Beatrix Potter by Linda Lear

Author:Linda Lear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

14

Salvages

Harold warne and his brother Fruing had been walking near their office in Covent Garden when the police arrested Harold and charged him before the Lord Mayor in Mansion House with ‘uttering [passing] a bill of exchange for £988.10s.3d. knowing it to be forged’. On 3 April The Times reported an alleged forged bill charge against Harold Edmund Warne, 56, making the crime public.1

The forgeries, totalling some £20,000, stemmed from Harold’s efforts to siphon money from the publishing company into a small fishing business on Jersey in the Channel Islands, a business he had inherited from his mother. Through mismanagement, he had allowed it to run into significant debt. Now both businesses were in financial ruin. A meeting of Frederick Warne & Co.’s principal associates and creditors was hastily convened. Fruing wrote to Beatrix explaining the situation on 5 April. She had not seen an earlier newspaper report of the arrest and had not been represented at the meeting, even though she was the firm’s largest creditor. Although she was stunned by the news, she could not have been completely surprised.

Not yet aware of the extent of Harold’s fraud, Beatrix wrote of her distress to Millie:

I would thankfully have sunk my share of the debt to have hushed the matter up… I’m afraid it must be a pretty bad job or surely it would have been kept quiet. I have felt for a long time there was a great risk of ending in a smash… I am writing to express as well as I can my exceeding sympathy with you and Alice [Harold’s wife] in this dreadful trouble — it is more than sympathy — fellow suffering.

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