ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20263, 24 May 1929, Page 15

ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY.

SIXTY YEARS IN PRISON.

DARTMOOR SHEPHERD'S DEATH. CALLING SHEEP BY NAMES. David Davies, " the Dartmoor Shopherd," is dead. Early in April ho was found on the roadside near Llanfyllin, close to Oswestry, where he was an inmate of tho workhouse, by a motor-cyclist, and at the inquest the jury recorded tho fact that he had died from heart failure arid exposure. Ho was aged 79. Davies had been sentenced to terms of imprisonment amounting to more than sixty years. His last conviction was at Derby in 1919. Tho coroner said it was a sad end to a sad life and it was strange that after all the vicissitudes of his life he should have died near to the place where he was born.

David Davies shared his political fame with those other subjects of Mr. Lloyd George's rhetoric, pheasants and mancelwurzels. It is now some 18 years since the Liberal Leader immortalised him in an election speech. "My friend the Home Secretary and I tho other day paid a visit to Dartmoor," said Mr. Lloyd George. "On that bleak, mist-sodden upland I saw an old man of 65 in convict garb. He had been sentenced to 13 years' penal servitude because, under the influence of drink, he had broken open a church poor-box and stolen 2s . , ." My friend tho Home Secretary," of those far-off days was Sir. Churchill, who, by one of those strange turns of fortune's wheel, now occupies the position then held by Mr. Lloyd George. Together they .had visited Priricetown, and their withers had been wrung. Davies,' Helease Ordered. Mr. Churchill a few days after the Chancellor's Mile End speech, mado the following statement in the Commons:— " My attention has been drawn to tho case of the old man who is undergoing a sentence of pentil servitude for stealing 2s from a church poor-box while under the influence of drink. This was the most serious sentence ever imposed under the new Prevention of Crimes Act. I have come to the conclusion that I am justified in advising the use of tho prerogative of the Crown to release this old man, who has now served more than a year, in the course of the next few months. In the meantime steps are being taken to procure him employment as a shepherd. It appears ho possesses tho faculty of being able to call the individual sheep of a flock to him by their names." So David was released. It was on a Friday—an unlucky day, as it afterwards appeared. On the following day he went to a situation which had been found for him near Wrexham and on the Sunday he left it —for an unknown destination. It had been stipulated that he should remain on the farm for six months and Mr. Churchill was duly heckled about the errant shepherd in Parliament. He said search had been made, both by the local police and by an officer sent fiom London, but David had not yet been traced. "By breaking the condition of his licence," added Mr. Churchill gravely, "he has rendered himself liable for a summary conviction or to have his licence revoked, and any person who has aided in breaking title conditions is also liable to conviction. I will decide what course is to be taken in regard to him when I have ascertained the circumstances under which he left." A Long Criminal Record. Mr- Churchill omitted to mention a fact which had already leaked out—that the shepherd was an old gaolbird with a long criminal record and that the sentence of 13 years included 10 of detention uftder the new Act of Parliament passed by tho Liberal Government specially to deal with such cases. Sir Alfred Wills, a former Judge, had given Davies' history to. the public. He was, it seemed, quite a lovable personality, always happy in gaol. He said:—"He was employed as the shepherd of the Dartmoor flock. He loved his sheep, took the utmost care of them, and they loved him. He never drove them, but in a kind of scriptural fashion led them forth. They obeyed him and he had no trouble with them. But he had an incurable mania for theft, generally of a petty order. When released he expected soon to be back again and his expectations were always satisfied. He never committed any act of violence; ho was sorry on this occasion to have to leave Dartmoor and part from his flock." It was about two months before David Davies was found. He had stolen four bottles of whisky and rifled another church box, and "ho was sentenced eventually at Shropshire Assizes to nine more months of imprisonment. Sinco then David Davies, although fated to bo a national character to the end of his life, had been no longer a political hero, and he was never again rescued from the "bleak, mist-sodden upland of Dartmoor" by touring Ministers.