Thomson CJ:

This appellant was convicted in the Magistrates' Court at Kulai for assisting in carrying on a public lottery in contravention of s. 4(1)(c) of the Common Gaming Houses Ordinance, 1953. The alleged lottery in question was the wellknown gambling operation known in this country as the is characters lottery" or "tikam ekor."

It was never at any time seriously in dispute that the appellant was in fact assisting in carrying on a "characters lottery" but he appealed against his conviction on the ground that the " characters lottery " is not a lottery within the meaning of the Common Gaming Houses Ordinance. Hepworth J, dismissed the appeal but, in view of the existence of a conflict of authority on the point, gave his certificate to enable it to be re-heard by this Court.

The Common Gaming Houses Ordinance defines a "lottery" as follows:

Lottery' includes any game, method, or device whereby money or money's worth is distributed or allotted in any manner depending upon or to be determined by chance or lot, whether the same be held, drawn, exercised, or managed within or without the Federation.

No useful purpose would be served by embarking on a detailed exegesis of that definition. The name of the votaries of the Goddess Fortune is legion and the commercial exploitation of their devotion is an ever fruitful field. So, as was said by Humphreys, J, in the Case of Coles v. Odhams Press Ltd. [1936] 1 KB 416, 427 "there will seemingly never be any finality on the question what is a lottery". What this Court has to decide here is whether the operations known as the of characters lottery" which the present appellant was carrying on do or do not fall within the statutory definition.

The facts relating to that operation in the present case do not differ in any material respect from the facts in the case of PP v. Woo Fong [1955] MLJ 235 where it was described in the following terms:

What happened was that persons desiring to participate stake amounts of money on what they considered would be the last three digits or the last four digits of the number of the ticket which proved to be the winning ticket in the sweeps take organised by the Singapore Turf Club in connection with a particular horse race to be run at Singapore on 7 May 1955. If the digits selected proved to be the correct ones then the person making the stake would be paid $700 or $4,000 for each dollar staked according as to whether he had placed his stake on three or four digits. Presumably, though there was no evidence of this, stakes would also be accepted in respect of the last two digits in which case presumably the amount to be paid in the event of the forecast proving correct would be $70.

In the case of Kang Yeow Hooi & Ors v. PP [1954] MLJ 233 the Court of Appeal was concerned with the question of when a "characters lottery" ceased to be in progress and decided that question on the basis that operation was a lottery within the statutory meaning without considering the point in terms. In the course of his judgment Mathew, CJ, observed - "In our view, the essence of a lottery is the distribution of money or money's worth which is determined by lot or chance. The elements of distribution and chance must both be present.

In the case of PP v. Woo Fong, supra , the question actually in issue was whether an operator who took bets both on the two digits and the three digits in the same sweeps take number was carrying on a single lottery or two lotteries and the question of lottery or no lottery was not raised. Nevertheless, the "characters lottery" having been described in the passage which has already been quoted it was observed:

There can be no doubt that such an operation constitutes a lottery within the meaning of the Common Gaming Houses Ordinance for it is a method of distributing money according to pure chance.

In the meantime in the case of PP v. Lau Ting Kai [1955] MLJ 207 (which was not reported at the time of the judgment in Woo Fong's cas