her fiancé could not marry her if she were sent to gaol, and that her life would be irretrievably ruined, and she was discharged! From The Birmingham Post, 4th February 1902: A female clerk (twenty-six) pleaded guilty to embezzling £5, 1s. 9d. on 16th November, £2, 2s. 4d. on 21st December and £5, 0s. 9d. on 23rd December last, the moneys of her employer. Prosecuting counsel said prisoner entered prosecutor's employ in 1900, and in June last her salary was raised to 27s. 6d. a week. The defalcations, which began a month before the increase, amounted to £134. She had falsified the books, and when suspicion fell upon her destroyed two books, in order, as she thought, to prevent detection. Her counsel pleaded for leniency on the ground of her previous good character and because she was engaged! The recorder merely bound her over, stating that her parents and young man were respectable, and so was the house in which she lodged! A correspondent mentions in The Birmingham Post of February 1902 a case where a woman had burned her employer's outhouses and property, doing £1800 worth of damage, and got off with a month's imprisonment. On the other hand, the same judge, at the same Quarter Sessions, thus dealt with two male embezzlers: C. C. (twenty-eight), clerk, who pleaded guilty to embezzling two sums of money from his master in August and September of 1901
