LOVE-SICK YOUTH.

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17242, 29 October 1927, Page 14 (Supplement)

LOVE-SICK YOUTH.

THE GOLD WATER CURE. Letters and postcards from an infatuated youth to a girl who rejected his advances were read at the Old Bailey, when Ernest Pudge, aged 20, painter, of Battersea, pleaded guilty !o threatening to murder Marie Griffiths. Air J. F. Eastwood, prosecuting, said the girl, who was 20, lived at Chelsea, and was a relation of Budge by marriage. He first met her in 1924, and then began to pester her to go out with him. She refused to have anything to do with him.

She was employed in a West End store, and in consequence of his letters and postcards and his waiting for her outside she lost her position, but Budge continued his conduct, and for the last twelve months someone had to take the grl every day to and from her work for protection. There were several hundred letters and postcards, and in one of them Rudge wrote: “I have loved you more constantly than 99 men out of 100, and 1 would take your life rather than prolong this misery.” Detective Sergeant Thompson said Rudge had an excellent character, and there was nothing against him except “this mad infatuation.”

Mr M. Healy, defending, said that Rudge was greatly attached to the giri, and his pent-up emotions found expression in this way. Rejected troubadours of tlie olden days used to serenade their sweethearts bcneaLh their windows at night, and Rudge was only doing in a cruder form what they did.

Air Justice Finlay: The analogy does not seem a very close one to me. Mr Healy: The cure in the old days seems to have been a jug of cold water, and I suggest a jug of cold water has been administered to this youth, who has already had six weeks in prison to think over his folly. Mr Justice Finlay, in passing sentence of four months' imprisonment in the second division, said that ’ such conduct persisted in after a serious —"uing could not he passed oner.