Boy and Live Coals

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 159, 8 July 1938, Page 2

Boy and Live Coals

CRUELTY OF FATHER LONDON, June 18. Stanley Parrack, 27-year-old leading aircraftman at Hendon, was fined £25 on June 2 for cruelty, including making his seven-year-old son pick up live coals, is to be dismissed from the : Royal Air Force. Sir Kingsley Wood (Air Minister) made this announcement in the House of Commons. | Asked if any provision would be made for the wife and son, the Air Minister said there would be a service gratuity, and Parrack would be placed under tho Unemployment Insurance Acts. j During tho police court proceedings, when Parrack was convicted, the j magistrates were told that if he were sent to prison it would mean his discharge from the Royal Air Force and that this would leave his w r ife and children without means. In a statement yesterday Mrs. Lily Gibbs, Parrack’» mother-in-law, said: i“I have not seen him since tho police I court proceedings and do not know where ho is. All I want is to have tho custody of tho boy given to me. He was with me until August of last year. ’ * At tho house in Rowan avenue, Hove, i where Mrs. Parrack has recently been (staying with relatives, it was stated jlast night: "Mrs. Parrack is in London with her husband. We do not know tho address.” Parrack had claimed that, when ho made his son pick up the coals with his bare hands, he did not know the coal was so hot, nor that the boy was really burned. The magistrate, sentencing Parrack, I said: "This is a case of shocking illtreatment, and one really deserving of imprisonment. If you do not pay tho fine within one month you will go to prison for three months.” After the case, people demonstrated outside Parraek’s homo in Brighton. Angry crowds shouted: “Lynch him,” and had to bo dispersed by the police in the early hours of the morning. Accommodation was provided elsewhere for Parrack and his family. Crowds hissed as he dfove away. It was thought that Parrack had gone to stay with his brother %vho was an officer in the East Sussex police. Dennis Parrack, the son, is now in a public institution at Brighton.