BABY GAMBLERS

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11, 18 March 1905, Page 20

BABY GAMBLERS

BETTING IN STRET, SCHOOL AND NURSERY.

(By Marion Elliston, in the London “Express.”)

Occasionally we feel a little shocked at the stories of woman-gambling which filter through the closed doors of drawing-rooms. Possibly our feelings might be a little deeper if we realised how insidiously the evil of childgambling is creeping into English society without respect of age or class or sex.

There is a corner where three ways meet in the parish of fit. Mary’s Plaistow, which a bookmaker has adopted as his permanent pitc-h. “I call him the curse of the parish,'’ said the Rev. T. Given-Wilson, the other day, when a despairing little band of his workers went to him reporting the man’s renewed energies for evil among the little lads of the parish. “But I cannot stop him. I write to the mayor of the borough. The man is arrested -—has been time after time. He’s fined—has been time after time—they are fining him £lO now. After a fine he stays away for a couple of days, then he returns perfectly openly, and back again round hini flock my people. He is like a stone round my neck so far as work among the men and boys goes —they spend their dinner-hour w’ith him at the corner, and their evenings with me at the chib.”

“It is not only the men and boys,” added the lady superintendent of the settlements, “I constantly see the women handing him their money. They run out of their houses without bat or bonnet, dash up to the corner, and back again to their washing and cooking. Then a man in a dog-cart drives by slowly, and if no policeman is in sight pulls up just long enough to take the money and papers from the pave-ment-man, and goes on again.” Tiny Punters. “Neither does it stop at women,” chimed in another of the settlement ladies. “He takes money- from quite tiny children. If you stand on the railway bridge—seeing but unseen—when the children come out of school just after twelve you see him reaping a great harvest on exciting race, days?’

“It is practically the same all over London,” said the Rev. E. A. Gardner, a typical “boys’ curate,” who has devoted the whole of his “six-foot two” of Oxford-trained muscle and mind to knocking manliness into hoys and vice out of them ever since he entered the Church.

“One night one of my boys, a fine, promising little lad of fifteen, came to sec me in a dreadful terror. He had been betting—had lost —and then had stolen some money to pay the debt. Then he bet again to replace it, and lost again. I asked Idm how much he had lost, and he named an amount, which I lent him, arranging that he was to pay back a little each week.

“If he had only told me the truth it would have been all right, but he had only told me half the amount he had stolen, hoping to make up the rest in some other way. Naturally, he failed, and, feeling too ashamed to own that he had not been straight with me, he worried, and then—drowned himself in the Regent's Canal. But it killed betting among his comrades.”

Betting is not an evil confined to the poorer classes nor to the London boy of varied calling. There are few housemasters at any of our public schools that arc not in a slate of perpetual vigilance against betting. The apparently innocent-looking missives that look like “private, correspondence” veil many a tipster’s circular, Parental Responsibility. 'A well-known headmaster recently said: “The betting that we cannot suppress is the betting directly encouraged by the boys’ own parents, A boy writes

home, asks his father to put so much on a certain horse out of his next allowance. The father does it, the boy spends hie winnings—we know it, but we cannot help it. The parents themselves defeat us. Numbers of fathers keep their boys regularly informed as to what to back, and, with a stupid indulgence that only fosters recklessness, always pay their, boys’ losses.

But what about the home drawingroom aud the home nursery? Nothing is much more astonishing than the curious conglomerate of gambling and religion that obtains In a number of country houses.

A very well-known sportsman, member of a North-country Hunt, and owner of a lacing stud, is thoroughly devoted to his children. The little troop arrives in the library immediately after tea for romps. Then, the two youngest being withdrawn, the last half-hour is devoted to solid business. The two eldest boys, aged six and seven, stand beside their father for a quarter of an hour learning from memory the names of the winners and their pv ners in the days’ papers, and running through the list of those for the morrow, under their father’s “tips,” finally making him infinitesimal bets to be squared up the following evening. They then cross to the other side of the fireplace and say their evening prayers to their mother, who tells them Bible stories until the dressing-bell rings, when this most loving quartette wends its way upstairs.

Gantblmg at Seven. Another bright-eyed boy of seven very similarly circumstanced danced out to meet a favourite visitor with a sovereign in his hand. “Look here, what I won from Daddy last night,” he eaid, showing it. “He was teaching ns a new card game after tea, and he. bet a sovereign to my shilling that I couldn’t learn It in one evening. 1 beat him before I went to bed—fairplay and ‘no gives;’ Daddy won’t let us have ’gives’ in games; says we hud better lose. So, you see, he lost, and he’s paid.” Sportsmanlike, of course; but is seven years a suitable age for initiation into the complex right and wrong of making gains at another’s Joss ? A sadder case is that o( a very wellconnected girl of fourteen who, coming from the village post office, met a friend, with whom this conversation took place: “Just been to cash an order I got from Captain this morning.” “What has Captain been sending yon orders for?”

“Oh, he does all my betting for me, you know. He wrote to tell me what to back, and I sent him haK-a-erown. I won ten shillings with it, and I’m going to buy a new prayer-book to go with my new frock before Sunday—my red one docs not match it a bit.”

“Does your father know you do this kind of thing?” “Father? I should think not. And for goodness sake don’t tell him. Mother knows, for she’s always doing it herself —we generally bet together. But I can’t think what father would say if he found out!”