In the Bad Old Days!

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6946, 27 June 1929, Page 4

In the Bad Old Days!

DRAMAS FROM THE TABLES... THOUSANDS SQUANDERED IN A NIGHT . . . . PLAYING FOR THE FAMILY ESTATES!

£IO,OOO LOST IN 10 MINUTES

It is amazing in these times to dip into the records a few generations old, and read of vast fortunes that were lost in a night at reckless cardplaying. There were clubs then to which the aristocracy resorted, where estates, to say nothing of bank balances and family treasures, changed hands with a quick reverse of fickle fortune. It is an undoubted fact that nothing approaching the same voracious gambling spirit prevails today. One reason is that owners of landed estates have not the same freedom to deal with their possessions, which are usually inherited with extensive encumbrances (says a writer in the "News of the World”).

Present-day gambling is comparable with the mole-hill to the mountain of what are known as the “good old times.” Now and then an instance of a heavy sum changing hands is recorded; but peeps into the past reveal wonderful changes of fortune in a single night at the card tables of the aristocratic clubs with which the West End abounded. At White’s, for example, the most exclusive club in London, we read that General Scott, father-in-law of the Duke of Portland, once sat down to a game of whist at three o’clock one afternoon and rose at eight o’clock the following morning a winner of £60,000; and, although he had had occasional heavy losses, his winnings in two years exceeded £2OO 000. At Crcskford’s famous club the gambling was on a still more prodigal scale. It was there that Ball Hughes, the greatest gambler of his day, dissipated his splendid patrimony of £70,000 a year. In a single night’s play he once lost £90,000. A couple of hours later he was playing again, and, after winning back all he had lost the previous night, finally left the table a loser of £28,000.

A splendid prodigal was Mr. George Payne, one 'of the most sensational gamblers on the turf and at the cardtable England has ever known. For upwards of half a century Payne is said to have spent more nights at play than any man who ever cut a pack of cards, and many remarkable stories are told of his experiences. On one occasion Payne and Lord Alfred Denison sat up all night playing cards at Limmer’s Hotel. The gambling only came to an end just in time for his lordshiß to meet his bride at the altar of St. George’s, Hanover Square, after losing £30,000. LOST £40,000 AT A SITTING At the ancestral home of Colonel Henry Mellish at Blythe, may still be seen the table on which he once lost £40,000 at a single all-night sitting to the Prince Regent. But even Col. Mellish had a formidable rival in the last Lord Hastings, who, after dissipating a splendid patrimony, died in poverty before he reached his 27th birthday. Not content with squandering his gold on the turf, as few men have ever done, he flung it away with amazing recklessness at the card table. In a single evening he is said to have lost £79,000 at hazard at a West End club, and on two successive evenings he won £15,000 and lost £34,000, his loss for three days amounting to nearly £IOO,OOO. “In a single afternoon he lost £15,000 at dice, throwing at £IOO a time, and he would spend hours cutting the cards for £2OO a cut, and tossing for £SO notes.” When John Mytton, the “Squire of Halstead,” came of age he succeeded to an inheritance valued at half a million pounds. Seventeen years later he died, shattered in health and fortune, in the Debtors’ Ward of the King’s Bench Prison, his entire fortune squandered over cards. So reckless was he that he thought nothing of staking a large estate on a single game, or of losing £50,000 or more between dusk and dawn; and all the pleadings of his friends were powerless to check him in his rush to ruin. When his agent once begged him to abjure gambling and said to him, "If you will only be content to live for a few years on £6,000 a year, things will all come right,” all he got for his pains was the laughing answer: “My dear fellow I wouldn’t give a straw for life if it had to be spent on £6,000 a year.” But even Squire Mytton must yield the palm of reckless plunging to Mr. Ernest Benson, whose prodigal career caused no little sensation a generation ago, when he squandered his entire capital of a-quarter of a million pounds within two years of receiving it. In a few hours of play at Goodwood Benson is said to have lost £30,000. At Sandown, after losing £15,000 over the day’s racing, he sat down to a game of cards and only left the table after he had added £IO,OOO to his losses; while on one occasion he dropped £IO,OOO in ten minutes at chemin-de-fer.