“BULLDOG DRUMMOND”

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 February 1939, Page 11

“BULLDOG DRUMMOND”

-O ■ —" FROM FICTION TO REAL LIFE “Bulldog Drummond” has stepped from the pages of fiction to clean up London’s West End. Dog whips wielded by stalwart members of his Black Gang, punishing dope pedlers and other crooks, are making Mayfair a cleaner place in which to live. "Sapper” (Major Cyril McNeil), the creator of Bulldog Drummond, is responsible for the formation of this real-life Black Gang to war on vice. Disgusted by the degenerate parasites of the West End. against whom lhe police were powerless, he suggested, half humorously, in an Army mess not long before he died, that any young man of energy should take a tip from Bulldog Drummond. A band of young officers, many of them bearing distinguished names, hare taken him at his word. This is how they work. Their quarry is marked down. The gang satisfy themselves that he deserves punishment. When a suitable opportunity offers, he is kidnapped by a body of sturdy masked men. His struggles are fruitless. Into a ear he is bundled and driven to a garage attached to a large, isolated house off the Great West road.

There the “executioners” wait with dog whips. He is flogged until he [ promises not to offend again. | Then the victim is turned loose. He ■ limps back abjectly to the West End. i Never does he go to the police. They are the last people to whom he wants to make explanations. Dope-cigarettes have become a West End menace. Society girls started to smoke them as mild adventure, but now they are wrecking their lives. A vnnn~ officer said recently: “A tTicnd of mine was very unset when his charming fiancee was taken ill,

and her mother told him the engagement had better be considered off. She had been going to these cigarette orgies. It will be years before she is well. “Then someone remembered ‘Sapper’s’ joke. So the real life Black Gang was formed.” Final sidelight —from a hospital casualty report: — Man treated for laceration on tho back and shoulders. Refused to have the police informed. When this patient left the hdspital he was presented with a dog-whip. On the label was: “Souvenir, 1938.”