LOW EARNING OF CRIME

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 July 1927, Page 8

LOW EARNING OF CRIME

“THE WORST PAID JOB.” Mr Edgar Wallace, the novelist and playwright, addressed a meeting recently, of the St. Peter’s Brotherhood in St. Peter’s Church, Greenwich. Mr Wallace is a native of Greenwich and an old boy of St. Peter’s School. He said that the only time he had ever spoken in a church was when he said “amen” in the wrong place. Mr Wallace gave an interesting address, taking as his subject “Criminals and other mugs.” Crime, he said, was the worst paid job anybody could take up. He had known some notorious criminals and one of them told him that his average earnings for the past 35 years had been under 14s per week, and he had spent 20 years in prison. One of the most desperate men he had ever known, a Scotsman with a university education, admitted to him that he had only made an average of 12s per week in a lifetime of crime. Mr Wallace did not believe that there was a single criminal in England today who possessed £2OO he could call his own, and so he thought he was quite justified in describing all criminals as "mugs.”