his capacity as Secretary would officially receive £300 per annum plus the Society's rent for his Holland Road establishment, and his wife would receive £50 as Lady Secretary. Goold officially gave his services free. However Sturman was not able to say that he did not take all the income for his family and share some of it with Goold. He "lived on the Society and was the Society." The majority of the Society's income came from school examinations; this consisted of mailing out exam papers and not examining candidates. Sturman sold diplomas and "shared the proceeds with Goold . . . the examinations were a farce." Labouchère said, "It seems to me that the same result might be obtained much more economically if the "Fellows" of all these concerns would keep their guineas in their pockets and write themselves down "A.S.S." without permission of anybody." Fellows and members of the Society were too embarrassed by their own gullibility to take Sturman to Court. Since this 1892 exposé in Truth limited the Society's activities in Europe, Sturman turned to the Colonies for his guineas. However by the following year newspapers as far away as New Zealand had picked up the story, and the Society's infamy was going before it. In Auckland, The Evening Post of 7 June 1893 heard that Edward Robert Tregear, author of The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891) had received an unexpected silver medallion from the Society - posted in March and sent by the slow boat - along with the Journal and the usual offer of Fellowship in return for the usual guineas. He refused the Fellowship. Thus continued around the world the disabusement of academics and would-be academics about the Society. The title of the Evening Post's 1893 article was "A bogus literary society." References External links Society of Science, Letters and Art Journal, 1891 Retrieved 7 February 2014 Learned societies of the United Kingdom Fraud in the United Kingdom