THE WELSHER IN HIS PROPER

Otago Witness, Issue 2394, 18 January 1900, Page 44

THE WELSHER IN HIS PROPER

PLACE. Says the Field: — It is only within the last dozen years that the courts have come to the conclusion that welshing can bear the aspect of larceny. For ages the fiction wps maintained thnt a welriier was only a defaulter, and as such he could not be sued, the Goming Act vetoing 1 such claims. We remember the in&tanee ot a young- Oxonian at Reading races, j 1 ; .65 or 1866, having a welsher arrested by pliun-clodies police and taken to the town I police olHce. The clerk in charge there peremptorily declined to take the charge of theft, and lectured the prosecutor on his impropriety in invoking the police as a means for recovering a gambling debt ; he also pointed out to the Oxonian that he stood in danger of action for damages from the welfher. It was not until 1887 that the case of -Regina v. Buckmaeter inaugurated a new departure. The prosecution offered evidence — easy enough against a notorious welsher — j that the accused took prosecutor's deposit, not with any prior intention or even contemplation of making any " bet," but simply to confiscate it to his own use. The court thereupon convicted of "larceny by artifice," and, the point being -©served for a court for Crown cases, the conviction was affirmed. Curiously, this conviction, arising out of an Ascoc prosecution, hailed from the same county, Berks, which had 20 years earlier so snubbed the similar attempt above narrated to bring a welsher to justice. From that time (l'c&/) welshing, though still rampant, has not been on the same safe footing as that which it was previously supposed to occupy. Prior to that the sole remedy of a welsher' s victims consisted in tearing the thief to pieces if they chanced later in the day ■to light upon him unprotected by a posse of brother criminals. Some 40 years ago the well-known Captain White had to defend an action brought against him by a welsher for " kicking " him, and, if we recollect right, the galhuit captain was mulcted by a sympathetic jury for about £50 damages, in spite of the clearest evidence that the plaintiff was a professional welsher. Undoubtedly, the caiDtaiu was technically in the wrong side in inflicting, corporal punishment upon the rogue who had just before robbed him ; but his hopes of a verdict for a farthing were spoilt by the credulity and sympathy with which the jury listened to the welsher' s allegations of his inability to walk or to sit down with comfort for a long time after the application of the captain's bcot. The Spclthorne Bench appear to be as unsophisticated with regard to racecourse frp.uds as the jury referred to; otherwise they could hardly have supposed that a three-sovereign penalty would suffice to deter welshers from their profession.