Days of Future Past: An illicit raffle at the trotting club

Saturday, 27 June 2026

The Hamilton police had it in for the Jews. As the year was 1949, you might suppose that context was significant. Was this a reaction to recent events in the Middle East or an insensitive response to the tragedy of World War II? Neither. The prejudice had deeper roots. The constabulary were playing a longer game.

The sting was well planned and executed. It involved subterfuge and misrepresentation and its morality was called into question. Did the ends justify the means? The transgression was a commonplace one and the justification for the criminal act eminently defensible. Yet this time, the Jews would pay.

At the end of May, 1949 a woman entered the office of the Waikato Trotting Club and approached the desk of Margaret Winifred Jew. She inquired as to the possibility of entering a raffle. The woman had heard that for £1 one of 5500 tickets could be purchased. The prize was a new car. She was ever so keen to take part.

Margaret could not have been more obliging. It was all for a good cause. Margaret opened her desk drawer, found a book of tickets - one of 500 printed - and completed the transaction. There were smiles on both sides.

The following day a man stood before George Henry Jew in the same space. George was the secretary of the Waikato Trotting Club; with a relaxed attitude toward post-war nepotism, he had employed his own daughter. However, that was not the issue. The man, like the woman, had heard about the car raffle. Might George favour him with a ticket?

Margaret was away at present, explained George, but he knew where she kept the ticket book. He had not himself sold a ticket before - Margaret was in charge of the book - but he would help a fellow out. George went over to his daughter's desk, rifled through the drawer and came up with the goods. The man was most pleased. Mission accomplished.

Around three weeks later Margaret and her father stood in the dock of Hamilton's Magistrate's Court. In their own estimation, the police had been magnanimous. Not wishing to seem excessive or to punish unduly, they had withdrawn charges of receiving money for the purpose of a lottery and assisting in the conducting of a lottery. On the basis of evidence alone, the Jews had at the very least a prima facie case to answer on those scores.

Where the police would not back down was on the charge of selling a ticket in a lottery. And for good reason. Their undercover operation had been an utter success. The cover of their plain clothes operatives had not been blown. Tickets were sold in good faith, to complete strangers. These facts were established beyond dispute. The Jews had confessed.

Senior Detective W.R. Murray was indifferent to the fact that the lottery in question had a charitable purpose. Whatever the anti-semitic implications of persecuting Jews in open court, the defendants were actually ardent Catholics, a different chosen people entirely. The lottery had been organised, if not by the Catholic Church then by the faithful, in the church's name, in order to raise funds for new religious and educational facilities. Margaret and George, like so many of their local Papist brethren, were convinced that Hamilton needed a new Catholic school. They had taken practical steps to that end.

The partiality of the prosecution was extraordinary. If 5500 tickets were in circulation, a large percent of Hamilton's population must have been, by definition, equally guilty. Moreover, whilst Margaret Jew had played an administrative part in running the lottery, she could not have been its ringleader. The constabulary was going after the small fry, letting the bigger fish - the Catholic pillars of the community, one could reasonably suppose - off the hook.

Period sexism was to advantage Margaret. Despite the fact that she was the holder of the ticket book and principal seller, it was George Jew who attracted a £50 fine upon conviction. Margaret, somewhat unbelievably, was fined merely £5, literally one tenth of that figure. It was more important to make an example of the secretary of the Waikato Trotting Club. The irony that George Jew, whose very income was derived from state sanctioned gambling, was convicted of selling a raffle ticket that was raising funds for a noble cause, as opposed to the mercenary motivations of horse racing, was utterly lost on contemporary commentators.

W.R. Murray certainly had no sympathy. The officer explained in court that he had had private conversations with George Jew in the recent past. 'I warned him of the duties of the police and that if it continued a prosecution must follow', said Murray, whilst conceding that this hint stopped well short of specifics. He had not mentioned the Catholic car lottery. That would have been giving the game away, robbing the police of their opportunity to play dress up.

In a day of pompous court pronouncements Murray's attitude rivalled that of sitting magistrate S.L. Paterson. 'Gambling in Hamilton has been getting out of hand', lectured the senior detective, adding that 'one of its most prevalent causes has to do with the conduct of illegal lotteries'. Quite possibly another rather more prevalent cause might have involved horses galloping - or, in George Jew's case, trotting - in circles.

Paterson stood on his duty with such vigour that it begged questions about his own religious affiliations. If he was Catholic himself a day in the confessional box surely would not be sufficient atonement. He noted the defence counsel request for discharge without conviction but rejected it on the grounds that the Jews should be made an example of. 'The offence was not in any way trivial', said the S.M., arguing that 'there was no distinction between running a raffle and selling a ticket in it'.

The magistrate claimed that he was wholly ignorant of past community fund raising practices involving lotteries. It was irrelevant to him if that were the case. The high cost of living was in part attributable to 'the large amount of gambling' and 'lotteries of this nature were an encouragement to people to spend money and live beyond their means'. He drew a distinction between 'a small raffle between a group of friends' and 'the sale of tickets in a public office to complete strangers' but in either case 'the fact that proceeds were for church purposes was no mitigation of the offence'.

Paterson was equally defensive when it came to police tactics. When the Jews' lawyer questioned the entrapment technique of the constabulary the argument fell on deaf judicial ears. Paterson's judgement was that 'the police were justified in laying traps in such cases provided they acted fairly and did not use pressure'. The evidence was important, not the means by which it was obtained. Why the authorities chose to uniquely target the Jews was not a matter that the bench considered.

The Jew case had a context that went well beyond Hamilton. In the weeks leading up to the sting the Minister of Internal Affairs, Bill Parry, had declined an application by a cancer research campaign committee to run a fundraising lottery. The proposed prize in said raffle was a car. Parry had attracted a significant amount of criticism for the decision, given that it seemingly imperilled much needed medical research. Why, his critics queried, were other such lotteries, whose goals were less worthy, permitted and this one deemed unacceptable?

The police inaction in such instances had by extension also been questioned. They required a conviction or two to demonstrate that gambling in New Zealand was an illegal, immoral practice, or rather might be thought that in instances that went beyond horse racing and local Art Unions.

A still wider context was much publicity in 1949 afforded local wins in Australian state lotteries. Whilst the establishment of New Zealand's own Golden Kiwi was still twelve years away - and the pious Parry issued a statement at the outset of May making clear that the Labour government had no intention of launching a national lottery - New Zealand punters could legally buy tickets from agents of these Australian operations. There was an enormous irony in the fact that one such person, Dr. A.H. Tocker of the then Canterbury University College, a professor of economics, a man who might have been expected to caution against such low percent investment and a member of the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce, won £10,000 in 1948 in an overseas lottery and thereafter retired from academic life.

It still remains an open question why George and Margaret Jew, otherwise god-fearing, respectable citizens, were uniquely targeted by authorities.

Here is one speculative theory.

Prior to coming to Hamilton in 1938 and taking up his position with the Waikato Trotting Club, George Jew lived in Ngāruawāhia for a quarter of a century. He was an original investor in one of the great rural, Waikato business success stories, the Alpine Ice Cream Company, when it first opened in Huntly in 1928. However, his day job was that of a farmer and twice during the 1930s his practices came into official question.

In 1931 George attempted to combine business with pleasure. On the second day of a Te Rapa race meeting he drove his truck from Ngāruawāhia to Cambridge where he took possession of a number of pigs and bobby calves, loading them into said vehicle. The truck was of sufficient dimension to accommodate all these beasts without undue crushing.

George, as was his wont, then went to the races. He remained there for two-and-a-half hours. During this time one Senior Sergeant Sweeney discovered the parked truck. Six large pigs and four small calves were inside. One calf was dead.

Charged with animal cruelty, George put up a spirited and convincing defence. Whilst conceding that the transportation of any bobby calf was potentially cruel, he argued that truck transportation was superior to that of rail and that he had treated the animals purchased that day with greater care than they would have received on a train. It was to be expected that the weaker bobby calves would perish, with or without bulky pigs to crush them. In this case, the calf that was found dead was in that condition upon sale. After the races he had plans to take it to the Horotiu freezing works.

Mr Wyvern Wilson, S.M. largely agreed. The magistrate found in George's favour, ruling that the prosecution had presented insufficient evidence. Jew 1, Police 0.

Four years later, in January of 1935, a second animal cruelty case came before the bench, with Mr. S.L. Paterson S.M., of whom we have earlier heard, sitting in judgement.

On 18 September, 1934, Herbert Morris, an official inspector for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, followed the wagon of George Jew as it pulled out of the Frankton stockyards. When George stopped briefly, en route back to Ngāruawāhia, the officious Morris spied 14 pigs, 5 lambs, 2 bobby calves and a heifer. Although the wagon was 70 square feet, sufficient in dimension for all beasts, Morris was of the opinion that George's failure to employ a dividing device was particularly cruel and likely to cause distress to the animals.

Also at issue was the speed being travelled. Morris estimated this as 45mph, a challenge for the heifer, which was tied to the back of the truck.

Paterson was no more inclined toward the state case than his colleague had been in 1931. He questioned both Morris' evidence and its implications, arguing that the failure to separate the beasts did not constitute cruelty. 'Under the circumstances', said the judge, 'it seems to me that he [Morris] either wanted to make a case against Jew or that he was opposed to him'. Jew 2, Police 0.

It is possible of course that these 1930s cases had no bearing on the prosecution of the same man in 1949. However, if police were looking to scapegoat an individual for a nominal crime that was so widespread that they were not lacking in options, might it not be probable that they chose someone who had twice defeated them in court? The victory was all the sweeter given justice was administered by Paterson, who had so unequivocally been Jew's champion 14 years earlier. Jew 2, Police 1.

Whether the car lottery was discontinued in light of legal proceedings or was nevertheless drawn, on the sly, on the strength of its ecclesiastical cause, Hamilton Catholics did get their new church and school. On 25 July, 1949, Mr W.D. Corby, a representative of the church, outbid the Huntly Men's Club in the purchase of the Hamilton Combined Services' Club, large premises housed in Garden Place. The HCS club was formerly the Patriotic Hut, public facilities built and used during wartime, particularly for social and civic occasions.

On 20 May, 1950, Bishop Liston, Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland, blessed and opened the new Catholic church school and hall in Clarkin Road, Fairfield, the repurposed Patriotic Hut. Whether George and Margaret Jew were on hand, kissing rings and giving confession for their sins, or remained away, disgraced by their convictions, is unknown.