CONFESSION THAT WAS 'GHOSTED'

AT the end of your obituary of Sir Anthony Tichborne (July 26) you refer to the celebrated Tichborne Case, and end with the sentence that the claimant "subsequently admitted he was an imposter.
This is a reference to a confessiora which he signed as Arthur Orton in the People in 1895. But he repudiated it almost immediately afterwards, saying he had yielded to the temptation because of his extreme destitution, and his belief that he could make provision for his young wife, having been promised £4,000. In the event he received only a few hundred, which he soon lost in attempting to run a tobacconists' shop in Islington and then a ham-and-beef shop. The confession in the People was "ghosted" for him by a journalist called Williams, using the speeches of the prosecution, and neither the claimant's enemies or friends regarded it as significant.
The claimant continued where he could to place articles under the signature R. C. D. Tichborne, but the laws of libel precluded editors from letting him argue his case in their columns.
Douglas Woodruff Abingdon, Berkshire.
Prisoners
INOTED your article of July 19 about the Catholic Prisoners' Social Service—in
_ particular the remarks from their report regarding gravitating to hostel accommodation and the risk of meeting old associates, which makes the task of rehabilitation more difficult.
While agreeing this possibility is ever present, as the Society of Vincent de Paul is engaged in the effort of providing such accommodation, we feel that this statement made outside the context of prison after-care does less than justice to those who share in the work.
Whatever the dangers implicit in any attempt to reform transgressors, they should not be dismissed lightly. The hostel has a valid place in the complex problem, especially the "specialist hostel"; what fails with one may well succeed with another.
R. Taylor
Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Mrs. Haughton
mAY I, like Fr. Francis J. Ripley (July 19) "beg the hospitality of your columns" to dissociate myself from both Fr. Ripley and "the majority of the Catholic community" to which he with all self-assurance refers, who so violently oppose the views, especially on authority, of Mrs. Rosemary Haughton in her recent television interview?
I lend my wholehearted support as a Catholic layman and teacher to the very splendid work Mrs. Naughton is doing just in getting at loggerheads with those elements of the English Catholic ghetto who believe that sanctity is synonymous with antiquity and that a thoroughly Christocentric spirit of critical inquiry within the Church is dangerous and destructive.
Kenneth A. Craig Northampton.