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New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume IV, Issue 205, 28 June 1894, Page 5

An anti-gambling crusade has been started in the old country by the members of the National Anti-Gambling League. This virtuous organisation states it has got tired of going for the little men and that it is now going to prosecute all the big clubs, all the big owners and managers of the big race meetings and all the mathematical professors whose address is Tattersall’s. The league has found out that the Betting Houses (or Places) Act, 1853, extends to credit betting as well as ready money transactions, and consequently its legal advisers have advised that rings and turf clubs areillegal betting places. Clubs which are used in the old country for betting, pure and simple, will be crusaded against by the league. Speaking to a Pall Mall Budget man the secretary of the league lately said: — “ The demon of gain shouts from the throats of five thousand bookmakers on a hundred courses. Their customers- are

believed to number half a million souls, not one per cent, of whom it is estimated fail to lose their money in the long run, amounting in the aggregate to five millions sterling per annum. Some of the chief operators in this ghastly business retire with fortunes of one or two hundred thousand pounds. Jockeys make fortunes, and are pampered as prime donnas. A child hardly through the School Board curriculum has received a thousand pounds for winning a race. The enormous money interests afford occasion for every kind of fraud. And here is a pointed instance of the anomalous condition of things. I have just heard from Plymouth, where there has been a raid by sixty detectives, that the small fry who were caught were not only imprisoned, but were being marched handcuffed through the streets at the very same time as the authorities and the police were protecting the aristocratic betting men on Epsom Downs.” The league states that the members of the public who bet at race meetings will not be prosecuted, but that bookmakers and owners of meetings who have permitted betting will have to meet it in court. Really the world is getting very moral.