§ DR. KENEALYasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, On whose authority he stated in his place in Parliament, on the 3rd of August 1875, that Mina Jury, a witness against the defendant in the Tichborne case, and who is now in penal servitude for several robberies, was not the same person as Mercivina Caulfield, who was sentenced to seven years' transportation for robbery in Dublin in 1847; whether the person who gave him the information is still in the service of the Government or receiving a pension; and, whether it was proved at the trial of the detectives at the Old Bailey in September last by Superintendent Williamson of Scotland Yard, that Mercivina Caulfield and Mina Jury were one and the same person, and that she had been so convicted in Dublin as alleged.
MR. ASSHETON GROSS, in reply, said, that what he had stated with regard to the identity of a person named Mercivina Caulfield with Mrs. Mina Jury, was that the only official record that could be found in Ireland showed that in June, 1847, a woman named Mercivina Caulfield was sentenced to 21 seven years' transportation for felony, and sailed in 1848 to Hobart Town; but no documents could be found to show what subsequently became of her, and no person who could identify her with Mrs. Mina Jury, and that the latter entirely denied that she was the same person. The detective authorities at Scotland Yard were not aware of the fact to which the hon. Member had alluded at the time she was examined as a witness in the Tichborne trial. The gentleman who gave the information on which he based his answer in August, 1875, held, and worthily filled, a high position in the service—a position which he trusted he would long remain in. The only reference to Mrs. Mina Jury which the Solicitor to the Treasury could find in the evidence given by Superintendent Williamson at the trial of the detectives at the Old Bailey in September last was in an answer in which he said that one of the defendants was engaged on the 4th of July, 1875, in inquiries into a case which related to Mercy A. Corfield and Mrs. Mina Jury.