GAMING CHARGES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 3, 3 July 1937, Page 11

GAMING CHARGES

POLICE RAID CLUB

MANY MEN ARRESTED

(By Telegraph—i'ress Association.)

CHRISTCHURCH, This Day.

Breaking through specially reinforced and bolted doors, a party of twenty-seven police and detectives raided the Civic Club on the third floor of a building in Manchester Street at 11.30 o'clock last night and arrested thirty-two men. This morning Raymond Claude McHarus, a salesman, proprietor of the club, was fined £100 and costs, in default three months' imprisonment, by Mr. E. C. Levvcy, S.M.,

for using premises as . a common gaming-house. Thirty men were fined £5 and costs, in default thirty'days' imprisonment, for being found on the premises of a common gaming-house, and one old age pensioner, who said he was just at the club "to borrow a few shillings 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 as evidence. The game being played, he said, was hazards. "Complaints have been received about the club," said the detective-sergeant. "People complained of the way it was conducted and said that men with criminal records had been seen entering it. The wives of sustenance men said their husbands were gambling there. Altogether, the place comes well within the definition of a common nuisance." ♦

"I ask for leniency for the members," said 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."