BEGGARS’ PROFITS

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 May 1938, Page 12

BEGGARS’ PROFITS

HARD LUCK TALES Begging has become one of Great Britain’s most ingenious and profitable “professions”—-a following that lias aroused the ire of the Archbishop of Canterbury and earned his recent reference to “these unscrupulous” pests says the “People." “Unscrupulous" is putting it mildly, as was discovered by a woman, investigator of the Charity Organisation Society. “I should express it much stronger than that.” she said with a smile, “and so would you. hud you known ‘the Colonel.' “A dear fellow was ‘the Colonel,’ living in his old-world cottage in one of England’s loveliest villages, ‘content with his small pension.’ “At least, that is what he wrote in the thousands of letters he mailed to the outside world.

“ ‘You and 1 are comparatively well off,’ he would write. ‘but there’s a couple here as poor as cab-drivers in Venice.’ “Then ‘the Colonel’ would tell a story of a dying husband and of a wife, half paralysed, trying to fend for her six children. “Struck by ‘the Colonel’s pitiful tale. I went down to the village to see what I could do. 1 saw the vicar. He knew of no couple in dire distress. “But, the Colonel. Oh, yes, he knew ‘the Colonel' —a peppery and wealthy old fellow, who had a big weekly mail and cashed scores of postal orders at the post-office every week!" “The Colonel” was duly prosecuted and convicted. “’Erbert was a man of a different calibre,” she went on. “’Erb was an unsuccessful coster when he hit on the idea of waste collections for the unemployed. “Starting on foot with a barrow, he worked up to the luxury of a car for himself and a fleet of vans for his ‘business.’

“He even had advertisements printed, explaining that his vans ‘will call in your district three times a week.’ “But ’Erb did not get away with it for long. He was challenged officially, and admitted quite frankly that the unemployed for whom he was collecting were himself and his mates.

SOON BE HOMELESS’

“’Erb, however, was almost a model of virtue compared with Mrs. J., whose pitiful tale t had occasion to investigate. “She wrote scores of letters saying that she was soon to be homeless in an ugly grey world. “Then in a blotted scribble on paper that seemed to be stained with her tears: ‘I have been deserted by my husband. My poor baby is lying dead in the house. My other children are crying for food. 1 am being ejected because I cannot pay my rent here. Please, please help!’ “Mrs. J. must have done pretty well out of her SOS, for when I called at The house the door was opened by a beaming stalwart with a fat, well-fed baby in his arms. “He turned out to be Mrs. J.’s ‘runaway husband,’ and when I entered 1 found the two ‘starving’ children eating roast duck and new potatoes! “I challenged the woman. She shrugged and admitted it all. “There are scores of genuine charities and thousands of cases deserving our pity,” my informant went on, “but it is time something was done about the bogus organisations and the professional beggars who are fleecing the public of hundreds of thousands a, year.” I