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15 May 57 John Dublin Father ______________________________________________________________________________________________

My dear Father

I saw that you put your question in the House* & that Sir C Wood said that the ship would not contain anything like that number. I had the curiosity to go to our orderly room & ask for the numbers going out. You will see there are 900 human beings belonging to the regiment & we have estimated ship's officers, stewards, boys & seamen at about 50. Not a very large number for a good sized ship.

The Colonel wished me to send you a correct list of the number going out & you might perhaps put it that there are not many less than a thousand on board. After all that Sir Charles Wood said that he would not take anything like that number. Of course I send you the list privately. You have not obtained it by authority & you must not bring my name forward in the matter at all.

I think I must subscribe a sovereign to the Society for Employment of Aged Soldiers & will you tell them to send me a lot of cards at once as we shall be sending a number of men away early next week. Will you give the sovereign & stop it out of my next dividends. There are a great many good men going away who I would wish to do something for.

I write to my Mother by this post.

Yr. affectionate Son

J Wimburn Laurie

Dublin

May 15th /57

* in the House – John Laurie was elected the (Conservative) MP for Barnstaple in 1854. However it was shown that he had made an illegal payment – specifically that he had paid the £1,400 defence costs of the previous Conservative MPs, Richard Bremridge and Sir William Fraser, who had been unseated after having themselves been found guilty of bribery by making payments to individual voters in the 1852 election. As a result John Laurie lost his seat in 1855 for ‘having procured his election and return by means of an illegal bargain’, but was reinstated in 1857 after a by-election. He did not contest the 1859 General Election which, in Barnstaple, was also followed by the now customary accusations of malpractice