Beggars can’t be choosers
Today begging and vagrancy have been mitigated somewhat by the government’s policy of accommodating the homeless and the indolent in motels.
A century ago things were rather different. On November 7 1922, when 79-year-old Frederick Yyness came before the courts for the 139th time on the charge of ‘‘begging alms’’ on Wellington’s Courtney Place, the excuse of ‘‘I only have few months to live’’ saw no sympathy from the sitting magistrate.
When the Irishman asked to be placed ‘‘in a home’’, His Worship replied ‘‘no home will have you’’.
An opportunity was lost to express a rather more obvious sentiment: ‘‘beggars cannot be choosers’’.
Ironically, Yyness was eventually placed in Ohiro Home, the avoidance of a prison sentence at odds with usual practice.
Nine years later, on Hamilton’s Victoria St, John Moore was arrested on a charge of ‘‘being an idle and indolent person and begging alms’’.
Under the influence of alcohol, Moore was observed by one Constable Brown stopping several men and asking them for money. Unlike Yyness, Moore claimed not to have been in trouble before and pleaded to be allowed to take up a position in Te Kuiti. Resisting such overtures, the somewhat haughty judge ‘‘. . . remarked that he [Moore] was of the vagrant type and a man who was going to a job did not indulge in liquor’’.
Sentencing Moore to 14 days imprisonment, Mr Wyvern Wilson, SM said: ‘‘I’m giving you a chance to get some of that liquor out of you’’.
Recidivist beggars usually attracted longer sentences. In July of 1933 police brought evocative charges against four men, claiming each constituted ‘‘a rogue and a vagabond in that they placed themselves in Customs Street for the purpose of begging alms and having been convicted previously for vagrancy’’. A witness testified that he was flanked by two of the criminals, one of whom, reacting to a refusal to give money, held the witness’ arm.
It was the police contention that the strategy of ‘‘paired’’ begging was deliberate. The pair with previous Hamilton convictions received three months imprisonment each, their Christchurch colleagues six months.