The Sun.
London, England, 1861-04-11 00:00:00

OLD COURT.

Edward Holland, 22, a Post-office letter-carrier,
was charged with stealing an order for the payment
of £690 7s. 3d., the property of the Postmaster-
General.

Mr. Clerk and Mr. Poland prosecuted on behalf
of the Post-office authorities. The prisoner had no
counsel.

The facts of this case have appeared very recently
in the Mansion-house police report. The prisoner
was a letter-carrier, and part of his duty was also
to sort the letters at the General Post-office in St.
Martin's•le-Grand, and it appeared that on the 25th
of January a letter was sent by the Religious Tract
Society of Edinburgh to Mr. Jones, the manager of
the Religious Tract Society of London, 56, Pater-
noster-row, which contained a remittance to that
society in the form of a cheque upon Messrs. Glyn
and Co., Lombard-street, for the sum of £690 7s. 3d.
The letter, in due course, would have arrived at the
General Post-office in London on the morning of
Saturday, the 26th of January, on which day the
prisoner was employed in sorting, as usual, and he
had, consequently an opportunity of taking it; but
although there was no positive evidence that he had
done so, the letter never reached its destination and
the facts that subsequently transpired left no rea-
sonable doubt that the prisoner had secreted it

while in the course of sorting the letters, or impro-
perly obtained possession of it in some other man-
ner. On Monday, the 28th, the cheque was pro
sented at Messrs. Glyn's, with, apparently, the en-
dorsement of Mr. Jones, to whose order it was made
payable, upon it, and it was paid with twelve .£5O
notes, and £9O in gold, and the remainder in small
cash, and one of the clerks in the bank at the time
identified the prisoner as the person by whom the
cheque was presented. He had at this time leave
of absence, and he was away from duty, and al-
though of course, the loss of the letter and the
cheque was speedily discovered no clue was obtained
to the party by whom the robbery was committed
until the 25th of March, but this additional inci-
dent occurred on the day the money was obtained
from Messrs. Glyn's. It appeared that on that day
some person presented himself at the Bank of
England and asked for change for three .£5O notes.
They were handed to a gentleman named Dean,
who observed that upon each note there was written
the name of Richard Jones, and the address, 40,
Prebend-street, Islington, and he turned from the
counter and looked at the London Directory, and
discovered that there was no No. 40 in that street,
and when he returned to the counter the person
who had brought the notes had disappeared, leav-
ing them behind, and they turned out to be three
of the £5O notes that were given for the cheque.
The only explanation given by the prisoner for his
possession of the notes was that he had found them.
The prisoner, when called upon for his defence,
repeated the statement that he had picked up the
notes in a bundle, and he admitted that he had
endeavoured to appropriate them to his own use,
and said. that he was very sorry he had done so.
The learned judge having summed up the evi-
dence,

The jury at once returned a verdict of guilty and
he was sentenced to be kept in penal servitude for
six years.

POLICE 111, TELLIGENCE.-April 10.

MANSION-HOUSE.—Edward Cox, the con-
ductor (badge 517) of an omnibus plying between
the Paddington and London-bridge railway sta-
tions, and belonging to the General Omnibus Com-
pany, attended before Alderman Rose, to answer a
summons charging him with demanding and taking
from a passenger more than the legal fare.
The complaint was preferred under the Hackney
Carriages Act (the 6th and 7th of "Victoria, cap.
86), the 33d section of which makes it an offence
punishable with a fine of 20s. for the driver of any
such carriage to refuse to admit and carry at the
lawful fare any passenger for whom there shall be
room, and to whose admission no reasonable objec-
tion shall be made, or to demand more than the
legal fare. Another section of the same statute
renders it incumbent on the proprietor of every
metropolitan hackney carriage to " keep distinctly
painted in a conspicuous manner, on the inside of
it, a table of fares to be demanded of passengers,
and the fares thereon specified shall be deemed to
be the only lawful fares."
On Thursday last the complainant, Mr. Edwin
Johns, residing in Poland-street, Oxford-street,
hailed the defendant's omnibus at the corner of
Wardonr-street, Oxford-street. Some few minutes
previously he stood waiting for a 3d. omnibus, of
which there are many on that line, and allowed
one or two to pass, the fare by which was 4d. He
was induced to stop the defendant's omnibus by
seeing pasted on the outside of the door a large
placard, on which were printed the words "From
Edgware-road to London-bridge, 3d.," the figure
"3" being some five or six inches long. He pre-
ferred riding outside, and before getting upon
the roof he stood for a moment on the foot-
board, upon which the defendant told him he
would have to pay ls. for riding there, holding
out his hand at the same time. Thinking he was
joking, the complainant ridiculed the idea of pay-
ing ls., and said he should pay him the fare mark-
ed outside the door—namely, 3d. He would not
have hailed the omnibus if he had not seen the 3d.
fare marked outside, because he had been charged
4d. before for riding the same distance by another
omnibus. On his declining to pay ls. the defen-
dant demanded that he should get down, but that
he also refused to do until he got to his destination.
At Farringdon-street the omnibus stopped to allow
a passenger to alight, and on passing along Cheap-
side the defendant mounted the roof and collected
the fares of the passengers there. The complainant,
who did not see what any. of them paid, refused to
pay his own until lie arrived at the Bank, upon
which the defendant, taking out a pocket-book, re-
quested to know his address, but he declined to
give it until he got to the end of his journey. On
arriving at the Bank, where the complainant was
set down, the defendant demanded Is. from him,
which he refused to pay in the first instance, and
appealed to Police-constable Thurlow on duty there,
to assist in settling the dispute. The defendant then
opened the door of the omnibus and pointed to a
moveable plate inside the door, on which was
painted " Express fare, ls." That moveable plate
covered the whole of the ordinary fares, which were
painted on the panel below it, and which corre-
sponded with those placarded outside namely,
" From Praed-street to Tottenham-court-road, 2d. ;
from Edgeware-road to London-bridge railway sta-
tion, 3d. ; beyond those places, 6d. On the sta-
tionary table of fares inside was painted, but in
very small letters, " Express fares, ls., without
luggage." On the advice of the constable, the com-
plainant paid the defendant ls., and then summoned
him to this court.
In answer to Mr. Alderman Rose, the complain-
ant said any one looking at the defendant's omnibus
from the street could come to no other conclusion
than that the fare was threepence.
The defendant, in answer to the charge, said his
omnibus was an " express," which ran once a day
to and from the Paddington and London-bridge
railway stations at a shilling fare, and he did not
profess to take up passengers on the road. 'When
the complainant got up he (defendant) told him he
would have to pay is., but, notwithstanding that,
he persisted in riding. •
Mr. Alderman Rose told the defendant that by
exhibiting a large placard outside his omnibus in-
dicating that the fare for a given distance was 3d.
people were induced to ride by it, and it was not
until entering that they became aware, by looking
at the moveable plate inside, that they would be
charged ls. fer travelling within the prescribed
limits. Besides, outside passengers had no means
of seeing the sliding plate inside. However, by the
words, "Express fare, is.," being painted inside,
there had been a compliance, though it might be a
colourable one, with the requirement of the statute
in that respect; and as he (Alderman Rose) could