Mexborough and Swinton Times, April 29th, 1932
Cruel Fraud
Thurnscoe Woman Who Drew Stepfather’s Savings
“I have grave doubts about not sending you to penal servitude, though it is your first offence,” said Mr. Justice Hawks at the Yorkshire Assizes at Leeds on Friday when sentencing Doris Fawcett (29), a typist and uncertificated teacher, said to be a native of Thurnscoe, to 18 months’ imprisonment in the second division, for forgery and fraudulent conversion.
Prisoner, it was stated, resided with her mother and stepfather at Allerton Bywater, and the charges arose out of withdrawals made by prisoner from her stepfather’s Post Office savings account.
Mr. C. Paley Scott said the stepfather was an elderly man who was blinded in the pit years ago, and it had been easy for the prisoner to withdraw money from his account because he was allowed to make a cross instead of the usual signature. Within the course of a year the accused had withdrawn almost all the money in the account, amounting in all to £323. The whole of the money seemed to have been frittered away on a poultry farm in which prisoner was interested.
The judge, in passing sentence, said he did not view the case in any more favourable light in consequence of a submission made on behalf of the prisoner that there had been laxity on the part of the postmaster. The prisoner, he said, was a member of a respectable family, to whom any idea of robbery should have been repulsive in the last degree, and she had broken a position of trust time and time again.