PREDATORY LANDLADIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 19

PREDATORY LANDLADIES

Recently there was a happy tale in the Press explaining how an actor of the old school circumvented a conscienceless landlady, states an English writer. He numbered each piece of sugar plainly with a lead pencil, and afterwards was overheard demonstrating with the predatory one, who had purloined numbers 35 to 39.

This is an old complaint against a now almost extinct type of landlady. David Livingstone was up against the same difficulty in the year 1836 when he took a lodging in the High Street, Glasgow, at two shillings a week. The constant disappearances of his tea and sugar and oatmeal irritated him to such an extent that he took another lodging, for which he was forced to pay the extravagant figure of 2s 6d per week.

John Everett Millais once recounted the story of how he dealt with this problem in his youthful impecunious days. In his case the pilferings chiefly affected his butter, so he conceived the brilliant idea of making a sketch of the pat of butter. When the next meal came round, by comparing the sketch with the original, he was able to demonstrate without a shadow of doubt that his property had been basely assailed. What the landlady thought of this masterly stroke he omits to r& cord.