THE WELLINGTON WORKING MEN’S CLUB.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2156, 22 January 1881, Page 2

THE WELLINGTON WORKING MEN’S CLUB.

The Wellington Working Men’s Club is an excellent specimen of a very excellent class of institution. It was founded long before the Christchurch Working Men’s Club was started, and has attained considerable dimensions. The rooms, situated over some shops in Lambton Quay, are both numerous and spacious, and the whole establishment is a decided credit to the City of Wellington. But, we are sorry to say, that complete harmony does not reign within the precincts, although, financially speaking, the Club’s affairs are not at all in a bad way. At the half-yearly general meeting, held a few days ago, it was shown that the receipts more than covered the expenditure, and that additions had been made which, it was hoped, would result in increased revenue. But the question which agitated the meeting, and caused a terrible overflow of feeling, was the suspension by the committee of two members, whom the meeting finally reinstated, besides erasing the minute suspending them from the books. The head and front of the offence of the individuals about whom all this excitement arose, consisted in their being found “ lying on the billiard table ” —a proceeding which the committee considered justified their suspension. Now, this is decidedly mysterious, aud the question arises if the actual fact of lying on the table was not aggravated by other circumstances. In the old digging days, when Dunedin was crowded with men hastening to the Dunstan and elsewhere, nothing was more common than to have a shake-down made up on the billiard table in fault of some better place. On ordinary occasions, perhaps, it is not usual to spend the night in this way; but had the two offenders, remembering old times, taken upon themselves to camp down in this manner, the committee might well have considered they had a precedent, and have passed the fault over for once. Or again, a man when making a stroke, his own ball being far on the table, is often apt to over-reach himself in bending over the board, and sometimes from causes not entirely under his own control, such as a fatty degeneration of his tissues at large, is unable to recover himself, and may be found by any habitue of the billiard room stretched out on the table as flat as a pancake and as helpless as a turtle turned over on its back. But in the case in questiontwo men were found recumbent on the table, and as two men never make strokes at the same time—at least, in ordinary clubs — it must be inferred that this theory “ will net wash.” No—we are inclined to think that in the offence in question there must have been some ingredient peculiarly distasteful to the committee. Some such thing as this, then, might have happened. A committee man and an ordinary member might have been playing a game on which a certain amount of money depended. The former was on the point of winning the game by an easy stroke, consisting of holing the red and cannoning, when two men devoted to the cause of the latter were found “lying on the table”—one across the left-hand bottom pocket, and the other in the direct line between the committeeman’s ball and that of his opponent. A circumstance such as this might, indeed, be calculated to rouse the wrath of any committeeman, who might, with a certain degree of justice, suggest to his colleagues the suspension of the two delinquents. This seems a possible solution of an otherwise difficult question. We are aware that this mode of personally rushing into the breach does not obtain in ordinary sporting circles, but there is no accounting for tastes. On a certain occasion, at some races at the Waipori digging township, when a horse was about to win which the miners did not “ fancy,” they made for it, armed with poles, and drove it away from the winning post. The two cases, it will be seen at once, are somewhat parallel. Anyhow, this matter at the Wellington Working Men’s Club is a good deal involved. It has occasioned a considerable disturbance in the club itself, and the outside public are thoroughly mystified.