LIQUOR IN THE PARK.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LVI, Issue 8626, 7 December 1906, Page 5

LIQUOR IN THE PARK.

Petition before the Licensing

Committee.

A petition was read at yesterday's Licensing Committee meeting which was referred to that body from the Masterton Borough Council. It is two or three months ago since the latter body dealt with the matter, but it will be remembered that the Council received a petition requesting that the sale of alcoholic liquors at sports meetings held in the Masterton Park be no longer sanctioned. Though the Park Committee passed a resolution in favour of granting the petition (which bore a fair number of signatures) the Council as a whole was not favourable to the idea, though the Clerk was instructed to ascertain and report on the Council's position-whether the Council could prevent bodies who paid for the hire of the Park from selling liquor provided the Licensing Committee saw fit to grant the license. The Clerk's report being that tho only power in the Council's hands was to refuse to grant leave to sporting bodies to use the Park if they sold liquor—in other words, that the Council could not prevent the sale if the booth was licensed—the petition was forwarded to the Licensing Committee to consider.

After the petition had been read, Mr Pownall, on behalf of the Caledonian Society, objected to the petition being allowed to prejudice the Society's chance of getting its usual conditional license for the New Year's Day Sports. He stated that the Society had had the privilege for a very long time, and that no abuses whatever had arisen. In a gathering of the sort, where a large body of Scotchmen met together on their festival day, it would be hard lines indeed if they were to have their enjoyment curtailed through a petition of the kind before the Committee.

On the Chairman asking Sergeant Millar his opinion, the latter replied that it might be better, for the sake of women and children present at the gatherings, if the license was not there.

Mr Pownall urged that this argument cut both ways. If the license of a hotel was convenient in one place it was convenient in another. A large number at the gathering, including some people coming from long distances, would find the booth a convenience, and women and children were as close to a hotel on the street as they were to the booth at the sports.

Mr McEwen thought that little harm was done by the issue of a conditional license to a reputable body, and especially to such a body as the Caledonian Society. Personally, he had no knowledge of having seen or heard of any excess of drunkenness at the sports meetings in Masterton. The Council, he mentioned, had interrogated the persons who brought the petition to the meeting, and found that they could give only one definite instance of drunkenness, and, in this case, it was admitted, but the Society had removed the offender from the

grounds

The Chairman was inclined to believe that it was rather harsh to expect a gathering, such as the New Year's Day one, to be deprived of what might be to many attending it a great convenience. Certainly some attending would be better off, perhaps, without it; but that could not be helped. And there was another difficulty of preventing those who had had sufficient from getting more, but this was also an unavoidable circumstance.

The Committee decided that, in receiving applications for licenses for the Park, it would treat each request on its merits, and that granting licenses indiscriminately would not occur.