20 YEARS AFTER.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 911, 4 November 1933, Page 33 (Supplement)

20 YEARS AFTER.

THIS AGE OF MARVELS. MAN WHO CAME BACK. RELEASED SLAYER DAZED. Out of the world for 20 years, and now to come back to it—from a prison cell. It is bewildering, amazing, dazzling to Edward Wild Hilton. Speeding cars instead of horse-drawn carriages; aeroplanes zooming overhead; music from a box by turning a knob; wide roads instead of country lanes. . . . And more yet to marvel at. Telephone talks across the world, cinema films that speak and sing; oil-driven ships; great buildings ... a whole host of undreamt of things. Edward Wild Hilton is 38 years of age. He was a boy of 18 when, with an accomplice named Kelly, he was sentenced to death for the murder of his employer, Mr. Daniel Bardsley, an Oldham shopkeeper. Kelly was executed, but Hilton, owing to his age, was reprieved, and committed to prison for life. A life sentence means 20 years—and the term ended last month. Hilton came from Maidstone Prison a free man—into a world which he agreed was “queer.” Walked Into New Age. It was more than that. He has walked into a new age of wonders. The world he left as a boy has vanished. While he has been m the world but not of it, we have had a world war in which millions of men of his own age died, motor cars have swarmed over the land, altering the aspect of every town and village, to add to the bewilderment of the man who stepped from solitude into a roaring, rushing traffic torrent. One of his greatest thrills was when he entered one of those glittering palaces that have replaced the old “picturedrovnes,” and heard the shadows speaking, trains thundering, guns roaring. He missed old-time screen friends, like fat John Bunny, Flora Finch and Maurice Costello- # London amazed him as a new city with its edifices of Portland stone, concrete and steel. He did not recognise Regent Street, Kingsway and Aldwych. If he is inclined to engineering, mighty motor ships and giant railway locomotives will hold him amazed. Night has for him a breath-taking display of illuminated signs that reel on words in letters of light. Crowd Waits at Prison. A ' crowd waited outside Maidstone Prison to see Hilton leave. They waited in vain. He was conducted from the prison through a side gate that had not been used tor years. Hilton, a free man in this world of marvels open before him, travelled to London in a locked first-class reserved compartment. He was dazed. He only raised the blinds once at a wayside stop to ask. how far it was to London. He carried a musical instrument, which he plays, and the Salvation Army took charge of him. They arranged a meeting between him and his parents. He has been able to see them only occasionally in the last 20 years. Hilton has developed his musical bent in prison. He led the band at Dartmoor. Perhaps he will become a Salvation Army bandsman. He had a ticket to Oldham, but he would not say if he intended going back there. Virtually he has come back from the dead into the maze of a life that we who have grown up with it take for granted. Few men can share his thrills to-day.