STARVING STOWAWAYS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 288, 6 December 1933, Page 5

STARVING STOWAWAYS

HARDSHIPS OF TWO BRITONS Two Britons, who declared they were starving and unable to find work in the United States, returned to their home country as stowaways in the liner Afajestic. The men. Bernard Bradley, aged 31. barber, and Ernest Webb, aged 39, engineer, were charged at Southampton recently with stowing away in the liner at Now York. “I did it through sheer starvation and unemployment,” Bradley said, adding that he had received a letter frbm his wife in England that one of his children had died. Webb also expressed his regret and stated: ”It was merely the urge to live. For 15 months I have been striving with might and main to obtain employment, but being a British subject is a great handicap in the United States to obtaining work.” Stowaways are usually sent to prison by the Southampton magistrates, but, in what the ehairman described as the exceptional circumstances, the magistrates decided to impose fines of £5, or 21 days’ imprisonment, and allowed the me t] a fortnight to pay.