DISGUISED CHEF

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 276, 20 November 1937, Page 9

DISGUISED CHEF

IDENTITY REVEALED NEW YORK, Nov. 18. A message from Oyster Bay says that it has been disclosed that Grouard was Lucy Hall, a Pennsylvania servant girl, who ran away from home 40 years ago. She informed her employer at Oyster Bay that she was born in the south of France and came to America at the age of four. She sent a letter to her parents not knowing that they were dead, only a few days before her own death. She saio that she was dangerously ill and needed help.

A New York message on November 16 stated: A message from Oyster Bay says that not until her death was the secret which a chef to a socially prominent family had concealed for 14 years revealed, namely that, though working as a man under the name of Alfred Grouard, she was really a woman. Moreover, her determination to keep her secret cost her her life, as she resisted every attempt to provide medical attention. It was disclosed after her death that she had been a victim of diabetes, a condition that might easily have been controlled by the use of insulin.

The employer, who engaged a short, stocky chef without references because “he” impressed him as an efficient type of man, declared that Grouard was a faultless servant, having apparently omy two interests in life—cooking and religion. Grouard never left her employer’s estate for 14 years, never received a letter, and never had a caller. When her health failed last year, Grouard repulsed her employer’s physician hysterically, but her sex was discovered while she was under a coma.