HOTEL THIEVES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVII, Issue 968, 24 September 1908, Page 20

HOTEL THIEVES.

The position of a burglary insurance company in connection with hotel thieves is an interesting one. The House of Lords had recently to state the law on the subject. The case was one of Whitehouse v. Pickett, and was one in which a jeweller’s traveller was robbed at an Edinburgh hotel of a bag containing goods to the value of some £IBOO, and the insurance company (the National Burglary Insurance Corporation, now the National General Insurance Company), after paying the claim made upon it for the full amount of loss, put the law in motion, by means of an action against the proprietors of the hotel, in the name of their assured, to recover the amount they had paid. Innkeepers are liable in law, beyond the statutory £3O, for loss of a guest’s property under certain circumstances, as, for instance, when the property is specially deposited with them for safe custody, or the property is lost or stolen through

£tie culpable negligence of the innkeeper. The company alleged that the proprietors of the hotel were in both respects at fault and in support of their contention, it was shown in evidence that the traveller was well known at the hotel, as was also the nature of his business that it was a custom of some years’ standing for the servants of the hotel, without special instructions, to carry his business bag—the bag containing the jewellery—to a safe place (a place of very doubtful safety it turned out to be), which was “ in the corner of the office behind the ice-chest.” That the depositor acquiesced in the arrangements made for the protection of his property and regarded them as adequate there is no reason to doubt, and 99 times out of 100 they would probably work satisfactorily. But the pitcher goes once too often to the well. Some smart thieves shadowed the commercial traveller, and learned his ways; and one evening when he requested his bag of jewellery he was handed a “ colorable imitation,” containing nothing more valuable than bricks and dirty rags. The Scotch Court had given a verdict against the hotel proprietor for £1790, but the Scotch Court of Appeal reversed this decision, and the House of Lords confirmed the reversal. The Lords held that the handing over of the bag for custody without declaration of

value —without the warning which he hotelkeeper had a right to expect —was not the “ special deposit ” required by law to entitle the victim of robbery to recover, and that, though the system of keeping the property of guests in safe custody might be objectionable and neglectful, it was necessary to trace the loss to some definite act of neglect on the part of the hotelkeeper—such as could not be established in this case —before he could be made responsible.