BABY-FARMING CASE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11538, 24 November 1900, Page 2 (Supplement)

BABY-FARMING CASE.

CROYDON WOMEN LIGHTLY DEALT WITH AT YARMOUTH. Annie Lob, an elderly woman, and Henrietta Gibbs, a woman of middle age, were at Yarmouth lately convicted under the Infant Life Protection Act, and sentenced to fourteen days' imprisonment, in default of £1 fine each. The couple came to.Yarmouth from Croydon, where they were refused a license to take in infants. They brought four small children, six cats, and four boxes, but no spare clothing or children's necessaries. At the house in Bowling Green Walk, where they took lodgings, the landlady stated that no food was ever cooked, save a little gruel. When the children cried for food, she and her husband gave them some. They went to a common lodging-house owing three weeks' rent. On September 1 defendants hired a house of nine rooms on Wellesley Road. The place was shockingly filthy, and there were only two boxes and a mattress in the way of household belongings. The children, who had no nightclothes, huddled on the floor in their dayclothes with a bit of hearthrug over them. When the Yarmouth lady-in-spector called she was denied admission, and the detective-inspector only got into the house at the back by scaling a wall. The doctor who was fetched described the stench as appalling. The women pleaded poverty, Loe hysterically screaming for her darling's. Gibbs admitted that for one child she had 5s weekly, and a letter showed that defendants were negotiating to take a child for life for £20. Two of the little ones had been sent to their parents, and the other two are in the care of the children's society. Local opinion is indignant at the trifling sentence.