Two Fat Ladies
Will the new super-casinos bring about the demise of the commercial bingo hall? Carolyn Downs traces the history of the game back to the eighteenth century and finds that then – as now – it had a strong attraction for women gamblers.
It must have seemed a good idea that the present Labour government should mark its second term by reforming gambling and alcohol laws. Social legislation is notoriously expensive, but this move would allow the government to show its liberal modernizing tendencies whilst increasing revenue to the Exchequer. The government could not have expected to arouse moral outrage of such dimensions that massive concessions were needed to get the Gambling Act (2005) through Parliament. Media coverage has almost entirely centred on the super-casinos the act will bring into being; it has been generally overlooked that the new legislation, and the concurrent smoking ban, will almost certainly change commercial bingo.
Since 1961, the public face of commercial gambling in Britain has largely been filled by bingo. The names Mecca and Gala are synonymous with hushed, smoke-filled halls in which large numbers of people, mainly women, wait for their number to come up. However, according to the final report of the Royal Commission on Gambling (1978), ‘Gambling legislation has had a chequered and unhappy history’; the birth of commercial bingo in 1961, the unintended child of the Betting and Gaming Act (1960), also caused enormous moral panic as leisure entrepreneurs were accused of enticing women into gambling.
The clear intention of the act had been to prevent commercial gaming, but unfortunately there was a loophole, and within three days of the law being passed the first commercial bingo club opened. By 1963 Treasury figures showed that 14 million people, most of them women, belonged to bingo clubs – an apparent growth from nowhere. The press were outraged by the spectacle of women gambling; The Times’ leader writer waxed indignant about the appeal of ‘this cretinous pastime’ and the risks to children ‘neglected while their mothers play bingo’. In Parliament an adjournment debate about bingo in July 1961 attracted more than fifty speakers.
A key feature of the press and parliamentary comment was that greedy entrepreneurs were leading women into gambling, and that this was an entirely unprecedented phenomenon. Press reports about bingo consistently reflect dichotomous views of gambling – at one and the same time the popular leisure choice of many and cause for moral disapproval – in which accounts of lives transformed by massive wins sit next to panic stories about lives ruined by gambling addiction.
Although there are considerable difficulties in researching the history of gambling, as records tend to be negative, a thread connecting working-class women with random numbers games related to bingo can be traced back more than two hundred years. It is likely that the opening of the first commercial bingo club in January 1961, far from being the start of a new phenomenon, was the continuation of a pattern of leisure established since the early eighteenth century.
Gambling provides commercial opportunities that particularly suit women's work patterns. Alehouses, often managed by women, always offered opportunities for commercial gambling. Parliamentary investigations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reported that many London gaming houses were run by women, and that women were the main gamblers on illegal lotteries. In the early twentieth century the National Anti-gambling League found that women were significantly involved in both betting and bookmaking, while a range of autobiographical accounts suggest that significant numbers of women either gambled or earned substantial incomes from bookmaking.
Bingo is fundamentally a lottery, and the first English lottery was established in 1566. It was not a huge success. However, the attraction of lotteries grew, and by 1694 had become so popular that more than £1m, equivalent to £87,528,301,886.79 today, was raised by one of the then intermittent state lotteries. Many smaller lotteries were run by individuals, alehouses and at fairs. They were considered a nuisance and King Charles II (not noted for his opposition to gambling) issued an ordinance against them complaining that ‘[His Majesty] is informed of the ill consequences resulting from the frequency of lotteries, puppet shows, etc., whereby the meaner sort of people are diverted from their work.’ The key factor here is the reference to ‘the meaner sort of people’. Gamblers from the lower classes consistently suffered most from the moral disapproval of those who considered themselves the arbiters of social control and order.
By 1702 the state lottery was an annual event, but the 'meaner sort of people', including women, wanted to gamble throughout the year, and looked for opportunities to do so. Thus the poor continued to clash with those who condemned their gambling while condoning it amongst the wealthy. In 1716 the Lord Mayor of London prohibited barrow women from playing dice in public. However, they circumvented the regulations by carrying wheels marked with numbers, ‘which being turned, govern the chance by the figure a hand in the centre points to when stopped’. During this period scores of private lotteries were taking place across the country. They were all banned in 1721, but the ban appears to have been largely ineffective.
It seems that the desire to share in the increasingly affluent and consumer-based society was felt even by the lowest orders. Poor people had aspirations that they knew could not be met by honest toil; gambling offered an escape, even if temporary, from poverty. The state lottery provided a means of transformation; the poor became rich and winners were widely reported, as in The Times of 1798:
The £20,000 prize, drawn on Friday, is divided amongst a number of poor persons; a female servant in Brook Street, Holborn, had a sixteenth; a woman who keeps a fruit stall in Grays Inn Lane another.
State lottery tickets, however, cost ten guineas each. Although shares in a ticket could be purchased for twelve shillings and sixpence, this placed them beyond the reach of the poorer classes. Also, because the state lottery was open for only a limited period, it failed to satisfy the appetite of the public for this popular game of chance. These demands ensured that illegal, private lotteries, called ‘little goes’, were immensely popular with the lower orders. Tickets could be bought for as little as a halfpenny, so this form of gambling was available to all but the poorest in society. Newspaper reports frequently commented disapprovingly on the presence of poor women at ‘little goes’. Thus the Newgate Calendar of August 11th, 1795:
On Friday night last … upwards of thirty persons were apprehended at the house of one M’Call … where the most destructive practices to the poor were carrying on, that of Private Lotteries (called Little Goes) ... The wives of many industrious mechanics, by attending these nefarious houses, have not only been duped out of their earnings (which ought to have been applied to the earning of bread for their families), but have even pawned their beds, wedding rings and almost every article they were possessed of, for that purpose.
There was much public discussion about illegal lotteries among the poor. It was said that illegal gambling increased applications to Boards of Guardians for poor relief. Evangelical clergy waxed indignant on the ills of illegal lotteries. The Times of July 22nd, 1798 followed their lead in urging magistrates to act against the evil:
It is those who compose the lower orders of society whom it so seriously affects…We hope that the magistrates of each jurisdiction…will perform their duty on behalf of the poor over whom they preside, and put a stop to such a growing and alarming evil, of such pernicious and dangerous tendency.
Such was the apprehension about the effects of these illegal lotteries and the impact on their largely lower-class participants that in 1801 an act was passed declaring them a public nuisance. But it seems to have been generally ignored. In 1808 the report of a select committee into the lottery laws estimated that every servant in London probably spent twenty-five shillings a year on illegal lotteries and concluded that perhaps half a million pounds sterling was placed on various numbers games in London each year.
The insuring of state lottery tickets was another numbers game, costing about one shilling per chance in 1800. The winner earned £1 if the number insured was drawn, conversely, the bet could be made that the number would not be drawn. A law officer reported to the 1808 committee that ‘the wives of the labouring poor, and gentlemen’s servants’ purchased most of the illegal insurance. He went to state that:
When I have caught a great many in a room together, I have found most of them poor women [who have pawned] their pillows, their boilers and their clothes, till they have been almost naked.
Illegal insurances were often sold by women, who earned considerable commission:
The party taking insurances was a women of respectable appearance, there were four or five women about, who were doing numbers as they call it: She was taken into custody with her papers and memorandums … The persons insuring were principally women of low description … A very considerable portion of women who could write and who know a little of figures, are employed in this nefarious trade; and whenever any of them are convicted and imprisoned, there is generally a stipulation with their principal that they shall be allowed two guineas per week during the term of their imprisonment.
Between 1802 and 1808 twenty-eight people, fifteen of whom were women, were convicted for the sale of lottery insurance at Queen's Square Magistrates Court, London. That these women were able to be paid during imprisonment demonstrates the amount of income that could be made from the activity.
The moral tide of opinion against gambling continued to rise, and eventually a coalition of evangelical activists, including the religious writer Hannah More, lobbied successfully for the ending of the state lottery; the final draw took place in 1826. This left a gap in the market, which publicans were quick to fill by developing their own numbers games. A new phenomenon at this time was the spread of off-course betting, encouraged by the Gaming Act of 1845 and the development of speedier communications. Cash betting offices sprang up in all the major towns and cities as gambling on the horses, and more particularly sweepstakes using race listings in the sporting papers, provided an outlet for working-class gamblers, women especially, who had previously engaged in illegal lotteries and insurances.
For the moralists of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, gambling, especially amongst the lower orders, was a vice that government had a duty to attempt to stamp out or, at the very least, control. The Street Betting Act (1906), the response to a temperance-related campaign led by the national Anti-Gambling League, was seen as a class-based measure even as it passed through parliament. It was largely unsuccessful, and criminalized cash betting and poor punters. Nor did it stop numbers games, with bingo becoming ever more popular and widespread.
In its early days, bingo was known by many different names, including tombola, house, houseyhousey and lotto. The game seems to have started among men in the services in the late nineteenth century, possibly introduced from Malta, where it was common in mid-century, and in 1890 games of bingo were allowed as a recreation to raise mess funds. It became a favourite activity among troops serving in the First World War and after the war spread as a popular entertainment at travelling fairs and in seafront arcades. Clubs and other organizations soon adapted it as a way of raising funds.
But while fairground and fund-raising games of bingo were commonplace by 1926, of more concern to Parliament were illegal cash games of bingo that allowed operators to rake in considerable profits and regularly attracted large numbers of women. In the late 1930s a survey of York carried out by B.S. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, referred to games that were played 'solely as a means of gambling' describing the most popular of these as 'housey-housey'. In Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918-45 (1986), Stephen G.Jones mentions that this type of gambling was also popular in interwar Salford and that gambling was often the only leisure activity open to the unemployed and to working-class mothers.
By the 1930s many operators of illegal bingo games were being prosecuted. In the London borough of Peckham alone, according to police evidence, there were no less than seven bingo operators who had to limit the number of games each participant could play because demand for seats was so high. Between thirty and sixty players were noted at each five-minute session of bingo, which ran continuously from 10am to 6pm daily, and there was often a queue of people waiting for a bingo board to become vacant. Woman Police Sergeant Stratton (working undercover) noted that the game was extremely popular, and played ‘mostly by women of the poorer class’.
After the Second World War, pressure steadily mounted for the legalization of off-course betting, with a Royal Commission reporting on the subject in 1951. There was, however, no demand for commercial bingo, although the game was becoming increasingly popular as a leisure entertainment. The Roman Catholic Church organized quasi-commercial bingo sessions as a fund-raising activity, while the huge games run by Butlin’s holiday camps raised thousands of pounds each year for charity. However, despite the grass-roots popularity of the game, it slid under the radar of the law-makers concerned with drawing up the Betting and Gaming Act (1960).
Their failure to identify, and stop, a loophole in the act allowed commercial bingo to arrive by the backdoor. As the intention of the new act had been to prevent commercial gaming, the advent of commercial bingo attracted huge press attention. Alongside photographs of long queues outside the bingo halls and details of the spectacular prizes being won, newspapers carried alarmist stories about the damage being caused to British culture and society by bingo. Their sustained onslaught created a climate in which to admit to playing bingo was tantamount to an admission of child neglect, improvidence and limited intelligence. Bingo was portrayed as a new vice, rather than the continuation of a tradition of mild gambling on random numbers.
If popular culture is 'culture made by the people', then the growth of commercial bingo out of eighteenth-century numbers games, through alehouses, the services, fairgrounds, sweepstakes, and illegal cash bingo, is part of a pattern first noted by the Socialist Thomas Wright in 1888, who held that workers had a 'rich cultural existence of their own' and did not want to have an alien proto-middle class culture imposed upon them. In the light of the evidence, it is clear that bingo developed from a long tradition of numbers games played, and often run, by women; the leisure entrepreneurs who established commercial bingo in the 1960s met an existing demand; they did not create that demand.
