Lincoln & Son

In Shepton Mallet jail, Somerset, England, a hangman's noose tightened, last week, and snapped out the life of John Lincoln, a British soldier, who last Christmas Eve murdered a certain traveling salesman whose house he was attempting to rob. Some 50,000 English humanitarians signed a petition that the execution be delayed for a few days until the condemned man's father might arrive from Ceylon. The petition was denied. John Lincoln's father is the notorious Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, in 1910 a Liberal M. P. for Darlington, during the War an international spy for both England and Germany. Late in the week he reached the Netherlands by boat from Ceylon. He was informed by the British Legation at The Hague that his son had been hanged, that he would under no circumstances be allowed to enter England to take charge of the body. Disheartened he wept: "My sins have been visited upon my son!"

Trebitsch-Lincoln. In the private files of European chefs d' espionnage, "Trebitsch-Lincoln" is listed under literally dozens of aliases, among which his original name is completely lost. It has been said of him that the world is his plaything. Certainly his attitude toward creeds and laws was that of a versatile bad boy playing with what toys he could misuse. His book, Revelations of an International Spy (McBride, 1916), was described by an amused U. S. diplomatist as "a spitball of wastepaper and spleen spat at his former European employers"; others professed to take seriously his arraignment of Sir Edward Grey as the archvillain of the World War.

A summary of the diversified activities which have caused him to be regarded with international suspicion: 1) Entered an English Presbyterian theological college, after announcing his conversion from Judaism to Christianity; 2) Became a Presbyterian clergyman; 3) Secretary to B. Seebohm Rowntree, the millionaire Quaker cocoa manufacturer; 4) Liberal M. P. cartooned by Punch for speaking broken English mixed with Hungarian in Parliament; 5) Wartime mail censor in the British Postoffice Department; 6) Employed by Herr Steinhauer of the German Secret Service while still receiving British pay; 7) Imprisoned at Brooklyn, N. Y., pending extradition to England, where he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for a forgery committed two years earlier. (The circumstances that he was not tried as a spy and was not arrested when the forgery was committed, were cited by him as proving his innocence as a forger, and the truth of his revelations as a spy, part of which he composed in the Brooklyn jail.) ; 8) Served as chief publicity agent for the famed Kapp putsch, which tried to restore the throne of Germany to the Hohenzollerns; 9) Arrested by the Italian police charged with complicity in the murder of the millionaire Socialist Deputy Matteotti (TIME June 23, 1924, et seq.); Escaped to Ceylon where he became a Buddhist and was known as "Dr. Tandler."