It was a cool morning in Wellington this morning. Perhaps the journalist concerned is a local and had a case of brain freeze. I’ll quote the whole story here. See how high you can score by finding the wrong use of one word many times over.
When Manners St was a war zone
By CLIO FRANCIS – Stuff.co.nz | Thursday, 03 April 2008Today marks 65 years since the birth of Wellington’s most infamous brawl, the “Battle” of Manners Street.
The riot started on April 3, 1943 with an altercation between American and Maori Serviceman.
It began at the Allied Services’ Club in Manners Street, today a busy Post Office, before spilling out on to Wellington’s sleepy inner-city streets.
Conflicting reports exist on what triggered the violent fighting, but Maori serviceman at the time said that “the Yanks” had sought and received preferential treatment.
When the United States servicemen removed their Army belts to express their displeasure at the Maori troops being served, New Zealand serviceman jumped in, and the “battle” spread to the streets.
It was a bloody, raucous brawl, which saw the war allies pitted against one another, the American serviceman using their brass buckled belts as weapons in the fray.
It was estimated at its peak, to have involved over a thousand American and New Zealand servicemen as well as several hundred civilians.
The riot raged through the inner-city streets of Wellington, spreading to the A.N.A Club in Willis Street, the intersection at James Smith Corner and as far as the People Palace in upper Cuba Street before military police armed with batons defused the situation.
The “battle” waged for four hours, finally being halted by the combination of military police, fatigue and the worrying threat for American serviceman of missing the last train back to their barracks near Paekakariki.
Wartime censorship meant that state approval was required to report any military news, and that included the haphazard “battle” of Manners Street.
No reference to the riots appeared at the time in local newspapers or on the radio.
False rumours that two American serviceman had died that evening persisted for decades, the truth being that no one was killed, and only one New Zealand serviceman was subjected to military discipline.
The “American Invasion” (as New Zealanders affectionately called the arrival of US serviceman) brought a considerable clash of cultures, and the so-called “Battle” of Manners Mall was a messy explosion of tensions between two allies stationed together on the home front.
I scored four. Now, onto typographical errors. Count them in this excerpt from another story.
wJohn Scott Ritchie, 26, of Greymouth, appeared in the Invercar-gill District Court before justices of the peace Iris Robinson and Dinah Smith facing charges of failing to stop and reckless driv-ing.
You should be able to score three on that one paragraph. So that’s a total score of seven in two stories.
The funny thing is that every apostrophe was in the right place.