1935   Present  :  Soertsz A.J.

TOUSSAINT v. CECILIA.

 593-P. C. Gampola, 7,522.

Brothel-Meaning of term-House of ill-fame-Ordinance No. 5 of 1889, s. 1.

A brothel is a house of ill-fame to which men. resort for purposes of prostitution with women, who are to be found in the place or with women who resort to or are introduced to the house.

APPEAL from a conviction by the Police Magistrate of Gampola.

C. E. S. Perera, for accused, appellant.

October 16, 1935. SOERTSZ A.J.-

The accused in this case was charged with having kept and managed a brothel in breach of section 1 of Ordinance No. 5 of 1889.

Several cases have been cited to me to support the proposition that " a solitary instance of prostitution is insufficient to render a house a brothel". Quite apart from " authority", it must indeed be so. Generally a solitary instance of prostitution in a house no more makes that house a brothel than one swallow makes a summer. But in certain cases, to use the words in Stroud's Judicial Dictionary, " the one proved instance may itself prove it to be, not a solitary, but one of many instances". That, in my opinion, is the case here.

The definition of " brothel" adopted in Stroud's Judicial Dictionary is that proposed by Wills J. in Singleton v. Ellison [1 (1895) 1Q. B. 607.] " a place where people of opposite sexes are allowed to resort for prostitution ". Stroud, enlarging on this, says " a brothel involves the idea of a place of resort" and says that brothels are places to which persons other than their occupiers go to for having sexual intercourse with one another. Stroud suggests that this definition excludes the case of a woman who is the occupier of a house, or of several women who are joint occupiers receiving men for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with them in that house. It would appeal

that there is no etymological justification for restricting the meaning of the word brothel in this manner. The Oxford Dictionary points out that " brothel" originally was applied only to persons and meant " a worthless, abandoned fellow", " an abandoned woman, a prostitute " and that the correct old word for a house of ill-fame was " bordel". It goes on to say that the personal sense of the word became obsolete and it now remains as a substitute for the original word " bordel". This Dictionary defines " brothel" in the modern sense as " a house of ill-fame, a bawdy house". A "bawdy-house" is defined as a house of "prostitution ", and " prostitution" as " the offering by a woman of her body to indiscriminate intercourse with men for hire ".

In this view of the matter, it is not clear why Wills J.'s definition of brothel in Singleton v. Ellison (supra) as " a brothel, or bawdy-house is a place where people of opposite sexes are allowed to resort for prostitution " has been understood by the editors of Stroud's Judicial Dictionary, in the sense I have referred to, that is to say, as " involving the idea of a place of resort" and excluding the acts of prostitution on the part of women who are occupiers or joint occupiers of the house in question. De Sampayo J. in Morris v. Cornelis[1 3 Bal. (N. C.) 48.] adopted that definition, but in the later case of Wickremasuriya v. Mary Nona [2 24 N. L. R. 26.] agreed with Schneider J.'s view in Silva v. Suppu [3 21 N. L. R. 119.], and in doing so commented as follows on Singleton v. Ellison (supra) :-"The particular language of Singleton v. Ellison, which discusses the meaning of the word, appears to me to be due to the peculiar circumstances of that case, for there a woman who used to receive men into her rooms for the purpose of sexual intercourse with here self alone was held not to be liable for ' keeping a brothel'. The occupation of a house or room by a single prostitute may not constitute a brothel, but I do not myself see that the exigency of language or of law requires that, in order to make a house of ill-