RECORD SWEEPSTAKE

Taranaki Daily News, 24 July 1931, Page 4

RECORD SWEEPSTAKE

■ a 1 IRISH DERBY PRIZES. ABOUT £2,790,000 SUBSCRIBED. London, May 29. All world records for sweepstake totals have been easily surpassed by the receipts for the Free State Hospitals Derby sweepstake. Englishmen and Scots — many of them bearers of as much as £lOO0 —arrived in Dublin with the last subscriptions -and formed a queue outi/% the offices in order to deposit their stakes. The total sum subscribed will, it is believed, reach the surprsiing total of £2,700,000. The most modest estimate places the sum available for prizes at about £1,800,000. On this figure there will bo 18 prizes each of £30,000, £15,000 and £lO,OOO. In order to accommodate tho last anxious speculator the oilices in Dublin were kept open until after the arrival of the evening mail-boat. Long queues, mostly visitors from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, had already formed when the offices were opened. Nearly every shop in Dublin, it is said, was a depot where tickets could be bought. “The rush lias been terrific during the past few days,” said an official before the close of the offices. “We increased our staff to 3063,.and-still can barely cope with the flow of subscrip- i tions. Money is coming in every possible way-. There is a box of eggs on my I table, and though I have not had time to open it, I know that somewhere con-: coaled among the eggs is a bunch of I Treasury notes. Money and counterfoils ■ I arrive in cakes, in the soles of old shoes, j by carrier pigeon, and in a hundred in- j genious ways.” ’ I In Dublin to-day police with revolvers i are watching the mixing of the live and a half million slips of paper from which fortunes will be drawn. 1 hree hundred girls, chosen from 3000, iwho for weeks

have been scrutinising and docketing the |; tickets, performed, the mixing of counterfoils. With arms bare to the shoulder, the girls'turn over-the mounds of paper just like a baker kneading dough. The ceremony takes place in the Mansion House. They are tickets from all the corners of the world. Each ticket icpiesentp the hope of swift riches, but there are five and a half millions of them, and all tho time the policemen and officials watch lest one slip of paper should go astray. . All day the mixing of the counterfoils is going on' at five wooden tables. At regular intervals four-fifths of the tickets at° each table -are collected in boxes, -to be scattered on another table. This inixin" is fool-proof, like the separating piocess that came before it. The new electrical separator is like a big refrigerator with glass sides. A strong current of air, like a miniature typhoon, separates all the counterfoils in books of tickets that are fed into it by a girL ‘‘These Irish sweepstakes are attaining dimensions which make them a significant factor in our national economy,” writes a contributor to the NewsChronicle. “Three-quarters of the tickets, probably, are subscribed for in this country; if that is so, wo may well stand to lose, on balance, from £1,000,000 to £2,000,000 a year. This on the assumption that the programme of three big sweeps a year is carried through. _ ‘“For even if the prizes won by Britlish subscribers are proportionate to the I money put up, the money which goes in expenses and to the Irish hospitals is a . dead loss as far as Britain is concerned. In short, the net loss to Britain on these I Irish sweepstake** is becoming a incasui- ! able factor in our trade balance. It conI stitutes, in economic parlance, an ‘invisj ible import,’ which has to be paid for I by the export of gold or goods. Another i point of interest is the widespread disI tribution of this liability. 1 should estimate that some 10,901),900 persons—about a quarter of the population—arc directly or indirectly interested in the draw.’