POACHER—AND PROUD OF IT

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXIV, Issue 14057, 11 May 1946, Page 4

POACHER—AND PROUD OF IT

NINETY-TWO CONVICTIONS

GRIEVANCE OVER POTATO

CHARGE

There was something wrong in Norwich Shire Hall court on a recent Saturday. Someone was missing for the first time in ten years. But, a quarter of an hour later, the door opened and in walked Billy, the poacher.

He crept quietly to a seat, and, resting his hands on the bar in front of him, with, his white heard juut hanging over the ledge and the wispy white hairs on his .almost bald head just visible, William Goodson settled down to listen to the day's cases.

Billy Goodson is 86, a poacher and proud of it. He has at least 92 convictions for poaching, and —a conviction for stealing potatoes.Billy has never forgiven the police for that potato' charge. He would stop policemen in the street and tell them what he thought about it.

"I'm a poacher," he would' say. "What should I want with stealing potatoes?"

But Billy gave up poaching ten years ago, and Saturday morning in the Shire Hall court became a habit.

Throughout the war Billy would be in the public gallery, often all the "public" there, was.

After all, there might be a poaching case requiring his judgment, despite the fact that many times William has been called to order by the magistrate when he had offered his opinion. Billy the poacher started his career at the age of 15. At that time he was working on a farm, just outside Nqrwich ' for a shilling a week. "The consequence was," said William, "at the ago of l(i I was put into Norwich Castle, which was then used as a prison, for six weeks for shopting three partridges." For shooting three partridges Billy worked the treadmill for 12 hours a day while grown men dropped all around him from sheer exhaustion.

Since then Billy has seldohi dene more than two months in prison or paid more than 10s for his poaching habits.

Once he poached on the land of the present magistrate. Now the same magistrate gives Billy half a crown every Saturday.

Once William wept in the court when the magistrate gave him a job as under-gamekoeper on his estate, but the job lasted only two weeks.