WELSH SUNDAY CLOSING

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XIII, Issue 800, 6 July 1905, Page 24

WELSH SUNDAY CLOSING

THE LIMIT IN CLOSING PROPOSITIONS.

England is a nation of fashions violent fashions —or, as Lord Macaulay terms them, periodical fits. Ihev nevei last very long. A fit of the Smart Set is followed by an outbreak of Rita and Marie Corelli; they are both very deadly while they last. Sometimes a joke or an educated baboon has a vogue, and then the papers are full of references to or anecdotes about them.. .If a scent or a song catches on, the air is full of the one or the other for a few brief weeks, to the extinction of every other tune and •every other stink. Tt is the fashion, and English people take their fashions very seriously. At the present moment the expected advent of the crinoline is absorbing all the interest and convei sational power of which women are capable;

the rage for playing “ Hamlet” has spread like the spotted fever among the acting fraternity; and in Parliament the fascination of endeavouring to reduce the hours for licensed business has infested both Houses. In the House of Lords there is a Bill to close public-houses on Christmas Day in Ireland, and che Archbishop of Canterbury hopes (D.V.) to get their lordships to consider his proposal to give licensing justices the right to require that public-houses should be closed at nine o’clock on five days of the week, and at eignt o’clock on Saturday, and to restrict trading to a couple of hours on the Sabbath day.

rhe Primate’s proposals do not extend to Ireland, but they would, if they became law, be. in./force in Wales, where, if the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act Amendment Bill gets; through both Houses, they would scarcely be wanted. Lord Avebury aiid the Marquis of Ripon declared that the Christmas Closing Bill was approved by the people of Ireland. and i, is quite possible that His Grate of Canterbury believes the English are yearning to have public-houses closed at sunset, and that the backers of the Welsh Bill think the people of the principality will not be happy until they are compelled by law to travel twelve miles on‘the Sabbath day in order to get a drink, and then, as likely as not,, have to return without getting it. It is, as we say, possible that me Primate, and Mr. Herbert Roberts, Sir Alfred Thomas, Air. William Jones, and Mr. Herbert Lewis may entertain these delusions, but nobody else out of Bedlam, not even the people who will support these two measures in the Legislature, are labouring under the same singular impression There are a whole crowd of fanatics who would close licensed premises throughout the United Kingdom every day of the week and all day, but there are few among them who are so deluded as to suppose that they would be gratifying an universal desire by so doing. That these three Bills are aimed in a measure at the Trade cannot be doubted, but that they are even more prejudicial to the interest and convenience of the public is equally evident. We have already pointed out in these columns that the Archbishop’s proposals constitute a piece of class legislation, and the Welsh measure reveals the same fundamental defect. As the Bill is down for its second reading in the House of Commons, it is necessary to examine its leading provisions with care.

Briefly, they may be set down as follows:—(1) No occupier of licensed premises shall receive or serve travellers on Sunday, unless the occupier shall be the holder of a specially granted Sunday license. (2) No traveller shall be entitled to -be served with refreshment on Sunday unless he has travelled twelve miles for some purpoes other than that of obtaining intoxicating liquor. (.3) No traveller shall be regarded as having complied with these conditions unless his bona-fides are vouched for by one or more disinterested persons. (4) No intoxicating liquor shall be sold on Sunday at a railway station. (5) No Sunday license shall be granted in respect of any premises under the annual rateable value of £25.

The Bill requires holders of Sunday licenses to enter the names and addresses of all travellers or other persons entering their licensed premises on a Sunday, and it contains a list of penalties that the Sunday license-holder shall be visited with foi' any breach of these conditions. Other restrictions and provisions are included in this precious measure, which, in addition to regulating Sunday liquor traffic, is designed to supplement the club clauses of the Licensing Act of 1902, to control wholesale trade week-day deliveries, to require manufacturers of beer and wholesale beer-sellers to be registered, and to forfeit all beer-houses of which the annual rateable value is less than £l2. In fact, the Bill is so top-heavy with extraordinary and various provisions that it is absolutely bound to founder in the troubled waters of the House of Commons. There is enough material in it to be spread over at least four seperate Bills. 7 and the idea of calling such a heterogeneous mass of proposals a Sunday Closing Bill is as misleading as it would be to describe Whiteley’s an emporium for the sale of speckled canaries. The drafters of the measure would appear to have been so elated and dazzled at their great daring in putting their first half-dozen provisions into black and white, that they, allowed their descretion to run away with them, and they proceeded to pile on every other proposal that came into their heads. We unhesitatingly declare that the Black Sea fleet has more chance of going through the Dardanelles than this Welsh Noah’s Ark has of finding a passage through the House of Commons. It is absolutely the limit of impudent interference with the rights of the public in respect of licensed trading hours —it is the last extremity of

the fashion, the crowning absurdity which invariably prefaces the extinction of any fashion in this country. The first and fifth provisions that we have enumerated are aimed point-blank at the publican, and as they will not inconvenience the public, we will pass them over. But the same cannot be said of clauses three, four, and five. A man may travel eleven miles on Sunday on important business, but he may not afterwards cover another mile and procure alcoholic refreshment, because he will have gone that additional distance for no other purpose than to obtain it. And even if he has journeyed the prescribed dozen miles he cannot be served unless he can produce a person or persons to corroborate his statement that he has complied with the conditions which entitle him to obtain a drink. Even then, considering the risk that the publican runs of being convicted of any offence under this Bill, the parched and formally corroborated traveller may be refused the nourishment he stands in urgent need of by an over-cautious landlord. The conditions are monstrous, exasperating, and entirely ridiculous. Add to these piovisions the closing of railway refreshment rooms on Sunday, and the Bill becomes what Mr. Cecil Raleigh would call a melo-farce.

Imagine the position of a stranger, arriving in Cardiff on a Sunday morning. At the railway station his ticket would prove that he had travelled the regulation twelve miles or upwards which would entitle him to a glass of bitter and a hard-boiled egg. But once out of the precincts of the station he is. an alien and under the severest suspicion. He has nothing but his word for it that he has travelled the prescribed distance, and he knows nobody in the city who will vouch for his veracity. What is he to do ? If he is a diseased Polish Jew he could, we suppose, take his papers to the Russian Consul, and compel him to go along to the Pig and Compasses, and insist upon his being served ' but the Englishman would have nothing for it but to get back again into Merry England by the quickest route, or be reduced to a diet of cocoa oi' Kop’s ale. The teetotal faddists take some unconscionable liberties with their compatriots in England and Scotland, but what Welshmen have done to deserve the intolerable interference with their rights proposed in this Welsh Sunday Closing Bill is a secret that remains locked in the bosom of its backers.—“ L.V. Gazette.”