REMARKABLE CAREER

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 304, 21 November 1934, Page 4

REMARKABLE CAREER

NEW ZEALAND CONVICTIONS.

The remarkable career of Rupert Willoughby, aged 41, engaged the attention of a Marylsbone Magistrate, London, when the defendant was remanded for medical examination.

Evidence was given that "Willoughby was variously stated to have been born in Australia, Petrograd, Devonshire, and Cairo, where his father was a Government official. He was educated at Cambridge. He was convicted at Sydney in 1925 on a charge of refusing to pay for accommodation, and had similar convictions in New Zealand, Paris and London. He was deported to Australia from Los Angeles, arrested for fraud in Minorca, deported from Spain after two months’ imprisonment, arrested for fraud in Italy, and sentenced, but put over the Yugoslavian border, posed as an author and journalist in Albania, and was deported from Athens as a British subject. Willoughby denied being m Albania and Yugoslavia, and also convictions m France, Spain and Italy, but admitted two months’ imprisonment in New Zealand, saying that that was owing to his giving his name to company promoters who decamped with the capital. He went to pieces on liis liberation, he said, and was several times imprisoned on the other side of the world, so he went to the island of Mitylene, as the only place in Europe where he did not need a passport. There he was imprisoned for seven months and a half, after which the police chained and beat him senseless and threw.him aboard a steamer bound for England.