In his witness statement of September 26, 1997, Damian Daley claims Michael Stone used the word “paupers” to describe his victims. By a curious coincidence, the Daily Mirror for September 23 contained two articles in which this word appeared. Daley had a copy of this newspaper in his cell. The word paupers and the singular pauper are not used widely in the English language. Probably the most frequent uses of them occur in two phrases: the American literary work The Prince And The Pauper, and the expression pauper’s grave, which appears in the second Mirror article.
The current writer made a search of the Daily Mirror CD-ROM database at the Newspaper Library, and the result bears out the scarcity claim.
From 1992 to 1997 inclusive, the Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror yielded a total of 71 entries for pauper, and 60 for paupers.
The Times & Sunday Times for 1996 and 1997 inclusive yielded a total of 53 entries for pauper, and 34 for paupers.
A little mathematics shows an average (for both words) of around .0514 mention per day for the Mirror and .1195 mention per day for the Times newspapers.
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