Mr. Justice McTaggart’s Revenge
I had been working for Mr. McKelvie, the Newspaper Agent. For several months, I had been riding my little red “Moyes Special” bicycle with its 24-inch wheels and its sugar bag haversack on each side of the horizontal bar containing the mounds of newspapers to be delivered.
I knew the streets and houses of central Box Hill very well. I knew the houses where people tipped generously and the houses that I ought to avoid.
After some months on the paper round a golden opportunity opened. A paper boy was needed at the railway station each night after school. This was the No.1 site and the No.1 job. I pestered Mr. McKelvie until he decided that I was the boy for the job.
Every night I would hurry to McKelvie’s and pick up my load of papers and take them on my red bike to the railway station. I would prop the bike against a large palm tree just outside the front gate of the railway barricade and plant my feet firmly in the centre of the ramp. I learnt the cry of a fully professional paper boy “he a hare rip”. I practised the cry to encourage people to buy their copies of the “Herald” on their way home from work. On Wednesdays and Saturdays it was a bonanza because we also sold “The Sporting Globe” and no Melbourne man, interested in either football or cricket, could possibly buy an evening paper without also buying “The Sporting Globe”.
I learnt that sales were better if you advertised the headlines. So I would sing out the main headlines “Arthur Caldwell says ‘Two Wongs Don’t Make a White’”, “Child Endowment Up To Seven and Sixpence”, “New Airline Starts: Fly TAA The Friendly Way”, “Sugar Rationing Ends”, “New South Wales Workers Gain Forty Hour Week”, “Dr. Evatt Goes To United Nations”.
There were always some special days such as the first Tuesday in November when the Melbourne Cup was run and “The Sporting Globe” headline would be “Russia Wins The Melbourne Cup” or in the cricket season “Ray Lindwall Takes Three Wickets and Slaughters The Poms”.
Perhaps the biggest selling edition of all was the day we had photographs of the Royal Wedding between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. It was probably the first sign that the war was really over and a new era was beginning. We had photographs of King George and Queen Elizabeth and of the beautiful Princess and her Prince.
However, there were days when the news was slow. On those days we had to make up our own headlines – whether or not there was any corresponding news item in the paper – if we wanted to maintain sales. I worked out that as most of the papers were not read until someone was on a bus or walking a long way from the station I was pretty safe. So the headlines were developed “Two Headed Man Hanged in England”, “Essendon Finds New Footy Star”, “Pay Rise For All”.
Life was very good in those days when we stood on the railway ramp and gave Box Hill its news.
However, it did not take very long before I discovered a way in which I could double my income. Around my waist on the right hand side I had a leather money pouch with a brass clip in front and two pockets inside. One pocket was for the silver the two shillings, one shillings, sixpences and threepences, and one was for the copper coins pennies and halfpennies. With the newspapers balanced over my left arm and my right hand being able to dip into the leather pouch, I was able to quickly sell papers. In those days both the morning and evening papers cost twopence which meant a penny change for everybody giving a threepence, or fourpence change for everybody giving a zack. I soon learnt to keep only silver in my leather pouch and all the coppers that came my way in my pants pocket.
Men rushing downing the ramp from the train for the buses or for their long walk home would always offer a tray or a zack or a deener or, maybe, two bob for their paper. With a flourish my hand would dive deep to the bottom of the leather pouch and come up full of silver. Not a copper in sight. I would dive a second time, a third time, and every time the hand would be brim with silver. “No coppers mate” I would say looking at the purchaser with my big brown eyes. “That’s O.K. keep it as a tip” was inevitably the reply. The bulge of coppers in my right hand trouser pocket would grow bigger as the hours went by. It was sheer profit.
Soon I began to make more from tips than from wages.
I was earning seven and six a week by wages but often double that in tips.
I used to spend much of my wages on books. The first book I purchased was “Tikoni and His Warrior Friends”, a book about Australian aborigines. That started a lifetime habit which has now grown to a library of more than ten thousand books.
Soon my salary was running near one pound five shillings a week including the tips which was almost as much as some labourers earned. It was a remarkable financial gold mine for an eight year old.
But greed always brings a downfall. The man who was responsible was Mr. Justice McTaggart. Everyone called him “Mr. Justice McTaggart”. He was a tall, lean man, single, who lived with his single sister. He always wore a high crowned hat with a narrow brim and thin narrow black ties in an age when men wore broad colourful ties. He looked like an undertaker, acted like a duke, and worked as a public servant. He was not a justice however. That was only his Christian name but few people knew the difference.
He used to come into my mother’s shop and ask her for day old bread because it was better for his indigestion and made better toast. My mother said it was because he saved sixpence. My mother also found out that when the collars and cuffs of his shirt frayed, he used to remove the collars and cuffs and turn them the other way out so he could get extra wear.
Mr. Justice McTaggart, as everybody used to call him, held some position of importance in the Box Hill Presbyterian Church. It was a beautiful blue stone church on the corner of Bruce Street and Whitehorse Road. It had been moved stone by stone from West Melbourne and rebuilt on the highway in 1935. Outside was an imposing notice board with a Cross of St. Andrew and a flaming bush and underneath the words “Nec Tandem Consumebatur” a mystical, almost magical phrase that used to gain my gaze every time I passed.
Mr. Justice McTaggart was almost always last to come down the ramp and he insisted on change. I used to tell him that I had to go and ask another paper boy for coppers and I would go and ask a friend at the other ramp. But one day I made the fateful mistake of reaching into my pocket and pulling out a copper for him. Mr. Justice McTaggart marched around to Mr. McKelvie with a look of satisfaction. He spoke to Mr. McKelvie in terms of extortion, malpractice and public robbery.
Mr. McKelvie said nothing to me but on the following Saturday night after the last of the “Sporting Globes” had been sold he paid me seven and sixpence and told me that the job would now belong to someone else.
He explained to me in rather kindly and fatherly terms that crime never pays and if I would not be honest in small things I could never be trusted in big things.
It was a heavy moral lesson and at eight I was now unemployed. It was with heavy heart I rode my red Moyes Special home to face my mother to explain what had happened, up Bank Street, along the railway line to the top of the hill and to No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city that was only a village, where the adults were kind and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
