Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Licensing Office ·
The Counterfoil in My Father's Book
A licensing clerk's stub book is surrendered after the bank holiday, and one page of it will not meet the register it belongs to.
- filed: "after the bank holiday"
- reference: "LO/CF/19"
1. Received into the Archive at the Licensing Office, Murrow: one counterfoil book, pages numbered 401 to 460, surrendered by the household of the late Arthur Bessey, licensing clerk of that office, and lodged after the bank holiday under this form.
2. The practice of the office is one receipt to a page. The customer's copy leaves over the perforation; the counterfoil stays behind; and every stub carries the licence class, the fee received, the day of issue, and the clerk's initials. The stub book is the quiet half of the trade. Nothing on the customer copies that is not on the stubs, nothing on the stubs that is not on the register, and the register keeps both forever.
3. Pages 401 to 440 are regular and agree with the register throughout, in the hand of Arthur Bessey throughout, fees ruled and initialled to the week of his last attendance in the spring.
4. Page forty-one of that stretch is not regular. It carries two counterfoils, one above the other, written in one hand, which on comparison with the register is the hand of Arthur Bessey. No other page of the book is so written.
5. The lower counterfoil receipts a market stall, fee forty pence, on a Friday in August before the bank holiday. Two things stand against it. The register holds no entry for that class, that fee, that day; the day itself was an ordinary trading day, and the register for it is complete and wants nothing. And the lower writing rests half a line across the upper, ink settled into ink when it should have come to dry paper, which to the examiners means one page was written on twice, and not at once.
6. The signature on both counterfoils is the clerk's own. But the upper is dated to the spring and signed square, after the manner of the pages about it, and the lower, though it is dated to August, shows under the lamp the drying of a later sitting than the upper, the ink of it older than the date it stands inside. The book was in the house from the spring. The bank holiday came. The register does not know the lower counterfoil, and the lower counterfoil is dated before the holiday that the book came in after.
7. Statement of the son, Leslie Bessey, taken at the surrender and entered here in his words: "I found the book in the drawer with his collars, and I gave it over honest, because the pages didn't finish square and Dad was a man who finished square. Forty years on that counter and his rule was one receipt, one page, and the day on it the day he wrote it. That page has a day on it he wrote and a line he didn't, and the line is in his hand and it is under the other line, and I do not know of a pen that writes under a thing after the thing is dry. I say no differently from the register: he never took a fee on that Friday. Somebody paid something. He receipted it. I just could not tell you the order of the two any longer."
8. The serial of the lower counterfoil is proper to the book, and the book is proper to the surrender, and the day is proper to the calendar of that August. Only the register does not receive it, and the register is not in error. The book is retained against the next audit of that office, and the audit is set the question this writ cannot answer: a receipt is a clerk's word that money came in. Whose forty pence was paid that August Friday, on what was tendered for it, and in which of the two sittings of the one hand?