MAYFAIR GIRL TO RUN FARM FOR EX-CONVICTS

Southland Times, Issue 23652, 29 October 1938, Page 16

MAYFAIR GIRL TO RUN FARM FOR EX-CONVICTS

LONDON, September 24. A farm in Kent, where former convicts are trained to work on the land, is to be run by Dierdre du Barry, a 24-year-old Mayfair girl, who comes of the same family as the famous Mme. du Barry, of the eighteenth century French court. Miss du Barry, who has been helping convicts and their families « for three years, said this week: “I began this business when an old nurse of mine got me interested in an Irish boy who was in Brixton Gaol for stealing £2OOO worth of bonds. He had been a friend of my nurse and she was terribly upset about it. When he was transferred to Wandsworth I went and got his clothes and kept them for him and when he came out I paid his passage back to Ireland. He still writes me occasionally, calls me his colleen.” Since then Miss du Barry has employed nine former convicts at different times in her own household, Tenterden Manor, Kent, to give them their first jobs—and good references. Describing some of the difficulties of her work, she said: “One tried to murder the kitchenmaid because she refused to ‘walk out’ with him. She liked the gamekeeper better. Then there was Evan. I found one day that he had packed my riding clothes and all my silk shirts and was about to depart with them.” Miss du Barry does not keep books on the cost $ her good work. But she estimates they cost her between three and four hundred pounds a year. The new farm will cost more than that. “We breed chickens, turkeys and pheasants there now,” she said, “and I am planning to make room for 15 or 20 more men. We can probably use some of them growing crops, but I haven’t worked out that plan yet. I need the advice of farming experts. “This work is interesting,” she said. “Most of the men I’ve dealt with will reform, I find, if I can show them it is worth it to them. My system is simply offering them a reward—a pound or two—for good behaviour.”