STREET FIGHT AT WELLINGTON

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27193, 10 November 1953, Page 13

STREET FIGHT AT WELLINGTON

ABOUT 100 PERSONS INVOLVED

“FLARE-UP” OF STRIKE ON WATERFRONT (New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, November 9. The cause of a fight in Bunny street on Thursday night in which some 100 persons were involved was a flare-up of the old waterfront trouble, said Sergeant E. J. Trappitt in the Magistrate’s Court today, when William Towson Lowther, aged 35, a seaman and labourer, and Albert Bakk, a 26-year-old watersider, were charged with fighting eaclT other. Bakk, pleading self-defence, was acquitted. Lowther admitted the offence, and was fined

Willi VVBIS. Sergeant Trappitt said he had gone to Bunny street hear the Hotel Waterloo with two constables about 6.15 p.m. The traffic was held up by the crowd that had collected. Bakk had told him that he had gone to help a friend being attacked by two or three men when Lowther had assaulted him. Other men had been fighting, he said, but they had run away when the police arrived. He thought that Lowther was the aggressor, as he saw him try to knee Bakk in the groin. Questioned by Mr G. C. Marsack, S.M., Sergeant Trappitt said that Bakk was taking no more steps than were necessary to defend himself. . A member of the permanent waterfront union said that he and Bakk had been drinking in the hotel bar when z five or six men entered and said, “You scabby s have taken over all the bars in town. You are not to drink here again.” He and Bakk had gone outside and found the fight in progress. Bakk, he said, had gone to lelp an injured man, "but everyone left when the police came.” Asked for an explanation, Lowther told the Court: “If people are going to throw punches at me I must throw them back, that’s alj.”