Since the tragic exposure of Shapir a in 1883, no
more audacious or ingenious purveyor of forged ancient documents has been brought to book than Herbert Davies, the young ex-schoolmaster who was sentenced on Wednesday to three years' penal servitude for his frauds in connection with the Shipway pedigree case. Colonel Shipway, the descendant of an old Gloucesterhire family, employed Davies to trace his ancestry, and Davies for more than a year kept up an uninterrupted flow of interesting genealogical discoveries by falsifying registers, producing bogus heirlooms, forging and destroying wills, carving false inscriptions, and actually interfering with dead bodies and coffins. The daring and resourcefulness of the impostor were quite astounding, and apart from the criminality of his actions, the sum he extracted from Colonel Shipway-70O—was by no means an extravagant remuneration for his exertions. The exposure of the fraud, as Mr. Charles Mathews, who prosecuted for the Treasury, expressly stated, was due to the detection of one of Davies's forgeries by Mr. W. P. Phillimore, the antiquarian and publisher, and the whole affair supplies a powerful argument in favour of the reform long urged by Mr. Phillimore himself, which would establish County Record Offices, and secure for local records the care and protection provided for national records by the Act of 1837.
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