ALLEGED PLAGIARISM

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17953, 3 December 1932, Page 7

ALLEGED PLAGIARISM

LORDS DISMISS APPEAL .CASE AGAINST WELLS LONDON, Nov. S. The appeal of Florence A. Decks, a Toronto authoress, in her suit against 11. G. Wells, charging plagiarism, was dismissed to-day by the judiciary committee of the Privy Council. The judicial committee ruled against Miss Decks in her appeal against the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which denied her suit for £IOO,OOO from the celebrated author. When Lord Atkin, the presiding justice, dismissed the appeal, the Toronto woman bowed and left the court, making no statement. The hearing had lasted for nearly three days, during which Miss Decks personally presented her appeal. At one point she .was momentarily overcome .with faintness, but refused the offer of their lordships to adjourn.

PURE QUESTION OF FACT At the close of the argument to-day Lord Atkin declared that whether the book, “The Web” (the one Miss Decks submitted to the Macmillan Publishing Company, which site claimed had been seen by Mr. Wells and part of whose contents he had used in his “Outline of History,’’ hail been improperly handed over and used, was a pure question of fact on which the two lower courts in Canada had concluded against the appellant. In the ordinary course of events, continued Lord Atkin, tho judicial committee would have declined to hear the appeal which suggested the findings on facts had been wrong, but since Miss Peeks bad placed such confidence in -the case Their Lordships had thought special exception might be taken in the interests of everybody.

SAME INFORMATION SOURCE Both Die books of Miss Decks and Mr. Wells had been concerned with matters happening when neither of them were alive and therefore they' would have been obliged to go to the same source of information, stated His °His Lordship further declared that, the expert witnesses in the lower court, in Canada had boon allowed to give evidence which really had been beyond the province of the experts. Miss Decks took action against Wells as far back as 1925, but it was not until about two years ago that the case was first heard in the courts, and at that time it was dismissed by Mr. Justice M r . E. Raney, in an Ontario court. Her appeal to the appellate division of the Supremo Court of Canada was refused, and she had left. Canada last February to carry her charges to tho Privy Council judicial committee.