The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-08-29 00:00:00

j Mr. WATSON said the plaintiff was Mr. Thomae Au-
gustus Dolling, a gentleman who had, for many years,
held the office of assistant overseer of the parish of West
Derby. He had also been appointed collector of Queen's
taxes, and had held this office for some time. He had
recently been appointed treasurer of West Derby ; and
be came before the jury to complain of a foul and mali-
cious libel which had been published of him, and also o
slander extremely injurious to his character. The townf
ship of West Derby was an extremely populous district -
it was composed of two parts, one within the borough,:
called the municipal division, and one without the bo-
rough, called the rural division. lie believed that the
sum which Mr. Dolling had annually to collect amounted
to something like £15,000. He had to collect it from a
a large number of persons, probably 3,000. The de-
fendant was a gentleman, not in business He resided in
West Derby-street, and was a ratepayer of the township
of West Derby, and, for some years past, he had been
in the habit of showing some degree of enmity to Mr.
Dolling. He had, at public meetings and in newspapers,
spoken and written offensively of Mr. Dolling in the cha-
racter of overseer. He (the learned counsel) was told
that the defendant was a gentleman who indulged much
at public meetings; that be was very fond of making
speeches, and of being a leader in parochial matters. On
the 30th March, in this year, a meeting of the ratepayers
of the township was held for the purpose of nominating
overseers for the ensuing year. Mr. Smith, as usual,
was present at the meeting. His name was put in as one
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of the individuals
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of the funds of the township, he was a person who ought
not for one moment to be allowed to administer the funds
of the township. Was he to sit down quietly under the
imputation? His only course was to come there, and ask
the defendantjto substantiate the charge or confess at once
that it was untrue. Probably, if the thing bad stopped
there, Mr. Dolling might have stood upon his character,
and not even have noticed that; but it was found that, by
a subsequent publication, Mr. Smith had carried this
matter so far that Mr. Dolling was bound to come into
court. On the 6th April, when the list of persons from
whom the overseers for the year were to be selected, and
at the head of which was the name of Mr. Smith, was
placed before the justices of the peace, at Kirkdale, they,
exercising their judgment in the matter, did not elect Mr.
Smith to be one of the overseers. On the 10th of April
Mr. Smith printed end circulated in West Derby a libel-
ous document, which he (Mr. Watson) would read; and
he would put it to the jury whether any man, in office or
out of office, seeing the charges in that libel, could rest
satisfied without appealing to the laws of his coun'ry for
redress The document in question was signed by Thomas
Smith, and was headed " Recent West Derby Vestry."
Mr. Watson proceeded to read the document, from which
we extract the following passage t—
" You know that the two persons whose names you, by
an almost unanimous vote, ordered to be at the head of
the list, were not the choice favourites of our master, the
permanent overseer, and his zealous upholders. 1 was at
Kirkdale, according to my promise, and that was suffici-
ent, as it proved, to prevent a change of the list, had the
dissatisfied party been disposed to make such change.
But, alone, as I found myself, I was not sufficient to pre-
vent another course which that party adopted, and adopted
with success, as you will learn. There were four of them
from this township and neighbourhood, including our
overseer, and an attorney whom they picked up in court,
as a sort of Godsend, to be their leader and advocate.
There were six persons appeared in court against your list,
and one, only one, and he the least fitted, to support it,
farther than just to say that such was your list. I was
the person. And the attorney of the party commenced
by discharging himself of a load of accusations against me,
a load of spiteful falsehoods, with which they had just
been cramming him. For instance, he commenced by
declaring that I would never rest till I had ruined Mr.
Doleing.' With such stuff had they crammed the man.
Bless his stuffed head, I would neither injure him nor Mr.
Doleing, as he called our precious overseer and master.
I would only restrain ruffians and cheats from insulting
and committing depredations on us, and especially from
committing them on weak and unsuspicious persons, on
lone women, on widows and their families. It is my
knowledge of deeds of this description that makes me stick
to this fellow of ours. And, if it will ruin him to put a
stop to his practices in that way, why, then, base indeed
should I be if I were to desist from any fair and manly
course in seeking to control me. * * * Thus, my
brother ratepayers, ended your late manly and sensible
efforts to rescue your parochial affairs from the hands of
a small knot of corrupt and infuriated intriguers, who,
dead to every sense of truth and justice, invade and tram-
ple on your rights, and slander, belie, and plunder you.
Lei us hope, however, that the two gentlemen who have
received the appointment will have the firmness and reso-
lution requisite to respond to your wishes and fulfil your
intentions. Let us hope that they will not leave the
township to the mercy of an individual who has been set
over you by the little crew of shameless and corrupt crea-
tures who co-operate with him; who is confirmed and
upheld in his office by the three merciless ruffians in Lon-
don, fellows who are altogether of congenial dispositions,
and regardless of your rights and interests. * * * Let
us hope, too, that, instead of permitting this overbearing
and insolent overseer of ours to send his threatening notes
amongst us, commanding us to wait upon him with the
amount of our rates; and inflicting upon the humbler and
more neceasitous portion of the ratepayers his 2s. sum-
monses, which 25., I learn, is shared between him and
one of his fellow-workers. * * * One other reasona-
ble hope let me express. It has been the practice of this
doughty overseer of ours, when he wanted more of our
money to revel in, or to answer some other purpose of his
and his little nest of intriguers, to prepare a rate book, call
on his creatures, the overseers, mere nominees of his and
his crew, to put their names to the book, and thus to lay
new rates upon us, whilst large amounts of former rates,
very large amounts, remained uncollected and uncalled
for. Let us hope that our new overseers will not lend
their hands to such proceedings. And, further, let us
hope that any rate to be laid during their term of office
will be laid equitably and according to law, conditions
which have been most grossly and wilfully violated, and
for his own manifest profit, too, by this obstreperous and
super-serviceable overseer of ours ; grossly and wilfully
violated in every rate he has laid during the last four
years."
Mr. WATSON observed, that the object of the defendant
would be one of the matters for the jury to consider when
they came to assess the damages in the case. If they
thought that this proceeded from malicious motives, he
would ask them to give exemplary darnaaes. If, however,
even at this moment, the defendant, taking the excellent
advice vytaict, would assuredly be given to him by his (Mr.
Watson's) learned friend, (Mr. Baines,) would come for-
ward and exonerate Mr. Dolling from the charges which
he had cast upon him, he (Mr. Watson) would only ask
for nominal damages, and thus test the sincerity with
which Mr. Dolling came there, not to take money out of
the defendant's pocket, but simply to clear his character.
Mr. Watson then went through the pleadings of the de-
fendant. With respect to one plea, that the plaintiff had
wrongfully defrauded the municipal division of the county,
by laying on a county rate, he observed, that the rate was
not laid by the assistant overseer, but by the overseers.
In 1837, when Mr. Smith was overseer, he did lay a
borough rate on the municipal division, and a county rate
on the rural division, but that course was found very in-
convenient, and it was thought better to lay an equal rate
over the whole township, and to pay out of that the borough
rate to the borough, and the county rate to the county.
What robbery of the township was there in that ?
Joseph Bispham Leatherbarrow, Mr. Richard Sanders,
and Mr. Robert Donnison were called to prove the utter-
ance of the alleged spoken, and the publication of the
printed libel.
Mr. BAtNES then addretird the jury for the defendant.
H e observed, that his learbTd friend had called on him to
say whether he would retract all that his client bad said
in respect to Mr. Dolling. If the defendant could with
truth unsay what he had said, then he would be the first
man to come forward and express his conviction that he
had been in the wrong. But, believing that the charges
which he had actually brought could be substantiated, his
only course was to lay before the jury the evidence on
which those accusations were founded. He (Mr. Baines)
thought that he should be able to prove to the satisfaction
of the jury, before he had done, that with some allowance
for the proverbial excitability of a parish meeting, where
the speakers felt strongly and spoke strongly, he should
be able to show that the allegations of the defendant were
substantially correct. The first charge against the plaintiff
by Mr. Smith was said to have been made at the vestry meet-
ing held on the 30th of March last. That was a general
annual meeting; and if the jury should be of opinion, as he
contended was the case, that the words were spoken bona
fide, that the defendant believed them to be true, and acted
in the honest discharge of what he conceived to be his duty
to himself and the ratepayers, he (Mr. B.) should contend,
without the least doubt, that that would be a privileged
communication, for which it would be impossible to bold
the defendant responsible. Having cited the case of
" Spencer v. Hammerton" in corroboration, the learned
gentleman went on to state what the circumstances were
out of which the charge arose. Since the passing of the
Municipal Reform Act the municipal division of the
township of West Derby no longer formed a part of the
county of Lancaster ; it formed part of the borough of
Liverpool, and, by virtue of that was exempted from con-
tributing to the county rate, because it had its own bo-
rough rate to contribute to. When the plaintiff came
into office, after the passing of the Municipal Reform Act,
he made a very material change in the mode of collecting
the rates from the whole township ; and the motive for the
change would be made apparent when it was recollected
' that he received three per cent. on the money collected in
the municipal division, whilst he received nothing from the
rural division. He laid one rate over the whole of the
township, without separating the amount in any way, and
of the sum received one portion was paid to the county
rate and another portion to the borough rate, thus causing
the municipal division of the township to sustain a loss of
nearly £6OO a-year. This was the statement made by
Mr. Smith at the vestry meeting • and he (Mr. Baines)
should be able to show, that, although his client spoke
strongly, he said on that occasion, not that the township
had been " robbed" by Mr. Dolling, but that it had been
"wronged" to that extent by Mr. Dolling. Mr. Smith
was a respectable ratepayer, who had resided in the town-
ship. for many years, and when he applied to Mr. Dolling
to see the rarochial accounts, be was refused, and
ern
b (the
lan-
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of the defendant. t a
ction. Mr.
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Smith went to Mr. Dolling,
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learned counsel) could not but marvel,h
and asked to see Mr
he books; but said to
ratepayer,
bad not t
not pretend that be cc't
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