“A FAILURE.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 456, 18 May 1932, Page 5

“A FAILURE.”

Man’s Suicide After Brooding. LEFT STRANGE INSTRUCTIONS. LONDON, May 2. At the inquest at Paddington on Harold Boan, 28, a former Cambridge University man, whose father in Australia made him a handsome allowance, a verdict was returned of suicide while of unsound mind. Boan shot himself in the heart at Queen’s Gate Place, Kensington, leaving a letter, as follows: ‘‘l hoped as a lad thkt I should do something for England as a good citizen, barrister, and husband, but I have utterly failed.” Another letter enclosed in three envelopes said: “I die without a God. My god is my conscience. I leave my body for anatomy, and my car to my wife, and I wish to be cremated, and that the ashes be scattered. The penalty of failure is death.” Evidence w r as given that Boan, who was always highly strung and strangemannered, married a girl aged 16 in 1927. A son was born to them. Mrs Boan, who is expecting another child, was too prostrated to attend the Court, but she told a constable that after she and her husband returned from a restaurant where they had lunch, Boan excitedly wrote the letters, sat on the bed, burst into tears, snatched a revolver from the mantelpiece, freed himself when she threw her arms round him, and pulled the trigger. The weapon misfired, and he pulled again, discharging a blank cartridge. She thought that she had dissuaded him from suicide, but he seized the revolver from the bed where he had dropped it and fatally fired at his heart. They had been happy, she said, but he had been sleeping badly.