New Zealander At Bow Street Court

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 81, 13 August 1948, Page 5

New Zealander At Bow Street Court

PROSTITUTES TAKE FINES CASUALLY (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) London, July 19. Bow Street is noted for its police court, runners, and the Covent Garden Opera House. The Drury Lane Theatre, with British sublety is also in Bow Street. Bow Street accepts no responsibility for Bow Bells or bow legs. The four Kemsley Empire Journalists recently attended Bow Street Court. You are quite wrong. We were sitting on the bench with Mr Laurence Rivers Dunne, chief metropolitan magistrate. Seeing that justice was dunne, so to speak. Bow Street is smaller yet more elegant than the Magistrate’s Court, Wellington. There are not those sombre grey draperies which are said to be red through the dust. Business is done along the same lines, perhaps a little more briskly. At the rear of the court was a team of. young soldiers from “Monty’s”, new army studying this facet of their country’s-life, and a team of civil service girls doing the same thing. Prominent on the official guest list were several ladies of the pavement. Charges' of common prostitution in London courts are as many and as casual as charges of 'drunkenness in New Zealand cities. The Piccadilly commandos cheerfully plead guilty, get fined the maximum 40/-, and', in a manner of speaking, beat it.

We asked Mr Dunne afterwards about the casual attitude of these girls. He told us prostitution itself was not an offence at law unless the girls bothered • men on the streets. During the war there was an emergency regulation by which they cotild be ordered to the doctor, but that had been repealed. How do the girls avoid being drafted to essential industries? By blandly registering at the Labour Office as prostitutes. . Chilled by the prospect of Britain knee deep in swooning Mamas, the Labour Office dare not draft them into jobs with the nice girls who have fallen into its net. This stratagem worked all through the war also. After the girls came two gentlemen eager to assist the Court in every way, but hampered by having no recollection of the events under discussion. One had, conveniently, been drunk in Bow Street. The other had taken the obvious course when fate directed him to Brewer Street.

. Henry, who had set up his barrow in the Strand, had thereby obstructed the traffic. Henry was from Dundee. “London footpaths are expensive to rent,” said Mr Dunne, proving his point. Then came Moira, selected from the ordinary run of customers at a ! rge department store because she happened, at the time, to be shredding some display frocks with a pair of scissors. “I had a reason for doing it,” she explained somewhat less than fully. .And then a medico, who, so it was said, returned home one night, shook his housekeeper by the throat, and entertained her with such snippets from the day’s gossip as:. “In two minutes ycu’ll be dead.'' A jury is to hear all aboir it in due season. All in all, quite like a New Zealand Court, save for the girls. And as they did not seem to think there was anything noteworthy in their being there, why should we?