Master And Pupil

NZ Truth, Issue 968, 18 October 1924, Page 7

Master And Pupil

•. * . MEET IN PRISONERS' ROOM. Wasted Careers. No one shall know with what curiously mixed feelings two men regarded each other m the prisoners' roomof the Christchurch Supreme Court last weekend, when they waited there for sentence, one on a sexual crime, the other for breaking and entering, for m the days of a happier past the former was head teacher at St. Andrew's School, hear Timaru, and,nthe other his dux pupil. The teacher, William Fraser Park, was sentenced to five years' hard labor on no fewer than sixteen charges of indecent assaults on males over a period of five years. It was stated that he was 43 years of age, and his work as the head master of a school had been highly. . commended by those m authority. Medical evidence was called m this case, and Dr. F. Bevan-Brown stated that accused belonged to a well-defined type with an abnormality well known to the medical profession. In reply to a question by his Honor (Mr. Justice Reed), the doctor said the man was not of the same type as Oscar Wilde. The younger man, Samuel Robert Smith, had a previous record of dishonesty, and was sentenced to three years' reformative detention with the parting injunction by his Honor that prisoner would find it to his advantage to watch his step on release, for the next time he came before the Court would mean his declaration as an habitual criminal and the corollary possibility of his spending the remainder of his life m gaol. »