News by the Mail.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XXII, Issue 3874, 16 May 1906, Page 4

News by the Mail.

A STRANGE INCIDENT. The body of a youth, apparently about eighteen years old, was recovered from the foreshore of the Thames at Battersea a few weeks ago. As a result of a description in the Press, a Mrs Harvey, of Clarendon road, Paddington, attended at the mortuary and identified the body as that of her missing son, Edward, aged sixteen years, who had been absent from his home for about a fortnight. Undertakers conveyed the body to the Willesden mortuary to await burial, which was fixed for one o’clock on a Thursday. At six o’clock that morning Mrs Harvey, as she lay in bed, was startled by hearing footsteps in the passage, and she remarked to her husband, “ That sounds like Ted in the passage.” The man replied, “ No, it isn’t; go to sleep; you have not had much rest lately.” A moment later their supposed dead son was standing at the foot of their bed. He had been on tramp, and had returned from Gloucester.

Before his disappearance, young Harvey was an engine-cleaner on the Great Western Railway, at Paddington, but he gave up his situation. Some thirty of his fellow-workers had contributed towards a wreath, and all his friends and relations had donned mourning for the approaching funeral. The body found in the Thames was still unidentified when the mail left. The only articles found in the pockets were a rosary, a halfpenny and a black worsted glove.