A Mother's Secret

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 169, 22 July 1935, Page 10

A Mother's Secret

LIFE SAVINGS KEPT IN A TIN TRUNK. How a lodger discovered a secret hoard, the life sayings of his sweetheart’s mother, of which £420, nearly the whole of it, was afterwards stolen, was described at Staple Hill Police, Court, Bristol, when Joseph Smith, 21. a painter, Samuel Litson, 26, a piumber, George Sanger, 20, a labourer and Olaronce Litson, a labourer, were commit I'd for trial. They were charged with breaking into a house at Sound well on three occasions and stealing a total of £2.’!S Rosina Bryant said she got. to know Smith two years ago, when he painted the front of her house. Ho courted ho r daughter, and when he fell out of work' she kept him for eight months. She had sax ed the money unknown to her family, and kept it in her bedroom. It was to provide wedding presents for her son and daughter and a nest egg for her husband and herself in their oid age. When Smith was moving th? trunk for the, room to be painted he remarked now heavy it was, and she showed him what. il. contained. In June, 1934, she had £5OB in the trunk, but a few months later she found there was only £BO.