QUEEN OF BEGGARS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17040, 14 May 1923, Page 6

QUEEN OF BEGGARS.

CHAMPAGNE AND COUNTRY HOUSE. Behind the sentence of nine months’ imprisonment, passed by Judge Atherley Jones, K.C., on Caroline Vickers, at the Old Bailey, lies a remarkable story of fraud undetected for many years, says “ Lloyd’s News.” Described by the police a* “a most persistent and cunning begging-letter writer and a very dangerous woman,” Mr 9 Vickers, it is known, obtained £1065 from eight people alone. Of her early days the police can find out but little. Aoording to her own story, she was bern in Lincoln, of good parentage; but the police have fair reasons for believing that a Lincoln dairyman was her father. in any ease, she married in Lincolnshire, having run away from bom® and “ married beneath her.” Of her husband, a railwayman, there is now no trace. Mrs Vickers lived in Canonburv, N., and she lived there in good style. Cases of champagne were not an unknown luxury. She had been known to change a £SO note (got from one of her dupes) with her family grocer. Sums of £lO and £ls were not infrequent responses to her begging letters, a trade which paid her so well that she was able to keep it going from 1904 to 1921. Then, in 1921, she had an altogether new idea —the one which led to her conviction. It was the very simple plan of posing as an authoress and advertising for a young man to oopy manuscripts of novels and film plays, the post being “permanent” at £3 a week.

But, as she had had a previous employee “walk off with her manuscripts.” a security of £l5O was required.

And, unfortunately, she got it, the ciueity of her fraud lying in the fact that practically all her victims were exservice men, who trusted her with their “ little all.”

In this way she got as much as £2OO and £3OO a week.

It was the siae of the sums she netted that enabled her to pay her dupes for some weeks, until she had unhappily to confess to them, indeed, that “ her trustee had died in France, so that she was unable to pay the staff.”

In addition to her Canonburv house she had two places in the countrv—St Margaret’s Bay, Kent, and at Lelant. Cornwall. They were furnished on the jinx system, the instalment* being paid out of her victims’ money.