HEROIC SACRIFICE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3373, 3 October 1931, Page 2

HEROIC SACRIFICE

BIG INCOME RELINQUISHED. THOUSAND HOMES SAVED. A man who gave up a post worth £2OOO a year for an ideal is now living in London on 28s. a week and supporting an aged sister. The course of Mr. William Fitzsimmons' life was changed when he heard an evangelist's appeal for more saviours of humanity. He threw up his £2OOO a year post as a buyer and the prospects of retiring, as did his predecessor, with a fortune of £50,000, and became the Thames Police Court missionary at £IOO a year. Now Mr. Fitzsimmons looks back on forty-two years of sacrifice, and though he is living on a pension of only 28s. a week, he has no regrets. "I would do the same thing again," he said recently. Mr. Fitzsimmons has talked with criminals with the worst records. He has reformed by kindness and tact hundreds of youths who showed signs of becoming habitual criminals. Many, thanks to him, are now prosperous business men; one now earns £2500 a year.

More than a thousand homes would have been broken up but for Mr. Fitzsimmons' skilled handling of young couples who sought legal separation. He waged an intensive warfare on Chinese and others who took advantage of the craze of girls for seeking thrills in the East End to lead them into opium smoking and "dope" habits. Mr. Fitzsimmons never accepted police escort even when he went into hooligan localities where police only patrolled in twos and threes. He recalled a man he could not reform. "Spring Onion" was his nickname, and he had been convicted about four hundred times for drunkenness or violence to the police—it was usually necessary to club him senseless before getting him to the police station.

"One day 'Spring Onion' was in prison recovering from a heavy bout of drinking, when a prisoner in the next cell died," said Mr. Fitzsimmons. "There was much coming and going, and the incident so affected him that he swore to turn teetotal. He kept his word to the day of his death seventeen years later."