PREVALENCE OF PETTY THEFTS.

Hokitika Guardian, 12 August 1920, Page 4

PREVALENCE OF PETTY THEFTS.

AUSTRALIAN CATERERS HEAVY LOSERS.

SYDNEY, July 28

A clerk was brought before the Polio Court here the other day on a charg of stealing a tumbler, valued at 10d, the property of a hotel proprietor. He pleaded guilty, and said that he was drunk, and did not know what he was doing, and he was fined £3. The hotel man said that he had been forced to take this action. The price of glassware had greatly increased, and thieving had grown in proportion. It cost him no less than £l2 per month to replace stolen glasses. The stealing of glasses is a most common tiling in Australian bars. It is usually regarded as a joke. He is regarded as a very great “nut” indeed who can show, in his room, a collection of tumblers hearing the marks of most of the big city hotels. It not only shows that lie has a nice taste in glassware, and knows all the worth while hotels—but he must also be clever, for Boniface, who seems to have no sense of humour whatever in these matters, keeps a vigilant watch, and it is not easy to smuggle the articles away.

But the real sufferers are the caterers. Even in the high-class cafes the people carry off the silverware, anything from a teaspoon to a sugar basin or teapot being acceptable. Mr Barry Lupino, the well-known comedian, gave a dinner in Melbourne the other day, at a cost of £SO. Later, the caterer claimed £SO for silverware which had disappeared—playfully carried off by Barry’s friends. Barry resisted the claim, but a magistrate allowed it, and Barry’s dinner cost him £lO6, plus legal expenses. Mr John Wren, the wealthy Melbournite, who is at present over in Perth trying, as a prominent Roman Catholic, to get Father Jerger released, recently gave a dinner to the poor of Collingwood. a Melbourne suburb. The caterer’s bill, in the ordinary way, was C 250, and Wren paid that. Then the caterer lodged a claim for £298, being £2OO for extra guests (1930 attended instead of 800), and the balance for silverware which had disappeared along with the home-going poor of Collingwood. Wren refused this, and the matter is now being fought out in the Melbourne Courts.

It all links up with what some are pleased to term “the eoonomic confusion of the post-war period.”