(was) shown on both sides’. Claridge claimed that the President of the Board of Control promised him a steam ship when he was offered the recordership. The East India Company refused to pay for one, calling it a luxury. Claridge in turn refused to fund his transportation costs from his salary or expenses. To break this impasse, Fullerton and the Singapore Resident, Kenneth Murchison, finally held assizes in Singapore themselves in May 1828. Claridge eventually travelled to Malacca, but by that point the East India Company was petitioning the British government to remove him from office. Recall to England On 30 September 1828 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville, wrote to the President of the Board of Control, Charles Williams-Wynn: the East India Company Court of Directors had asked King George IV to remove Claridge from his recordership. Fullerton was accusing Claridge of ‘extorting higher salaries for the Officers of his Court than the Government deemed proper, on the threat of refusing to administer justice’. An Order in Council letter was signed and sent in February 1829, recalling Claridge to England. The letter reached Claridge in Malacca in August 1829. Claridge seems to have turned tail immediately and set off for China en route for England. A Calcutta newspaper quoted the British Government as saying that Claridge ‘is not, in point of fact, recalled, for no successor is appointed; he is merely directed to return’. This sentence is key to Claridge’s future: he was never dismissed, but more ambiguously directed to return to England. Back in England in late 1831, Claridge defended himself against six charges at a hearing of the Privy Council. He was acquitted of all the charges except one. However, the government would not allow him to return to Penang. The case of the ‘Gloucester Miser’ By 1835, Claridge was living in Plowden Buildings in the Middle Temple. It is unclear if he was practicing formally as a barrister, but it was at this time that he re-emerges out of the shadows as a player in one of the most notorious legal cases of the era, that of the Gloucester Miser. James or more popularly Jemmy Wood was the proprietor of one of the oldest private banks in the kingdom, probably the first commoner in England to become a millionaire and a noted miser. Charles Dickens is thought to have modelled Ebenezer Scrooge on him.