MILLIONAIRE MISER

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3443, 15 March 1932, Page 2

MILLIONAIRE MISER

SUED BY A SERVANT GIRL. NEVER ALLOWED LIBERTY. "No more millionaires for me," said Trude Rudow, a servant girl aged 19, when she had described to the judge of the Labour Court in Berlin her extraordinary experiences in the household of a wealthy manufacturer. "When I arrived at his mansion," she said, "I was delighted that I had a room to myself and my own bathroom, and was treated like a real lady. The food, too, was splendid, and there was as much as I could eat." "I could not even dust a room," she said, "without having somebody to look on."

She was still more astonished, when her first "evening out" came round, to find that her mistress expected to go with her. "She was most kind," Trude told the Judge, "and took me out in her Rolls-Royce, gave me coffee in a fashionable cafe, and the choice of going to a theatre or a cinema." But when Trude found that she could never go out unaccompanied, she felt that, despite this hospitality there was something uncanny about the place.

It was a long time before she discovered that her emloyer was in the habit of hoarding , large sums of money in the house, and lived in constant fear that he might be robbed. "He used to sit up all 'night counting his money," said Trude, "and then I understood that I was never allowed out alone lest I should tell people about his wealth." The last straw was the discovery that letters from her parents had been kept from her. So Trude ran away, sued her employer for depriving her of her liberty, and demanded a month's wages. The miser failed to appear, and the Judge decided that he would have to pay. "I would rather work for the poorest people," said Trude. I

The refusal of four gangs to mix concrete on the site of the Pine Hill school, Dunedin, resulted in 70 relief workers being told to cease work. They subsequently marched to the city and put the case before the Unemployment Committee and a representative of the Education Board.