At Edinburgh on Saturday Lieutenant and Mrs. C. A. Cameron
were each sentenced to three years' penal servitude for attempting to defraud Lloyd's of 26,500. The prisoners had insured a non-existent pearl necklace and then tried to obtain the insurance money by pretending that it had been stolen from them. The strangest part of the case was the attempt made by Mrs. Cameron to prove that the necklace was given to her by a mythical person named "Billy Walker." The attempt failed completely, and is only another proof of the difficulty of preserving the pretence of the existence of a fictitious character. It is easy enough to launch a dummy of this description ; it is almost impossible to keep it afloat. As Lord Dunedin said in his summing-up, if there really was such a person as Billy Walker, something must be known about him, even if he were in the wilds of Africa. Mrs. Gamp is the only really successful creator of an artificial personality, and Mrs. Gamp does not count, as she herself is a child of the brain.
Previous page
