With Wife over Letters After a "tiff" with his young wife about a letter she had written in French did one received in Welsh, a Lancashire County police constable gassed himself.
The officer, Richard David Atkins, aged twenty-six, of Bramley-view, Whalley, near Clitheroe, did not report for duty, and other constables found him lying gassed on the kitchen floor of his home. His wife had left him to go back to her parents at Maghull, near Liverpool, after the quarrel.
At the inquest on June 16 she said she and her husband had a slight difference of opinion about a letter she had written in French to her parents, and also about a letter in Welsh he had received from his uncle.
My husband had been rather strange, she said. My health was poor both before and after my baby was born on April 22, and he wi worried a great deal He was usually very. affectionate, but not on the day of the quarrel. He did not light the fire as usual and he did not kiss Before the War there were already indications that other countries were competing in a piecemeal way for this business, Thus, Hamburg was an important centre for Japanese men-thal, and Trieste for Dalmatian pyrethrum flowers; but isolated instances such as these hardly affected London's dominating position. With submarine warfare and the dislocation of shipping it became necessary for consuming countries to obtain their supplies of drugs as best they could, and so direct trading between the countries which used them was encouraged. Methods of trading resorted to because of the emergency have now become the custom of the trade, and London is no longer the world's drug depot.
For a long time past it has been debated whether the auctions should continue. The only purpose they serve is to show what quantities of drugs are available, from whom they may be obtained, and the approximate prices which buyers are expected to pay. By some it is considered that ihe expense involved by these auctions is worth while for those reasons, but the strongest inventive to their continuation is the British unwillingness to admit defeat and to announce to the world that London's predominance in this branch of commerce has vanished. Thursday's proceedings, however, were so discouraging that the whole matter is likely to be reconsidered.
Most of the large business in drugs for home consumption is done by private treaty, manufacturing druggists and wholesale distributors thus avoiding the publicity of the sale room, me when he came in.
After another difference the previous week, Mrs, Atkins said, she went into the kitchen and found her husband lying on the floor near the gas stove. The gas was not turned on, and she now realized he had done it to frighten her. It gave me a shock, and I collapsed, she said. He got up and sent for the doctor.
The coroner, Mr. F. Rowland, handed a letter to Mrs, Atkins, saying her husband had left it. Recording a verdict of suicide while not of sound mind, Mr. Rowland said he was satisfied that the balance of the man's mind had been disturbed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.