At the same time, fewer hotels and reduced trading hours initiated a ready-made and lucrative market for enterprising law-breakers. By driving beer barrels to pubs for out-of-hours sales and setting up drinking clubs in industrial neighbourhoods, a crime tyro could build a capital base from which to test other prohibited markets.
As a result, newly-restricted alcohol sales across the s created more rewarding and less dangerous opportunities for any budding criminal. There were egregious aspects to this business. One was sales from licensed publicans after hours through back lanes in the inner suburbs and in central Melbourne, an activity with which police were familiar from their long war against Sunday traders.
A more mundane and less visible sly grogging generally remained the province of small shopkeepers in working class Melbourne. In these crumbling back streets the liquor sellers were poverty-stricken women rather than flashy young men. Among them was Caroline Farrell. Caroline appeared at the North Melbourne Court House in , facing charges of selling liquor from her home. When police searched her cottage they found brandy hidden in the fireplace, money and wine under pillowcases, and the back yard littered with bottles.
Throughout the s a sad, struggling procession of such back-street sly groggers appeared in local courts, to be fined and occasionally imprisoned.
Decades later police themselves were struggling to respond to both to the illegal grog trade and the corruption it engendered in their own ranks. Having assured themselves of a reliable cash flow through illegal liquor trading, bright young toughs turned to experimenting with the novel trade in narcotics. In the nineteenth century opiates could easily be bought in city chemists.
Opium smokers in Chinatown were discriminated against, but were, at least for several decades, doing little that could be classed as illegal.
With the widespread medicinal use of morphine and other opiates during the First World War, along with experiments in refining cocaine, a new trade appeared. After the Treaty of Versailles Britain had signed off, on behalf of Australia, on laws prohibiting some drugs.
These laws formed an addendum to global controls to be supervised by the League of Nations. Their demand, along with the new restrictions, allowed some sly groggers to diversify into drugs. This criminal business synergy, between sly grog and cocaine trading, seemed to take police by surprise. The snow seller, Henry McEwan, admitted that he had moved into cocaine after making money selling sly grog, and that he supplied women in the back slums, probably in brothels, for two shillings a packet.
The drugs came from chemist shops. Law-breakers found one of the more lucrative uses for cocaine in the racing world, and in a trainer and stablehands were arrested for this novel means of doping a horse, at Moonee Valley.
As start time approached, Valdoid eased out in betting only to go on and win easily, before showing the effects of cocaine. Usually a quiet horse, Valdoid became excitable and hard to control after the race. Police swooped, in one of their few successful counters to doping rackets on racetracks. Far from merging glamour, commercial efficiency, and easy riches, snow selling exposed even more tawdry living conditions than did illegal liquor. The couple was in bed, with their two daughters in bed near them, one with whooping cough and the other in filthy clothes, in the worst case of destitution one officer had seen in his sixteen years of policing.
On the premises were a syringe, morphia tablets, and a capsule of cocaine. Before he could go to court Holmes had to recover his coat from a pawnshop. From these two markets, for after-hours alcohol and cocaine, a handful of Melbourne street toughs sought to create business-like structures in illegal selling. Their ambition, more than their actual achievements, frightened the wider community. Whereas moral panics in the nineteenth century had centred on prostitutes and larrikins, by the s sly groggers and armed, mobile robbers both terrified and thrilled Melburnians.
Where these crime entrepreneurs failed to secure any great success was in creating a structured market for gambling. Restrictions before the war had closed illegal totalisators. After , as the Depression weakened trade and state taxation revenue collapsed, licensed bookmakers were hit with new taxes on turnover. State cabinet approved new taxes on bookmakers in , and these seemed to provoke a series of raids on suburban bookmakers operating from hotels and private homes, often in otherwise respectable suburbs.
Slack handed his betting slips and account books to a friend as he ran. He was fined fifty pounds, probably far less than he took on Saturday races each week. In the s, such starting price SP bookmakers were confronted not so much by the moralising crusades typical of the early twentieth century, but by the dire need for taxation revenue.
Gunmen, no doubt in the pay of SP bookmakers, tried to shoot Phar Lap before the Melbourne Cup; the horse was shielded by stable foreman and strapper Tommy Woodcock, and went into hiding with jockey Jim Pike.
But these race broadcasts had not begun until and even then race clubs tried to ban the race callers resulting in comical scenes of callers watching races from the backs of lorries outside the fence or renting apartments alongside racetracks. There is no doubt that illegal gambling on horse racing and sometimes on dogs expanded after Neither bookmakers nor punters emerged as beneficiaries of underworld connections, however.
Instead, most gamblers took small bets with local bookies across Melbourne, a series of decentralised and almost amateur transactions. Licensed bookmakers, some of whom no doubt took bets away from the track, were preyed upon after the races and before they could deposit their takings on Monday mornings. A spate of bookie robberies ran through , sometimes with shots fired and victims wounded. When one of the bookmaker members was threatened in the foyer in August he managed to get a gun from his attackers, shoot one of them in the stomach, and flee upstairs.
Prahran police were able to arrest one of the gunmen shortly afterwards, but attacks on bookies continued as an occasional hazard across the decade. In an expanding city, with debts paid anonymously across distant suburbs and through new bank branches, the passing of dud cheques opened up new lines of petty fraud. They present the football club with a Wertheim piano. Saturday 14 Richmond Juniors 49 defeats St. Tiger captain William Thomas breaks his leg in two places below the knee, during the last quarter of the Carlton game in a collision with teammate Jimmy Smith.
He will be unable to work and the club will launch an appeal for him. The incident reignites calls for 'ambulance stretchers' to be at game , like in the and seasons. Percy Maybury, the captain and vice captain, tells his father William Maybury, that he dreamt the night before that William Thomas would break his leg against Carlton.
July Sat. They play a scratch match instead. Bill Burns and Norm Clark were scheduled to play for Woodend. William Maybury even considered playing for Richmond in this game. Vic Thorp plays for Victoria against South Australia. Max Hislop travelled to Adelaide as the 19th man but he did not play.
The granting of permits expired on June 30, the same day Minogue, a returned soldier, stepped off the transport. The League advise that the application was not received in time. Rather than play for Collingwood, Minogue steps out of football for 1 year. Had Dan Minogue received a permit he would have been elected captain. It is unsuccessful. Supporters sat in the grandstand. One of the doctors at a local Richmond hospital was David Rosenberg, a former vice-president of Richmond Football Club from He, himself, had a mild case of the influenza in March and had to self-isolate for a period of time.
The new kindergarten building at the Richmond Central State School was turned into the Richmond Emergency Hospital during the outbreak. Five classrooms were turned into 50 patient beds. The shelter in the yard was turned into a kitchen, the cloakrooms turned into bathrooms.
Richmond Football Club donated 10 pounds 10 shillings to the Richmond branch of the Red Cross Society, which had set up a relief kitchen that served up to people in the area. A nurse visited homes of the poor people and provided them with food suitable for influenza patients from the relief kitchen.
This meant he was unable to come over to Richmond and reside in the suburb for the required week residential qualification. He subsequently made his debut with the Tigers the following year and was a member of their premiership side.
Two days later, on May 5, the enormity of the influenza epidemic hit home when Thomas Weatherill, an older brother of Richmond players Harry, George, and Robert Weatherill, died as a result of the flu, aged He eventually recovered, but that, combined with a leg injury, meant he missed many home-and- away games in the season. The influenza peak for the Club was in Round 10 v Essendon, on July Champion full-back Vic Thorp, Bob Weatherill, and Artie Bettles were all late withdrawals from the match, having been struck down with the flu.
It was a wet day, so that, combined with the fear of contracting influenza, resulted in the Richmond players leaving the field at three-quarter time and changing their uniforms. They also were rubbed dry and drank steaming hot drinks before returning to the field for the final quarter of the match, which the Tigers ended up winning by five points in a mighty brave performance.
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