The Dewsbury Chronicle, and West Riding Advertiser. — 1895-03-27 (Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England)

NEWS  AT HOME.  The Yarmouth smack Rambler, while Idling 55 miles east-south-east of Lowestoft, picked asp the body of one of the passengers on board the ill-fated steamship Elbe. On the body were found American notes to the value of 70 dollars, a silver watch and gold chain.  One of the last Cinque Ports pilots made by the late Duke of Wellington during the period that he was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports has just died. This was Mr. Moon, who had recently removed from Deal to Dover. He was found dead in bed, death being due to the rupture of a blood-vessel.  On Saturday morning Mr. John Riffell, aged 46, a silversmith, walked into the warehouse of Messrs. Perkins, Bacon and Co., printers and lithographers, Whitefriars-street, London, and before attention could be called to him fell down the open lift to a warehouse below. His skull was fractured, and he received other terrible injuries.  The funeral took place at Brighton on Saturday afternoon of Joseph Harrison and his wife. Harrison murdered his wife during a temporary fit of insanity, and then committed suicide. A large number of persons followed the hearse, but only a few were permitted inside the gates of the cemetery, which were guarded by the police. Both bodies were buried in the same grave. Another instance of insubordination has just been brought to light at Aldershot, this time in a regiment—the Roy-al Scots Greys—that has never before been subjected to such an indignity. It appears that while the annual Balaklava ball of the sergeants was going on in the gymnasium, Wellington Lines, some one or more persons entered the stables of the C squadron and cut a large number of saddles. Stephen Bird, brewer, of High Wycombe, was fined £.5 for wilfully exporing a nurse named Williams when suffering from scarlet fever, without taking proper precaution to prevent the spread of the disorder. The nurse contracted the disease whilst attending defendant's family, and was then sent to Woking, crossing London in a cab, she travelling from 15. aterloo to Woking with other passengers. There have died at Ross, Herefordshire, in the same house, within four days, three sisters, named Miss Emma Phipps, Miss Eliza Phipps, and Mrs. Ann Wood, whose united ages amounted to 243 years. Miss Emma Phipps, who has carried on business as a grocer and corn merchant for the past half-century; was removed to her sister's residence, and died on Wednesday last week. Mrs. Wood, who was on a visit, died on Thursday, and Miss Emma Phipps on Saturday. At Liverpool Assizes the Lord Chief Justice sentenced Peter Flynn, aged 55, a coal-heaver, to six years' penal servitude for the manslaughter Df his wife. The parties had been married 25 years, but the deceased took to drink, and became very quarrelsome. It was proved that the prisoner frequently assaulted her, and when the body was examined after death it was covered with bruises, whilst 13 ribs were broken, and the pieces had penetrated the lungs. His Lordship remarked that the prisoner narrowly escaped hanging. Two men named Walton, father and son, were charged at Birmingham, the son with stealing money and the father with receiving it. Last October a bag containing £6B in gold was stolen from a cart in Birmingham, and no trace was ever discovered of the thieves. The other night the two prisoners had a :erious quarrel, and the son, a young man of 18, went to the police-station and confessed that he stole the money and shared it with another boy, giving his father £3O. On Saturday the young man retracted what he said about his father, but both were remanded. The Official Receiver of the East Bent Bankruptcy Court has received a letter from the wife of Mr. George Carter Rolfe, a well-known agriculturist, whose bankruptcy recently created considerable sensation in Kent. The debtor has absconded, but states through the medium of his wife's letter that he lost his money through holding hops to the value of £20,000 since 1874. In the two years 1884 and 1890 he lost £lO,OOO right off. Times got worse every year, but 1894 was the crushing one. Mr. Rolfe further states that he has taken nothing off the farm, and has gone away with money "from a friend."  A strange case of suffocation by gas has occurred at North Kensington. The three sons of a watchmaker, named Swain, went to bed on Friday night in a room over their father's shop in Golborne-road. On Saturday morning, as none of the lads seemed to be getting up, their father went in, and was horrified to find the room full of gas. His three boys lay to all appearances quite dead. Medical aid was immediately summoned, and two of the victims were brought back to life again, but the third, George Swain, aged 19, was already a corpse. The fatal escape of gas was caused by the dropping of the chandelier.  An aged single woman named Eliza Mead, who had long lived almost entirely on charity, died at Leighton Buzzard the other day, leaving a sister, who, for eight years had been partially an imbecile, and had been in receipt of parish relief. When Eliza died at the age of 71 years, and amid surroundings of abject poverty, the undertaker's men kicked accidentally against a box beneath the bed, and packages of money rolled out, which led to further examination, and a sum of no less than £228 in gold and silver—a great proportion being in threepenny and fourpenny pieces—was found stowed away in different parts of the rocm.  Thomas Ashton Grant, a respectable-looking man, with no less than five aliases, has been charged at Manchester with obtaining goods by fraud. The evidence of Detective-inspector Caminala went to show that the prisoner had represented himself as a wholesale game, poultry, and fish dealer, with a place of business in Chorlton-upon-Medlock. Ho had for some time been in the habit of ordering large consignments of farm produce from different parts of the country, and selling *them to dealers in the Manchester wholesale fish market. None of the consignments whicl) had been traced, and the value of which amounted to nearly a thousand pounds, had been paid for. It is probable Grant will be handed over to the Scottish authorities, as most of his victims belong north of the Tweed.