NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VII, Issue 360, 17 June 1897, Page 8

NOTES.

[By

Eros.]

It is hard lines indeed when, in addition to devoting a considerable portion of one’s time to promoting any branch of sport, one has to put the hand in the pocket to make good deficiencies. This has been the unpleasant experience of two of Wanganui’s most large-hearted sports, Messrs

W. R. Tuck and Win. Kennedy, who, as stewards of the now defunct Wanganui Trotting Club, have been held liable for the payment of a sum of £25, due for rent of Flemington Lodge, tenanted by the widow of the late Sam Powell, "the best starter with the flag New Zealand has ever seen. It is to be hoped that the other stewards of the club will not allow the whole brunt of the judgment to fall on the shoulders of the two gentlemen who the plaintiff saw fit to single out, for although they were the proposer and seconder of the resolution re securing the track at Flemington Lodge at the rent recovered, they are no more responsible than their fellow stewards.

The affairs of the late Wanganui' Trotting dub were not, I understand, by any means under good secretarial management, without which no club can be made financially successful. The last meeting, I learn, would have panned out all right had at least one important source of receipt been properly looked after, namely, nomination and acceptance fees, and I would sirongly recommend secretaries putting the names of all outstanding amounts after a meeting (giving them a week’s grace, not a day more) on the forfeit list. I hardly know of a single trotting club in the North Island which has not a large sum on its books of outstanding fees for nomination and acceptance. There is really only one remedy for the evil, and it is that a hard and fast rule that entries and acceptances unaccompanied by the necessary fees are put into the waste-paper basket. Once let owners distinctly understand that the rule is intended to apply to all and sundry, -with absolutely no exceptions, secretarial duties would be made very much lighter, and balancesheets present a more respectable appearance than they often do. That very old standing grievance between the Wellington and Johnsonville Trotting Clubs, which has been more than freely aired through the correspondence columns of this paper, in connection with an alleged guarantee made by the former club to the latter—to make good any loss over a meeting held by the Johnsonville Club if they refused the nomination of certain horses —is likely to come to a head at last, the J. and H.C. T.C. management having decided to litigate. It is a great pity for both clubs that the dispute could not have been settled otherwise —by arbitration, for instance —rather than recourse to law, which generally results in such cases in heavy expense to both, with no satisfactory solution of the difficulty. Manny Edwards, who experienced very little luck with that promising horse Dictator at Hawera, Nelson, and Christchurch, has decided to sojourn in the southern city.