DOORS BOLTED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 7

DOORS BOLTED.

GAMBLING SCHOOL.

OVER THIRTY MEN FINED. PROPRIETOR TO PAY £100. (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, this day. Breaking: through specially reinforced and bolted doors, a party of 27 police constables and detectives raided the j Civic Club, on the third floor of a building in Manchester Street at 11.30 o'clock last night and arrested 32 men. This morning Raymond Claude Me-; Hants, a salesman, and the proprietor of j the club, was fined £100 and costs, in j default three months' imprisonment, by: Mr. E. C. Levvey, S.M., for using the premises as a common gaming house. J Thirty men were each lined £5 and] costs, in default 30 days' imprisonment,! for being f< und on the premises. One old-age pensioner, who said he was just at the club "to borrow a fewshillings from his cousin Ike," was convicted and discharged. "The door was barricaded and reinforced,'" said Detective-Sergeant Holmes in describing the raid to the magistrate. He produced three heavy bolts ns evidence. The game being played was hazards. "Complaints have been received about the club,'' said the detective-sergeant. "People complained of the way it was conducted, and said men with criminal records had been seen entering. The wives of sustenance men said their husIwnds were gambling there. Altogether the place comes well within the definition of a common nuisance." I "I ask for leniency for members." >aid McHarus, when asked what he had to say. "They are poor men who were doing no harm. It was just a working man's flutter."