MANY MARRIAGES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 48, 26 January 1926, Page 7

MANY MARRIAGES.

FIVE HUNDRED ENGAGEMENTS.

THOUSANDS OF LOVE LETTERS.

LONDON Dec. 6. “Always tho .gentleman” sums up the description given by a landlady who was dismayed to learn that the man she considered “a model of' courtesy and thoughtfulness”—namely George Leslie (alius Patrick Moran), aged 64—had married seven women, was engaged to about five hundred others, and had a bag containing 5000 love letters from various women.

Leslie was charged at the Leeds Assizes with threo bigamies, and with fraudulently obtaining £1270, and was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, to be followed by five years’ police supervision. . Tho police said Leslie had for twenty years systematically obtained money from women under a promise of marriage, after which ho eluded them. During his career ho had received various sentences, starting with soven years’ penal servitude in 1892 for stealing postal orders. He was convicted on two charges of bigamy in 1911. He proposed marriage in 1920 on the night he first mot a certain domestic servant, who sent him £1 every month for five years. Another woman appealed to tho Judge to help her child, of whom sho declared Leslie was the father. She said sho had gone through a form of marriage with him. On that occasion Leslie borrowed ten shillings from her in the church. Sho had been a nurse and had given Leslie £BOO. It was further asserted that through a matrimonial agency Leslie had boon in touch with over a thousand women. The stories of his dupes resound throughout the midlands and the north of England.