issue LX, 31 October 1910, Page 6

ADVENTURESS'S CAREER

The danger to society of cunning allied with good education was exemplified in a forcible manner during the j hearing at the Liverpool Assizes, before Mr Justice Hamilton, of a charge against Catherine Cavendish Chapman, a refined-looking, fashionably dressed woman, thirty-two years of age, of obtaining money and food by false pretences from a Liverpool boarding-house keeper. The story of the prosecution was that the accused went to the boarding-house accompanied by a baby and a girl, whom she called her under-nurse. She represented herself as the wifo of a man with £1000 a year, and that she had an income of £200 a year. Her other five children, she said, were living at Whinnie Hall, Fifeshire, where they were provided with tutors by her grandmother, Lady Gordon Lennox. It seemed that prisoner went through a form of marriage at St. Pancras Church, London* in September, 1896, with a married man, named Horace Edward Cavendish Chapman, who was a clerk in Holy Orders. She did not then know he was already married. He is now undergoing twelve months' imprisonment for obtaining a railway ticket by false pretences. Five of the woman's children had been adopted by the Lambeth Guardians. On the strength of prisoner's representations the landlady of the boarding-house lent her small sums of money, and supplied her, the baby, and the nursegirl with food. Amongst other things prisoner said her eldest son Gordon was entitled to £8000 a year when he came of age. All prisoner's representations about her income and her relationship with Lady Gordon Lennox were found to 'be fictitious. Detective Sub-Inspector Moore said that prisoner came of a family in a fair social position. She was born at Clifton, Bristol, on July 2, 1875. When quite young she was taken to Glasgow, where she remained witil eighteem years of age, when she came to England as a companion to a lady. She went to London and went through the form of marriage with Chapman, who was then a clerk in Holy Orders, but was said to have been inhibited later. On one occasion she was found helplessly drunk in the streets of London. She was convicted in the Westminster Police Court in four cases of false pretences and obtaining money from policemen in the streets, , to whom she represented that she was the wife of a clergyman and had lost her purse. In that way she obtained small sums to enable her to, get home. She was released on October 22, 1908. There was very little doubt that for some time she had been living by fraud. There were letters found in her possession from which it appeared she hired a cabman to drive her about London, and borrowed money from him, through the want of which his home was sold up and he lost his cab. His Lordship said prisoner's case was a pitiable one, because there was no doubt marriage had been to her a source of unhappiness and might have led to crime. It was evident that the fraud which she perpetrate/! on Mrs Hime was of a kind to which she was certainly no stranger. She had been convicted not very long ago of a series of petty swindles of the same kinoT, and obtaining money from compassion; ate persons by false pretences. To what extent she had been practising other frauds it was impossible ,to tell. From the statement of Detective Sub-Inspector Moore there was nothing which led him tq think she was an object of pity. She had been in custody for two months already, and she must go to gaol now for seven months in the second division.