Family Britain, 1951-1957 (31 page)

Two of the most working-class sports were animal-based. Greyhound racing was an inter-war phenomenon that, like speedway, enjoyed a briefish golden age after the war, peaking as early as 1946, when total attendances of 30 million were not far short of football and the night of the Greyhound Derby at White City stadium coincided with no fewer than 44 race meetings on other British tracks. Floodlit, it gave the urban male working class easy access to a night out with a bit of a flutter – other London courses included Harringay, Catford, Wandsworth, Park Royal and New Cross – though even among that target group only a small, hard-core minority regularly attended, caught for ever by the marvellous closing sequence of
The Blue Lamp
, filmed at White City. The other, more participative animal sport was pigeon racing. Its roots lay in the nineteenth century, but it was still thriving in the 1950s with some half-a-million fanciers, especially in the form of long-distance races such as the Great Yorkshire Amalgamation’s Caen Race, the London North Combine’s Berwick Race and the West Yorkshire Federation’s Rennes Race. It was a highly competitive sport – ‘it is safe to state that the present team represent the combination of all that was the very best of the Lulhams, Jurions, Delmottes and Wegges, fully trained for the intended onslaught upon the prizes offered within the confines of the London North Road Competition,’ ran an advertisement in February 1952 for the auction of the birds, baskets, clocks and lofts of the late Charlie Fleming – but also sociable, including (in Richard Holt’s words) ‘the trip down to the club, usually a back room of a local pub, for the synchronising of clocks, the ringing, and the filling in of forms’. Yet, as Orwell had already warned in the 1930s in
The Road to Wigan Pier
, there was a looming threat. ‘There seems to be a lot of trouble in places about keeping pigeons on council estates,’ Frank Sant wrote in 1952 to
Racing Pigeon
’s ‘North-West Jottings’ column. ‘We in Middlewich always invite the chairman, officials and a few councillors to our club dinners. There has never been any trouble here. Perhaps you would pass on the tip.’25

In general, Zweig had no doubts on the matter. ‘Sporting events form an incessant topic of conversation with men not only in pubs and clubs, but also at home and at their works,’ he asserted in
The British Worker
. Moreover, he pointedly added, ‘a man who can forecast the result of an event is held in high esteem, as a win or a loss depends on his opinion’. Or as the
Economist
put it in 1947 with characteristic humanity: ‘The great support for organised gambling once came from the bored and ill-educated aristocracy; it comes today from the bored and ill-educated proletariat.’

Betting in Britain
was the title of a 1951 report by The Social Survey based on a socially representative nationwide sample. It found that ‘betting in Britain today is an almost universal habit’; that ‘more than three-quarters of the adult population go in for some form of betting’; and that, in terms of the most popular form of betting – namely horse-racing – the most regular punters were middle-aged, working-class men earning between £5 and £10 a week. Altogether, 44 per cent of the inquiry’s sample bet on major horse races, 39 per cent did the football pools, and 4 per cent bet on dog races, with in each case a bias towards men. But there were of course other popular forms of gambling. Rowntree and Lavers in their survey included pin-tables and other illegal gambling machines in amusement arcades, sweepstakes and raffles, and newspaper competitions, while an example of the way that gambling could pervade working-class culture was the working-men’s club in Middlesbrough officially called the North Eastern Club but locally always known as the Tote. ‘Its whole activity centres on gambling,’ reported M-O. ‘In it there are the bar, piano, billiard tables, and the like which typify most clubs, but as well there is a tape machine and one end of the main room is especially built with eight small hatches in the wall for placing bets, and a large blackboard near the hatches for price-marking. The bookmaker is also the club manager.’ And M-O quoted a member: ‘It’s packed here during the day, when the betting is going on. There won’t be many people in today, there’s no betting, but tomorrow and Saturday the place will be packed out, you won’t be able to move.’26

Betting shops as such had been illegal since 1853, which meant that for most working-class people, unable to spare the time and money to get to horse-race meetings and lacking the necessary phone and credit to bet via credit accounts with well-established bookmakers like William Hill, there was no alternative but to use the ‘street bookie’ and his many ‘runners’. Fred Done was 15 when in the late 1950s he began working with his father in the family bookmaking business and discovered a well-established machinery for circumventing the increasingly anachronistic, deeply paternalistic Victorian legislation:

He traded in Knott Mill, one of the rougher areas of Manchester, under a tarpaulin in a back yard. He would open the shop from 11 to 3 and from 5 to 7 for the evening dogs. Bets were written on any scrap of paper, with a nom de plume on the back. We had runners in all of the factories in Trafford Park, one of the biggest industrial complexes in Europe. We would send a taxi round every day, and the bets would be handed over in clock bags [ie ensuring that bets had not been placed after a race had started]. There were no books, there was no income tax, no betting duty. What you had at the end of your day was profit. The only payment you had to make was bribe money to the police, two or three quid a week to keep them off your back. If they were going to raid you, they’d let you know. Of course, punters were not as well-informed then. I once said I felt sorry for them and my father said, ‘If I ever hear you say that again . . . Always remember, skin ’em and stamp on ’em’. You had to be tough to stay in the industry. We had runners in all the pubs as well, and there was a lot of competition. The pubs were probably worse than the factories to control.

Everywhere the urban working class lived, the street bookies and their runners (usually on 10 per cent commission) were there too. At Blaina’s Red Lion a runner was invariably in the public bar on Friday afternoons taking bets, usually 2s each-way; in inner-city Liverpool, noted Mays, ‘in the early afternoon clusters of men, mostly unemployed, gathered together in Wessex Street to await the pay-out from the bookies after the results become known’, playing ‘pitch and toss or dice in small clusters’ while they waited, ‘with look-outs posted at strategic points to warn of the approach of the police’; at every working-men’s club in Featherstone there was a runner, ‘often disabled workmen who make a “bit on the side”, as they say, by being available at the club to take bets’; and in Derby, at a bookie’s in Wilson Street based in a house entered via the back garden, the young Anton Rippon, taking an adult bet that had been scribbled in pencil on an old sugar bag, found a smoke-filled room occupied by ‘dozens of men, many of them Irish labourers who lodged in the area, listening intently to a race commentary coming over a wire service’. It was an early, unsentimental education. ‘Mary, aged 11, was absorbed in her Rorschach,’ Madeline Kerr related in her vivid account of the people of Ship Street, another rundown part of central Liverpool, in about 1952–3:

Suddenly she stopped, looked at the clock and said with urgency, ‘I must run an errand for me dad. I’ll be back in two minutes.’ It was 2.20 pm and she had instructions to put 2s on a horse for her father with a bookmaker round the corner. She had been given the money. The bet had to be on by 2.30. She had her little sister Mildred, not yet five, with her. She tried to leave Mildred with me. Mildred howled. Mary picked Mildred up and ran from the house. She returned out of breath but beaming, still carrying Mildred. The bet had been made in time.

‘When asked,’ Kerr added, ‘what would happen if she had forgotten, she said, “He’d shout.” ’27

Liverpool – in the form of Littlewoods and Vernons – was also home to the flourishing football-pools industry, an industry which during the 1949–50 season involved some 10 million people filling in their weekly coupons. Poolites came from all social backgrounds, but the Hulton Survey of early 1949 conclusively showed the working class to be the most assiduous coupon-fillers, running at about 55 per cent of the working class in the case of men and 20 per cent in that of women – the latter figure perhaps an underestimate, given Zweig’s assertion that ‘about one in three women workers go in for pools’. How much did the working class stake each week? Exact estimates varied, but the average stake – around 2s 6d for a reasonably well-off working man – represented an affordable loss. Overwhelmingly the favourite punt, introduced soon after the war, was the treble chance: in effect the challenge of predicting eight draws (each worth three points) from fifty-five fixtures. The rewards of pulling it off were huge – up to £75,000, a ceiling voluntarily agreed upon by the pools companies after a recommendation in 1951 by the Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting – but the chances were slim indeed.

Sociologically, the overriding impression is of doing the pools as an absolutely normal part of the urban working-class routine. ‘Most of the dockside dwellers accept the filling up of the weekly coupon as casually and uncritically as a trip to Goodison or the evening in the corner pub,’ remarked Mays in Liverpool. ‘It is a part of life as they have always known it . . .’ All over the country, the ritual of checking the scores was sacrosanct. ‘The women in the family were always friendly, it was a happy atmosphere,’ recalled a close friend of the future fashion designer Ossie Clark (born 1942), brought up in Liverpool and, later, Warrington. ‘But everyone had to be quiet as his father [a P&O chief steward] listened to the results as he religiously did the football pools. There was John, Carol, Ossie and myself and sometimes we would be squabbling together – his eyebrow would twitch with annoyance, he’d tell us all to shut up and then disappear behind his copy of the
Liverpool Echo
.’28

Why did working men gamble? A trio of industrial workers spoke in the late 1940s to a TUC inquiry:

I gamble every week because there is nothing to do at home, and it is amusing to work out the selection.

I gamble because I want to. The Churches are such hypocrites to say that I am sinning.

When we do the football pools every week it is the only time that the family is really together, and it gives us so much pleasure working something out together. We spend very little really, only about 2s 6d each.

Such responses would not have surprised Ferdynand Zweig. ‘ “It’s fun and you give yourself a chance,” was the most frequent opinion, and it is difficult not to regard this sort of gambling as an innocent and inexpensive pastime,’ he wrote about the working-class addiction to the pools. ‘ “You can’t get anything worthwhile for a shilling nowadays,” they say, “but there you have something to look forward and hope for.” And a man complains bitterly: “I am so hard up that I can’t do even the bloody pools.” ’

Yet there was a darker side to Zweig’s analysis of working-class gambling more generally. Not just those unhappy types, ‘men who go short of the essentials of life so that they continue to gamble’, to be found ‘mostly at dog races’, but also, more broadly, the sense in which gambling acted as a substitute for a satisfying way of life, above all in the workplace:

‘Anyway,’ a good observer among workmen told me, ‘I have found that the more a man stays put and the more fed up he is with his life, the more he will set his hopes on gambling. A man with the initiative to do something in life, to look for another job and change the way of his life, will be less likely to go in for gambling.’ And another man confirmed him with: ‘I’m sick of hearing: “If I win on the pools.” People keep on and on saying it . . .’29

Unlike most of the anti-gambling lobby, still a significant force, Zweig knew far too much about the crooked timber of working-class humanity to be a puritan. His critique carries a charge, even if only at an existential level, that transcends progressive pipe dreams about the active, informed, rational citizen.

‘Such excitement, and such cheering on those late nights in August in the Forties as we welcomed the heroes at the Cross back from the victories at the Eisteddfod,’ recalled the television journalist John Morgan about his childhood in Morriston, whose all-male Orpheus Choir won first place for four successive years. ‘They were the most powerful and made the loveliest of tenor sounds. Ivor Simms [the conductor] would always insist the choir was ahead of the note, and would permit no self-indulgence.’ But in many Welsh colliery towns and villages, it was the Miners’ Eisteddfod, from 1948 held each year in the seaside resort of Porthcawl, that mattered at least as much. ‘All of you come – you’re welcome – men and women, young men and youths, boys and girls – yes; cats and dogs, too, and the sheep from the valley – all are welcome!’ was how in 1950 one of the event’s prime movers sought to encourage local musical talent. And, having quoted him, Sid Chaplin, writing his monthly piece for the National Coal Board’s house magazine, commented warmly: ‘That’s the spirit of the singing valleys. A culture that can be shared, a welcome in song and speech, and a place always ready by the fire, with the kettle hospitably on the boil.’