PLAYED MANY PARTS

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 80, 29 December 1931, Page 2

PLAYED MANY PARTS

Had Quiet Job as Bootlegger

A bootlegger earning £1 a minute, an assistant to a “faith healer,” a miner, a sailor, a cornet soloist—these are some of the roles played by a Yorkshireman, Mr. Firth Roy Fitton, in the course of two years’ wandering in search of work.

Mr. Fitton arrived in Southampton recently and he is now on his way back to his native Leeds, tramping the roads with only a few shillings in his pockets. . ■ , : ■ /

“I left Leeds two years ago,” the returned wanderer told a “Sunday Chronicle” representative. “I am a carpenter by trade, and a spell of unemployment made me decide to try my luck further afield.

“To begin with I did fairly well. I had five weeks’ work in Liverpool on a building job near the docks,' and when this finished I was able to ship aboard a vessel sailing for Canada. “I was a sailor before the war and I hold a' third mate’s ticket, so that I did quite well on the ship and could have remained on her after she reached Canada, but I decided to stay there. ; ;„“Then I had a bad spell. For two !or three months I only had one or two' Jobs, and I was practically starving when I met a man who offered me temporary work driving a truck. When I asked him ‘How temporary?’ this man replied, ‘Oh, about an hour, but the pay’s good! . “I guessed then what he wanted me to do, but I wasn’t' in a position to be particular, so I drove a truck containing smuggled whisky across the border ,'from Canada into the United States. For this job myself and'•another man received 200 dollars each for about 40; /minutes' work, so that I was paid for ;my bootlegging activities at the rate of £1 a minute. “I dared not stay in the' United • States, and so I dodged the frontier' guards and got back into Canada,' where I had all sorts of jobs. "At the end of a year and a half in Canada I was as broke as ever, and I came back to England the same way I went.”