The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-29 00:00:00

The Story of the Patent-Office.

In 1833 Mr. Edmunds, thenthe'Lord Chancellor's
pursebearer, was appointed Clerk of the Patents,
with a salary of £250 a-year, and an allowance of
£l5O a-year to pay the expenses of the office. It
was his duty to receive the fees payable at the office
and pay the chief part of them into the Exchequer,
another part (formerly appropriated to the use of
the Lord Chancellor) to the Accountant-General of
the Court of Chancery, and another part of the
Clerk of the Hanaper, the fees to be paid over by
him every quarter and the payments verified by affi-
davit. The fees received were considerable ;in some
years they exceeded £9,000. Still larger sums were
paid into office every year for stamps to be procured
and affixed to instruments which had to pass the
Great Seal. In fact, public money, amounting in
one year to £30,000, and in the last 30 years to
more than £461,000, passed through the bands of
Mr. Edmunds, or rather of his clerk, Mr. Ruscoe,
for Mr. Edmunds never performed the duties of
the office in person ; neither did he ever pay any-
thing to Mr. Ruscoe for performing them for
him. Until this latter obtained an official salary,
in. 1852 (when the Patent Law Amendment Act
came into force and Mr. Edmunds also had an
additional salary of £6OO a-year), Mr. Ruscoe's
emolument appears to have consisted of public
money kept back from the Government without
just cause, with some small gratuities from some of
the patent agents, and the profit upon boxes which
he sold 'for containing patents. Neither did Mr.
Edmunds ever pay any portion of the cost of the
parchment or of the expenses attending the prepa-
ration of charters and patents, or any other of the
expenses of the office ; they were all defrayed by
Mr. Ruscoe out of the stamp discounts which be-
longed to the Government, and the sums which he
deducted from thefees received for the Government.
In the performance of his duties Mr. Ruscoe was
subjected to little or no superintendence or control
by Mr. Edmunds, and no proper accounts of the
receipts and payments of the money passing through
the office have been kept. The fee books previous
to 1839 have been lost or destroyed, and it is stated
that no fee book was kept between 1852 and 1857.
Under these circumstances it has been found neces-
sary in the investigation which has recently taken
place to resort to other sources of information ; but
the gentlemen who conducted the investigation, and
from whose report all our statements are taken—
Mr. Greenwood, Q.C., and Mr. Hindmarch, Q.C.
—are confident that Mr. Edmunds is chargeable
with sums received for fees to a greater amount
than is shown by the account they have thus been
enabled to make out, and that fees have been re-
ceived of which no account has been kept in the
office, because during the investigation Mr. Ed-
munds has sent in to the Treasury an account in
which a larger receipt of fees is acknowledged in
some years than the amount of which they had been
able to obtain any particulars.
In order to show more clearly the irregularities
and deficiencies of Mr. Edmunds, an account has
been prepared containing on the debit side of it the
whole of the fees payable to the Exchequer which
it has been ascertained that Mr. Edmunds has re

ceived in every quarter of a year, grouping together
the fees received in two or more quarters, where
necessary, so as to accord with the payments made
by Mr. Edmunds from time to time into the Ex-

chequer, which are on the credit side of the account

For Mr. Edmunds soon became very irregular in
his payments into the Exchequer, sometimes making
payments for two, three, or even five quarters at
one time, instead of quarterly as required by the act
of Parliament. Mr. Ruscoe made up at first
monthly and afterwards every quarter an account
of his receipts and gave or sent it to Mr. Edmunds,

paying to him or into his " Patent-office account"
at Coutts's the money which the accounts showed

_ ........
to be payable to him, so that the fees received in

each quarter of a year were always in Mr. Ed-
munds's hands within a few days after the end of
the quarter ; but Mr. Edmunds delayed his pay-
ments of them into the Exchequer for longer and
longer periods after he had received them from Mr.
Ruscoe. Thus his payment on account of fees re-
ceived in all the five quarters ending in March,
1839, was not made until August, 1839 ; his pay-
ment on account of the two quarters ending in De-
cember, 1816, was made in April, 1848 ; his pay-
ment on account of the two quarters ending in
December, 1850, was not made until August, 1852,
which was the last payment made to the Exchequer
by Mr. Edmunds previously to the discovery in
1864 of his defalcations. And with regard to the
amount of the sums which Mr. Edmunds paid into
the Exchequer, it appears that the first few pay-
ments were correct, or nearly so, but afterwards
they became frequently less in amount than the
fees actually received, and occasionally the de-
ficiencies were very considerable. Thus the
fees payable into the Consolidated Fund for

the three quarters ending December, 1837,
amounted to £1,634, but the sum of £1,402 only
Was paid into the Exchequer. The fees for two