A Painful Scandal.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXV, Issue 1605, 7 May 1912, Page 7

A Painful Scandal.

A painful Old Bailey case lias been tragically stopped. The prisoner, .Mr. T. £. Stephens, a barrister, aged 73, came of an old legal family, one of his ancestors having been called to the Bar in 1052. and become a bencher. .Mr. Stephens was formerly a solicitor, and having married a wife with a small fortune went to the Bar. He was a Surrey J.P. and had stood as Liberal candidate for Plymouth and Mid-Worcestershire. He had also owned a drug business, which, in 1902, he made over to one of his sons, one of whom is now dead. The other. Mr. T. H. Stephens, now prosecuted his father for libel. There were family quarrels over financial transactions. Prosecutor sold £2OO worth of railway stock to a Cardiff ship-owner, through the Capital and Counties Bank, and prisoner wrote to the ship-owner that the -tock had been improperly transferred, as it was not his son's to dispose of. He made other allegations to the bank manager, calling prosecutor a thief who had robbed him of £2OOO, and whom he would have prosecuted at Bow street if he were not his son. There were two pitiful days in court. The son denied the charges set out in his father's plea of justification, a document yards long, which included a charge of feloniously breaking and entering the father's safe, and taking thence money, documents and other valuables. The son said he and a brother had opened the safe with a key they had made, an/1 taken documents which they claimed!