In 1817 a prosecution occurred at Brighton which elicited a queer array of facts, illustrating the gambling methods of that day. A warrant was sworn out by one William Clarke against William Wright and James Ford, on the charge of feloniously stealing one hundred pounds. But Clarke did not appear to prosecute, and when the magistrate issued a warrant to compel his attendance he hastily decamped.[decamped.] The prisoners were discharged, but very shortly afterward Wright was summoned before the magistrate to give evidence in an examination against one Charles Walker, of the Marine Library, for keeping an unlawful gaming house. Wright testified that Clarke engaged him about five weeks previously as a punter, or decoy player, to a game called “noir, rouge, tout les deux,” and that at the game was a gentleman who lost £125. Clarke asked witness if he thought the gentleman was rich, and being answered in the affirmative, told witness to invite the gentleman to dinner, let him have all the wine he wanted, and to spare no expense to get him drunk. This was done, and the gentleman returned to play again. As he had nothing but large bills he was induced to go to London with witness to change them, witness being enjoined to be sure to bring him back. One of the firm, which was composed of Clarke, O’Mara, Pollett and Moreley, gave the gentleman a letter to certain London Brokers to enable him to change his bills. On their way back to Brighton witness told the gentleman that he suspected the firm would substitute a false table during their absence. However, the gentleman returned to play, and witness and another decoy named Ford were given £100 each with which to play and to lead the gentleman on, and if possible to fulfil the expectations of the firm, which were to fleece the gentleman of five or six thousand pounds. As they entered the library, Walker accosted them and wished them better success, but he trembled visibly and seemed ill at ease. The game was carried on in a room over the library, for which the firm paid rent of twelve guineas a week. As the gentleman ascended the stairs a porter locked the door, by Walker’s order, and when he came into the gaming room he became alarmed at the appearance of the men there, and hastily descending the stairs and giving a plausible excuse to the porter, was allowed to pass out and thus escaped. Witness had not returned the £100 to Clarke, and it was on that account that Clarke had sworn out a warrant against him. Afterward Clarke had visited him and offered him £100 if he would not tell what he knew to the magistrate.
Ford and the gentleman substantiated Wright’s testimony, and the latter said that he went to Walker and demanded back the £125 which he had been cheated out of at play at the start. Walker was very much confused and nervous, and finally offered to return £100 of the sum, which offer was refused; and thereupon he laid the whole matter before the magistrate. Walker was found guilty and sentenced to several years imprisonment.
Messrs. Houlditch, the coach makers of Long Acre, had a traveling salesman whom they sent to the Continent to dispose of their goods. Like thousands of other employes, holding responsible positions of trust, he fell a victim to the vice of gambling, and soon found himself a defaulter and reduced to the utmost desperation. While in this frame of mind he wrote the following letter to his employer, which was read in subsequent court proceedings, and is given here to illustrate how frightfully ruinous the passion for play becomes when once it gains possession of a young man. The letter reads:
“Sir:—The errors into which I have fallen have made me so hate myself that I have adopted the horrible resolution of destroying myself. I am sensible of the crime I commit against God, my family and society, but have not courage to live dishonored. The generous confidence you placed in me I have basely violated. I have robbed you, and though not to enrich myself, the consciousness of it destroys me. Bankruptcy, poverty, beggary and want I could bear—conscious integrity would support me; but the ill-fated acquaintance I formed led me to those earthly hells, gambling houses, and then commenced my villainies and deceptions to you. My losses were not large at first, and the stories that were told me of gain made me hope they would soon be recovered. At this period I received the order to go to Vienna, and, on settling at the hotel, I found my debts trebled what I had expected. I was in consequence compelled to leave the two carriages as a guarantee for part of the debt, which I had not in my power to discharge. I had hoped success at Vienna would enable me to reinstate all to you, but disappointment blasted every hope, and despair, on my return to Paris, began to generate the fatal resolution which, at the moment you read this, will have matured itself to consummation. I feel that my reputation is blasted, no way left of reimbursing the money wasted, your confidence in me totally destroyed, and nothing left to me but to see my wife and children and die. Affection for them holds me in existence a little longer. The gaming table again presented itself to my imagination as the only possible means of extricating myself. Count Montoni’s 3,000 francs, which I received before you came to Paris, furnished me the means—my death speaks the result.”
The legal aspects of gambling in London early in this century are well treated in an article in Fraser’s Magazine for August, 1833, which says: “The officers of justice are regularly kept in the pay of the proprietors of the gaming houses, through whom timely notice is always given of any information laid against the establishment, and the intended attack guarded against. If this be doubted the same can be attested on oath, and otherwise proved beyond disputation. The expense of some of the gaming houses in London during the season (seven months) exceed £10,000. What, then, must be the gains to support this advance and profusion of property? Elegant houses are superbly fitted up, the most delicate viands and the choicest wines, with every other luxury, are provided to lure and detain those for whom the proprietors’ nets are spread. It is almost an impossibility to convict these wicked men under the present law; their enormous wealth is applied to the corruption of evidence, always unwilling, because the witnesses expose their own habits and culpability in attending these notorious dens of infamy. The sleeping partners are ever ready to advance money to oppose prosecutions, and often come forward to give evidence in opposition to the witnesses’ and to blacken the character of those who offer their testimony. Then there is always money to support those who may chance, once in ten years, to be convicted. Many practicing attorneys, too, are connected with these establishments, who threaten to prosecute for conspiracies, and not unfrequently, fictitious debts are sworn to, and arrests for large amounts made, to keep witnesses from appearing at court on the day of trial. One professional man in the parish of St. Anne has, to my knowledge, supported himself for thirty-five years by lending himself in this way to the middle-rate gambling houses, at the west end of town. His method is either to suborn or intimidate the parties, by threatening to indict them for perjury or otherwise persecute them to utter destruction.
“When it is considered that those who are competent to give evidence calculated to produce convictions well know the characters with whom they have to contend, and the phalanx of scoundrels there is always arrayed against them, it is not to be wondered at that they should be deterred from coming forward at the last moment, when even their persons are not free from danger, particularly as all minacious tricks are backed with a bribe, thus bringing fear and interest to bear against their antagonists. As every one who comes forward to give evidence against a gambling house must himself have been a participator in the offence of play, no man who has been the cause of a conviction has ever yet escaped ruin; no matter the motive which influenced him, whether it be remorse, pique, or public good, the conspiracy against him will be so powerful and ramified, through the leading men’s numerous emissaries and dependants, that his future course in life will be tracked, and his character blasted in every neighborhood where he may take up his abode. In one instance a young man who had laid information against a house, although no conviction followed, was hunted out of no fewer than eight situations. The clique of gamblers he had made his enemies contrived to find out in whose employ he was engaged, and then daily assailed his master with anonymous letters, defaming the young man’s character to such a degree that few could well retain him in their service, especially as the fact of having himself gambled at a public table could never be gotten rid of.
“When all other means of deterring a witness are exhausted, personal threats are used by ruffians, who are employed to cross him in whatever public company he may join, seeking every occasion to insult and quarrel with him until he is intimidated, and all other would-be witnesses, through fear of similar persecution, are prevented from offering any obstruction to their establishments.
“By these confederacies, backed as they are with enormous capital, notwithstanding the existing laws, houses have been kept open for the indiscriminate mixture of all grades, from the well bred gentlemen, the finished sharper, the raw and inexperienced flat, to the lowest description of pickpockets and other wretches of public nuisance, and, where all the evils the acts of Parliament were intended to annihilate, have for years past been in full activity. But in no period of our history have misery, distress—and crime, been so conspicuous, and the cause so manifestly and decidedly traced to the gambling habit of the community, as in the present day.
“As before observed, the incompetency of the magistracy, as now armed by law, to oppose the growing evil, is mainly attributable to the methodized system of confederacy and partnership concerns, wherein capitals are embarked by a large number of individuals, who have, (with a very few exceptions) sprung originally from the very scum of society. Now suppose one or more magistrates, employed especially as guardians of the public morality, whose peculiar duty it should be, acting on private information, to direct their officers to adopt any lawful mode of obtaining evidence to convict offenders against the law; could anything be more easy than to send two well-dressed men, under the authority of a magistrate, into the town with money in their pockets, who might in a short time, with very little tact, mix with gambling characters, and in a few weeks have free ingress and egress to all the hells in London, as amateur players? Nor can the keepers of these places ever by possibility guard themselves against this mode of attack, as the persons so employed might always be kept behind the curtain, introducing others of their friends, who could again, (as many as were needed) continue to introduce others, until every player and keeper of a gambling house was identified, and ample testimony for their conviction be prepared, when the blow might be struck against all in one day, and the fullest penalty of the law enforced on each offender.”
A writer in Bentley’s Magazine, speaking of the warfare that had been made on the gambling houses in England in 1838, said: “Hence arose appeals to the law and indictments against the parties which, in their success, gave encouragement to similar proceedings by others, and in the course of time this system was discovered to afford a fine source of profit to the prosecuting attorneys in the shape of costs, and they were, in consequence, frequently gotten up by some of the riff-raff of the profession, in the name of fictitious parties and with the sole view of extracting from the different houses large sums of money in settlement of the matter, without proceeding to trial. This was finally discovered, by the keepers of the houses, and after turning the tables on the prosecutors, and, indeed, convicting several for perjury, gambling houses went on again more vigorously than ever.”