CRIMINAL’S EXPLOITS.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17750, 29 June 1929, Page 14 (Supplement)

CRIMINAL’S EXPLOITS.

A man, whose exploits include the hoaxing of a city, the deception of four women, and the bogus engagements of 73 men to pull up a roadway, was recently sentenced to five years’ penal servitude and six years’ preventive detention at the Old Bailty, London, for fraud. George Henry Wilson was the name he was sentenced in, although his real name is Sydney Arthur Methrall. He appeared to be highly amused as the story of his misdeeds was unfolded. Wilson is the son of a Walworth blacksmith. He has 13 convictions against him, chiefly for fraud, including four terms of penal servitude.

Wilson’s first conviction was in Scotland, in the name of Wylie. In 1915 he got tLV’ee years’ penal servitude at Edinburgh for fraud, in the name of Gemmell. On the day of his release from this sentence he met a young woman at Waverley Station who was on her way to Western Australia. He told her he was going to Newcastle to take up an appointment at £SOO a year, and mat he had inherited a large fortune. By the time they reached Newcastle he had proposed marriage. He induced her to break her journey there, promising that he would marry her and' take her to Australia as soon as the arrangements regarding his fortune could be settled.

This promise was not kept. The man next obtained work with a firm of engineers in Newcastle, and they sent him to do minor repairs to a church in Gosport. There he made love to the caretaker, a widow with a family. He proposed marriage and the banns were published. Before the wedding he succeeded in getting every penny of her savings and absconded, leaving her stranded. He returned to Jar-row-on-Tync and there represented himself to be Hie treasurer of an institution for the blind. He engaged a number of women to collect for him,

BOGUS V.C. OF LEICESTER. HOAXING THE CITY FATHERS

and after obtaining a considerable sum of money disappeared. The young woman he had left at Newcastle was found to be destitute. Wilson then went to London and married ’ the pretty daughter of a gamekeeper. Leaving his -wife he turned up at Leicester as “the first V.C.” of that city. Bluffing the community,. he was given a public reception and banquet, and his portrait was hung in the Town Hall. He was received into the home .of a local clergyman, and Immediately he began to pay attention to the daughter of his host. He induced her to go through the form of marriage with him and then left her. This unfortunate woman and her child were so reduced In circumstances that she applied for Poor Law relief. Some time afterwards Wilson was arrested for unlawfully wearing the V.C., and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. His portrait was then torn down from the walls of the Leicester Town Hall. On his release he got a further 15 months’ imprisonment for defrauding the blind institution at Jarrow.

Next he went to Crawley, in Sussex, where he posed as Captain Arthur, V.C., and bought four cars with valueless cheques. For these and other offences he returned to penal servitude for another three years. In 1925 he was sentenced to four years' penal servitude at Pontefract for obtaining jewellery by fraud. He was sent to Dartmoor. In his solitude at this prison he made friends with a tabby cat, and when he was discharged last September he was allowed to take his pet with him. Next he defrauded an engineer named Mengles of considerable sums.

In February, Wilson went to Ilareflcld and engaged a foreman and 73 men, and started them digging trenches in a street. Then lie disappeared.