The history of anti gambling acts

A PENNY HERE: A PAY PACKET THERE

The three major bouts of legislation up to 1920 which tried to suppress gambling were drastic in their scope. Racecourse inspectors, first appointed in 1921, chased bookmakers off the tracks or worked with police to arrest them. The result was that the calling was driven underground, where it was pursued with even more vigour and enthusiasm. In 1921 there were race-meetings throughout the country on five days of each week, all attracting large crowds from across the social spectrum. That enthusiasts off-course could neither bet legally, nor learn of totalisator dividends or receive tips from newspapers, was a source of intense frustration. That bookmakers moved so easily to fill the void, and exploited it more profitably than they had been able to do before the passing of the anti-gambling laws, was indeed ironic.

By the 1920S bookmakers had an elaborate organisation for the rapid transmission of results and dividends. The volume of illegal business grew for both part- and full-time bookmakers. In May 1921 the latter organised a national ‘officer’ whose sole job, on race-days, was to facilitate the transmission of bets by telephone or telegram through a central Wellington office to all other bookies’ offices throughout the country. He had an initial annual retainer of.5oo, the funds being donated by participating bookmakers. This was the genesis of the euphemistically named Dominion Sportsmen’s Association which grew in strength as the illegal off-course trade increased. The association, which was to represent some oo full- time bookmakers over the next 30 years, supplied results to government- controlled radio stations, a dubious practice but one to which the police turned a blind eye.
Other bookmakers, their touts and agents flouted the law by accosting passers-by on the pavements outside hotels, a long-standing practice which the legislation had failed to arrest. When the police appeared, these men would simply disappear inside. Despite the prohibition, there was still open betting at sports events. In August 1921, a Free Lance reporter spied players and bookmakers in animated conversation near the dressing rooms inside an Auckland rugby ground. Police concentration on street betting did lead to more prosecutions, but behind closed doors there was a growing market.

The ban on publication of tips and dividends in newspapers also made bookmaking more attractive, as clients sought advice and information that was not otherwise available. The police, of course, were frustrated that illegal betting had spread its tentacles so successfully. They also found that arresting a bookmaker was barely worth the effort—for two reasons. Firstly, as we have already noted, very few of his clients were prepared to testify against him; he had to be caught in the act of laying a bet for a conviction to even be possible. Secondly, and even more galling to police and judiciary alike, few juries were prepared to convict a bookmaker, no matter how convincing the evidence against him. ‘When Justice Chapman, for example, told a Wellington jury in May 1921 that there was very strong evidence that Matthew Livingstone was bookmaking, and ‘that they must remember their oath and not their sympathies’, they ignored him. Livingstone was acquitted.

Commissioner of Police A. H. Wright complained bitterly in 1922 about the obstacles to prosecuting bookmakers, particularly their ability to be given the option of a jury trial. Wright, like his colleagues, had wanted successful arrests, convictions and jailing of bookmakers to put a stop to the practice, but the 1920 measure was proving a damp squib. Successive police commissioners reiterated ‘Wright’s protests with no greater success.

ernative tactic, however, which did prove more effective. Under the 1910 legislation they could prosecute bookmakers for keeping common gaming houses. Twenty-eight of 32 bookmakers were convicted under this measure in 1922, but the problem was that this was not an imprisonable offence, the maximum penalty being only a £ioo flne.
When bookies were convicted, judges revealed an antagonism towards them that reflected a scathing middle-class morality. A Taranaki magistrate, for example, told a first defendant that he considered bookmakers debauched and dirty. In 1923 an Auckland Supreme Court judge sentenced first offender Henry Salery to two months’ hard labour because he had treated a ‘proper’ law with contempt. Further, there was a gender exclusivity about bookmaking that, to the judicial eye, made woman bookmakers even more reprehensible than men. A magistrate called such a woman, arrested outside the Epsom trotting grounds in 1929, ‘despicable’ and a very bad moral influence on her daughter, who had been her penciller. Woman bookmakers were, of course, very rare.

A case in Christchurch caused the biggest uproar. Tobacconist William Vivian Whitta was the town’s biggest and most affluent bookmaker and, as such, was well-known to the police. Several convictions over 25 years of operating had failed to deter him. Whitta’s gambling winnings and commercial acumen enabled him to purchase billiard saloons and to trade in houses and sections. A considerable part of his business involved accepting bets on major Australian horse races, and every year he travelled to Australia in style to attend the Melbourne Cup and other meetings.

Irked by Whitta’s continuing success, Christchurch police intensified pressure on him after the passing of the 1920 legislation. Raiding his premises, however, was difficult because of a cleverly disguised warning system. Instead they studied the cheque-butts of Whitta’s clients, and although most refused to admit that these recorded successful bets, under pressure a handful did. Seizing upon this rare opportunity; police arrested him early in 1921. Whitta chose trial by jury, naturally, and hired a prominent King’s Counsel to defend him. The evidence was circumstantial, but this jury was atypically unsympathetic and convicted him. The judge gave Whitta six months’ hard labour, the longest possible sentence, and the local press approved. But the Lyttelton Times’ contention that ‘the great bulk of public sentiment was on the side of the law’ was about to be sorely tested.

Whitta’s son and business partner, Alfred, had earlier been sentenced to three months’ jail for a similar offence. But when the government, surprisingly, was prevailed upon to release Alfred early on the grounds that his sentence was excessive, his father’s plight was highlighted. A remarkable 13,000 Cantabrians, including professionals, businessmen and local-body politicians, signed a petition calling for his sentence also to be remitted, but Massey’s government, cognisant of opposing and equally strident Christian-based protests against Alfred Whitta’s release, took no action.

William Whitta faded from bookmaking prominence, but Alfred was in further bother, in 1925, 1926 and 1927, although he did not go to prison. Indeed his practice expanded. By 1928, after several convictions, he still had 3,000 clients, and he and his associates transacted up to i,ooo bets every day. No law, it seemed, could hinder the successful bookmaker, no matter how vigilantly he was pursued. Support for their calling was graphically illustrated by the popularity of a national petition organised by the Dominion Sportsmen’s Association in 1924, which attracted 8o,ii signatures in favour of their licensing. This was rejected by Parliament, but only after heated debate.

Politicians understood clearly that restrictions on legal gambling were playing into the bookmakers’ hands. Twice in 1927, and again in 1930, private members tried to make it easier for punters to bet legally by proposing off-course betting facilities, a doubles totalisator and the publicaof dividends. Also in 1927 a group of Auckland racing enthusiasts, including the mayor and the harbour board chairman, tried hard to interest the government in legal electric-hare coursing or greyhound racing (such races, with gambling, had been clandestinely running for some time). Both proposals met with disapproval. The majority of politicians, supported by newspapers and anti-gambling moralists, opposed any extension of gambling activities because they believed these appealed to the weak and disaffected, and because they feared an electoral backlash.

Despite restrictions on the availability of discretionary cash, the larger bookmakers survived well through the economic depression of the 1930s. By 1935 illegal off-course turnover was estimated to have exceeded £8 million annually, and more than 400 bookmakers and their touts were estimated to have been working within 50 miles of central Auckland. The reality was that all manner of men from across the social strata (and fewer numbers of women) were betting on horses as an enjoyable leisure activity. Horse racing was a high-profile and popular sport, and because off-course betting was illegal, bookmakers had both a monopoly and a captive market. They were cheeky on race-days, trading just outside the gates and fences of racing clubs. Bigger clubs, which had done well out of totalisator profits, informed police of bookies’ activities, but smaller clubs in the country, whose profit margins were finer, covertly welcomed their presence as an additional attraction to their meetings. At the Makaraka races near Gisborne, for example, a raised paddock at the back of the course proved a popular meeting-place for punters attracted by the spiel of both bookmakers and crown-and-anchor operators. Occasionally such clubs asked the Racing Conference to consider the reintroduction of bookmakers, but they were always outvoted by the metropolitan clubs.

That bookmakers prospered during the Depression was quite remarkable, as attendances at race-meetings fell, clubs retrenched and some clubs became defunct. During the 1932-33 year, 85 per cent of racing and trotting clubs made nett losses as totalisator turnover decreased drastically. Probably bookies benefitted because many erstwhile race-goers could not afford to pay for transport costs or entrance fees to the grounds, let alone afford to bet. The problems of racing clubs were compounded by an ever increasing tax on the totalisator as the Forbes administration sought in vain to lessen its debt. More than a few racehorse owners and trainers felt the economic pinch and, attracted by larger stakes and cheaper transport costs, transferred their teams across the Tasman. In 1933 those who remained keenly sought the reintroduction of the on-course bookmaker in order to make racing profitable again. Another attempt eighteen months later was more desperate, even having the support of large metropolitan racing clubs like Auckland fighting to stave off financial disaster. On neither occasion was the government interested. Bookmakers, no matter how respectable in character, were still castigated by wowsers as being ‘unclean’, and such disapproving voices still had a powerful influence on the body politic.

Relicensing off-course bookmakers was probably a better bet. During the early 1930s, Labour MP-Tim Armstrong (twice), United’s E. E Healy, and Eliot Davis in the Legislative Council all proposed measures to legalise them, arguing that this would control the business, clean out its disreputable element, benefit both the clubs and the government by increased taxation, and revive a sport that was ‘bleeding to death’ under its present laws. But all the Bills died in the House, Healy’s in December by only two votes. Armstrong was an unusual Labourite. Most of his parliamentary colleagues were opposed to bookmakers on the grounds that they fostered ‘unhealthy’ gambling habits that were inimical to the interests of the working class. Befitting his own ideology; Labour leader Harry Holland disparaged bookies as small-scale capitalists. ‘When he became Prime Minister in 1935, Michael Savage feared that licensing bookmakers would increase both the gambling facilities for working people, whom he considered gullible, and the already ‘unbridled’ power of the Racing Conference.

Indeed, the new Labour government was even less interested in licensing bookmakers than its predecessor had been. Late in 1936 Savage told the Dominion Sportsmen’s Association that there ‘was not a million-and-one chance’ of his government legalising them. But Bill Parry; his Minister of Internal Affairs, tired of successive racing delegations beating a path to his door requesting a liberalisation of the rules, called for a Royal Commission to study proposals for off-course betting. Savage refused. Parry’s enthusiasm had lessened by 1938, when the owners and trainers reversed their previous stance and, like the Racing Conference, advocated state-controlled betting. By then the economy had improved and horse-race gambling returns were increasing fast. More than £7 million passed through the totalisator that year, and twice as much was estimated to have passed through bookmakers’ hands.

Some bookmakers were still being arrested and convicted, but the law was enforced inconsistently. Those arrested were usually the smaller, part- time operators, the confidants of working folk in hotels and clubs. Punters of standing_politicians, lawyers, accountants, businessmen, school teachers and senior policemen—all bet discreetly with the bigger, better-disguised, full-time bookies. Since the ‘c’hitta trials, very few of them had been arrested. Their operations were hard to penetrate, and clients who were prepared to give evidence against them were very few and far between.

Police occasionally conducted raids to demonstrate that bookmakers had not completely defeated them. At midnight on 31 March 1935, a posse raided the Gloucester Club in Christchurch and found money, dice, cards, croupiers’ sticks and poker chips, as well as doubles charts, the rule book of the Dominion Sportsmen’s Association, telephone cards and race-books with dividends marked on them—and one jockey who was unceremoniously extracted by his collar from a cupboard. Sixty-five men, including public servants, trotting drivers and trainers, were arrested and fined. Yet the police were very lucky here. The raid’s success owed much to the breakdown of licensee Albert Khouri’s elaborate alarm system.
Bill Parry was persistent in his demand for a Royal Commission into racing and gaming. In January 1939, nearly three years after he had mooted the idea, he finally won the support of the Labour Cabinet for its establishment. Interested parties prepared evidence, and in June 1939 members of the Commission were appointed. But progress was slow, and when war broke out in September the Commission was postponed indefinitely. Issues that had been pressing for more than a decade, including the introduction of state lotteries, the licensing of bookmakers, the publication of racing dividends and the reintroduction of the doubles totalisator, were left simmering on a back-burner until the Commission was reformed in I946.

SOCIAL CLASS - horse Races

Betting on horse races was the most prominent gamble during the inter- war period. But a variety of other traditional forms continued, and some reached levels of social acceptability By the 1920S there had been perceptible changes to society’s uppermost stratum. Devastated by economic reverses and political decisions to break up their large estates, the landed gentry were almost moribund. Occupation and wealth rather than birth had become the primary determinants of power and privilege. Bankers, importers and exporters, merchants, politicians, some professionals and larger farmers formed the Chambers of Commerce and the Agricultural and Pastoral Associations, and shared a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. This included gambling in elite clubs, which had changed little in format since the nineteenth century. Billiards and snooker were games of skill played with a few pounds bet on the side, but poker was the real passion.

The Taranaki Club was typical in the 19205 and 1930S. Applicants for membership were vetted rigorously to ensure they were of genuine ‘high standing’. Once admitted, they were required to adhere to a strict code of etiquette—except, hypocritically, for anti-gambling rules which were deftly ignored. A 1903 Minute banning gambling games was reiterated in subsequent years, but it is clear that gambling on billiards and cards continued and that the club’s office-holders maintained a cloak-and-dagger pretence about its existence.

In fact, poker-playing in the Taranaki Club was extravagant. Stakes were often high; in one renowned instance, a sheep station in the hinterland changed hands, reputedly on the flip of an ace. On Friday nights there was a rush for available seats at the specially designed tables in the three poker rooms. Doors and windows (a common means of entry for late-corners) were then locked and the players were, according to one non- playing member, ‘a world apart from we mortals’. Men like Newton King, a wealthy businessman and land speculator, played through the night, emerging bleary-eyed for breakfast at dawn. The secrecy was to keep numbers manageable and to distance themselves from those other members who disapproved of the vulgarity. Poker-playing continued in this intensity until the late 1930S, when interest waned. There was never any danger of the activity being barred, despite the rules. Most players were influential locals whose membership was important to the prestige of the club.’

Protestants, especially Presbyterians, Methodists and smaller denominations such as Baptists and Congregatiopalists, continued to stress the importance of morally correct behaviour and individual salvation. But their protestations against drinking and gambling had little effect on the patterns of working men’s leisure. In the 19205 greater prosperity meant there was less transience among the unskilled, but many still sought release from tedium in sustained drinking and gambling. On the West Coast, coal- miners were known to have two pay-sheets. The miner kept the genuine copy in his pocket; the falsified copy, with a much smaller amount recorded in the Net Pay column, he took home and showed to his wife. The ‘missing’ money was spent on drinking and gambling. When some spouses later learned of this deceit they accompanied their husbands to the pay office. Other working men emerging from the same office on a Friday afternoon would be confronted by a fellow employee wishing to toss a penny for his fortnightly wage packet. This was rarely refused, and all over in a second, without acrimony. That the loser would be forced to face his wife’s wrath (if he was married), or to borrow money to tide him over, was never an obvious concern. He trusted his luck would be better a fortnight hence, or at cards, or with the bookie, or at the Sunday rugby league match. Bert Robinson, a goldminer at Waiuta for twenty years, observed this tradition ‘dozens and dozens of times’.

Men apprehended for gambling in public were invariably working-class. In 1924 four ‘street workers’ were arrested playing poker in Freemans Bay. Most among a large group of two-up players caught in Christchurch’s Sockburn Reserve in 1928 were railwaymen. All 28 players who were fined for playing two-up on a disused road between Shannon and Foxton in December 1922 were local flax-cutters or mill workers. Detectives periodically raided nooks and crannies on the waterfront to discover off-duty workers engrossed in games of dominoes, euchre, poker, hazard or two-up. A November 1927 edict from the Auckland Harbour Board banning gambling from its lunchroom merely caused the watersiders to set up their games outside. In April 1928 Wellington police who raided the Premier Club in Oriental Bay disturbed a hazard school which had been underway for two days and two nights. Chinese pedlars, market-gardeners and laundry workers (along with more than a few Europeans) continued to play fantan and pakapoo. Chinese businessmen organised bigger games, some making huge profits while keeping out of the limelight. To supplement their meagre incomes during the Depression, Bush men and men on relief work raffled rabbit, pork and even fern-root in hotels.

As they had since colonial days, sideshow men at festivals and exhibitions still devised games of chance accompanied by patters of self-promotion. Dice and card games were the most popular. Police kept a wary eye on these because it was relatively simple for an experienced spieler to befuddle, with sleight of hand, even the most cautious of punters. Some cheats were caught. Games of ‘boxball’ and ‘sky-alley’ at Auckland’s 1926 Winter Exhibition cost two men Lw between them for illegal gaming. John Lawrence deprived a ‘country lad’ of £7 in a game called ‘the Lodger’ at the 1927 Invercargill Royal Show before being arrested. Sideshows at the Bluff Civic Carnival in 1928 and at the New Brighton Gala in 1929 were closed down after the arrests of men doing ‘strange things’ with dice, cards and numbers.

Some working-class gambling was entrepreneurial, run by operators keen to make money from innocent enthusiasts. But mostly it was among friends—visible, gregarious, a warm expression of class solidarity and back- slapping camaraderie. The men gambled everywhere—in hotels, billiard saloons, Bush clearings, private homes, and by the 19205 in more exclusive haunts analogous to the clubs of the elite. Workingmen’s clubs, RSA social centres and sports clubs were popular rendezvous where men drank somewhat, partook in friendly games of cards and darts, and arranged wagers with friends on the outcome of a sports event or the time it would take for a fly to crawl up a frosty window pane. Following colonial tradition, drunken arguments among workers occasionally led to fist-fights which could be bruising, bloody and bet upon. Onlookers still made wagers at weekend sporting events. Annual athletic meetings for company workers were particularly well patronised. On the West Coast, £io was a common bet on lazystick, and in 1938 there was a temporary craze for wheelbarrow derbies with officials setting odds on the participants. Self-appointed bookmakers also stirred up business at running, boxing and wood-chopping competitions. Spectators and players alike arranged pre-match bets on inter- community rugby and rugby league contests. Some players, wishing to make money but lacking confidence in their own team’s abilities, backed the opposition to win. Very occasionally, key players ‘threw’ matches for substantial collects.

Men also gambled at their place of work., Flax workers at the Mangahao
Mills near Shannon, for example, played billiards and cards in their recreational periods through the 19205 and 193os. Crowds of 300 gathered to play two-up at the mill on weekends; some pools reached £500 per toss. On wet days, the men moved inside to the recreation room where tables were overturned to accommodate the game. Two-up was popular lunchtime fare in most large industrial plants. Arriving at one provincial freezing works in 1924 a broad-shouldered Australian started a two-up operation which soon attracted a willing clientele. But a suspicious punter grabbed the coin in mid-air and discovered it was a ‘double-header’. Quickly perceiving that attack was his best means of defence, the Australian drew himself up on his haunches, scowled and challenged all and sundry to take him on. As the bemused crowd reacted slowly to the scam, he took to his heels undamaged, but never to return.

Small-time gambling among the unemployed during the Depression brought a modicum of pleasure to men down on their luck. Relief workers constructed the Fox Glacier-Lake Paringa road on the West Coast during 1933-34. Crude home-brew kept them warm at night in their bare-walled huts. Around the candle or kerosene lamp, in a scene repeated in all rural relief camps, men played cribbage, poker, slippery sam or pontoon for threepences, matchsticks or just for the fun of it. But such activity brought forth righteous howls of middle-class indignation. In 1931 a Nelson magistrate described one group of relief workers he was sentencing for gambling as parasites and ‘undeserving of our sympathy’. The unemployed, like others through this time, sometimes fell victim to professional gamblers, or card sharps—transient confidence tricksters who traversed the country. Showing up in places where a card game might be in progress, they would smile, ask to join in, lose a couple of hands, scoop the pool by cheating, then excuse themselves to go to the toilet and disappear into the night. Such behaviour became so prevalent that one gambler wrote a book in 1933 warning the uninitiated and naive to beware of experienced players who pretended to be friendly. He included more than 30 diagrams illustrating commonly used scams.

The successful card cheat was peripatetic, glib, personable and nimble- fingered; he had strong nerves, read the odds astutely, both as to the fall of the cards and the gullibility of the opposition, and made himself as inconspicuous as possible. Some had confederates who were in on the deceit. Others, the most skilful and patient, worked alone. They surfaced in work- camps, where there was a ready and waiting market (men building the Homer Tunnel in 1936 were fleeced by a professional card sharp who had befriended them) and also in clubs, hotels, private homes and on board trains and ships. Publicans and shop proprietors charged poker-players rent for room and light. Some, less virtuous, arranged with professional gamblers to take a percentage of the profit. A few assisted in the scam itself. It was a profitable arrangement. The police were aware that illegal gambling schools were operating, and that innocents were being fleeced, but it was very difficult for them to catch the perpetrators. They had to be caught in the act, but this was almost impossible to achieve as entry to the games was strictly vetted, introductions and personal guarantees being standard procedure. During this period, and long afterwards, card sharping was a lucrative and widespread business.

More innocent games attracted disproportionate police attention. To raise funds community groups ran euchre evenings. As these grew in popularity in the late 1920s, some thousand or more patrons crowded local halls. Entrepreneurs saw the chance to make money, but there was uncertainty as to whether euchre was a game of chance or a game of skill and chance— the latter being deemed legal by a magistrate in 1927. The police subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court which reversed the decision, determining that a literal reading of section 36 of the 1908 Gaming Act did not require such a distinction to be made. This decision had immediate ramifications, as police began arresting euchre tournament organisers all around the country.

Ordinary folk in their hundreds gathered at protest meetings in Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin. MP Ted Howard led a delegation to Prime Minister Gordon Coates to try to. persuade him to allow euchre contests to continue unmolested. Coates was unmoved, but the tournaments remained popular despite their illegality. Police raided these games periodically, but by 1929 raids usually occurred only after there had been a complaint or where there were suspicions that the operators were taking an unfair percentage of the profits. A few games were being shut down as late as 1933, but by then the controversy had faded along with police interest. Euchre evenings, used mainly for fund-raising but also as enjoyable social occasions, survived through to the 1940S, when housie slowly began to supersede them. Housie had the advantage of being more easily run and had the potential to raise much more money. Unlike euchre, there was no vestige of skill in its playing. As a straight game of chance, housie was illegal until the law was modified in 1959.

The West Coast has a parochial gambling tradition. Local writers down the years—Iveagh Lord, Irwin Fans, Carl Pfaff, W. E Heinz and Mona Tracy—have all recorded gambling anecdotes, none more than Leslie Hobbs in his 1959 book, The Wild West Coast. He writes of policemen playing poker, crooked showmen, shady bookmakers, wagers on rugby and rugby league games, the nobbling of racehorses, and a variety of other bets, including the laying of odds on the ‘Stanley Graham Steeplechase of 1941’ which was won by the punter who estimated how long the police would take to catch the fugitive killer. The West Coast social environment had changed little since the days of the pioneers. Labouring men still loved to gamble: ‘work hard, play hard’ was the ethic.

Some West Coast gambling tales have become apocryphal in their retelling, but facts remain. Workers in dangerous occupations, such as miners and Bush men, pretended that sports or recreational injuries had been caused at work in order to receive compensation from their employers when they were short of funds. In the early 1940S a teenage Bush man was reputed to have received not only the standard £8 compensation for the loss of a first finger, but another £r for winning a bet that he would chop it off with a tomahawk. The annual Kumara horse races were legendary, with every worker within 50 miles taking the day off to attend. Rumours were rife that jockeys changed mounts in the mist behind a hillock at the back of the course, and that the betting was not always legitimate; horses in form were not always those at the shortest odds.

Unlike in Central Otago, the Irish card game forty-fives thrived on the Coast. In the inter-war years it was the most popular card game, enjoyed by small gamblers and commonly played at fund-raising evenings. Lazystick was also peculiar to the area. Arm-wrestling was a variant of lazystick, and also seems to have begun on the Coast. Contestants faced each other, clasped their opponent’s hand in a vice-like grip and forced it down until the arm of the vanquished rested flat along the bar. Hobbs writes with pride of Arthur Beban, a legendary West Coast athlete of herculean proportions, who ‘could win the wrestle so quickly, and with such force, that a man’s hand would almost be pushed through the mahogany’. Beban was always at very short odds. Unlike lazystick, arm-wrestling spread nationally as a robust expression of ego and machismo that has transcended barriers of class and time.

Cock-fighting also survived in the area. It was concentrated around Hokitika and popular for a relatively short time in the late 19205 and 1930S. Fanciers from Kowhitirangi, Kaniere, Kokatahi and Woodstock, as well as further afield, bred birds both for show and also to fight in well-organised but brutal contests. In July 1931 a reporter from a Sydney sports newspaper, after being sworn to secrecy as to the contest’s location and the names of the participants, was allowed to observe a fifteen-round bout between two spurred, four-pound gamecocks representing Canterbury and the West Coast. It ended when one bird failed to show for the fourteenth round as it had died in the interval, ‘a mangled and bleeding mess of malignity’ as the reporter poignantly described it)°
These Sunday cock-fights were serious business. Experts from both the West Coast and Canterbury trained birds for weeks before a fight, using boxing gloves on their claws and yelling at or striking the birds to stimulate their aggressive instincts; those which showed cowardice were slaughtered. Bouts were held in strict secrecy at different locations on the fringes of the Bush . If police approached, look-outs posted at road corners fired gunshots in the air. Before the spectacle began the birds were weighed, matched, spurred and assigned a bout position. On a good day ioo or more spectators attended, all strictly vetted. Betting was clandestine, as some bird-owners feared disgruntled losers would talk loosely in town and attract unwelcome police attention. Nonetheless, there was substantial betting on the outcome of fights. Some owners wagered on the skill of their own birds, and the chance to clean up on side-bets was the main attraction for most of the spectators. West Coast cock-fighting was a temporary phenomenon. Towards the outbreak of the Second World War the sport faded, then disappeared).