Light Come, Light Go: Gambling—Gamesters—Wagers—The Turf

by Ralph Nevill

To this place flocked grooms, valets, and all the silly fry of the district, carrying with them as much money as they could scrape together. Business was generally over by the afternoon, when the proprietors, who never made their exit by the door, climbed up to the top of the tower, and got through a hole in the roof—from which, by a ladder, they descended to a slated roof of a back place about twenty feet lower; they then crawled along about twenty feet of wall, and by an aperture in another, like a gun-port, descended into a back yard, and completed their cat-like line of march through a house in Hertford Street. This, to the astonishment of the neighbours, was done regularly every morning.

The place having become a public scandal, Townshend, with several Bow Street runners and four carpenters, went to Warren Street one morning, three hackney coaches being posted at some distance from the scene of action.

On the arrival of the peace officers, the four proprietors of No. 13 came out through the roof, and planted their ladder; but it gave way, and they were obliged to jump upon the slated roof twenty feet below them. By some marvellous chance, however, they escaped uninjured, the slates only being broken. They then jumped upon an adjacent wall, and flung their books into the garden of a gentleman's house. No. 17 Warren Street, and followed themselves; their idea was to escape through his back door, but the owner was fortunately at home, and resisted this design. They then leaped the wall of the next house, Drover's, the hairdresser, with their books, and in this house they were secured. One of them fired a pistol at the officers, which fortunately did no harm. The runners had cutlasses and axes, with which they made their way into the house.

The inhabitants of the district, it may be added, did not exhibit any enthusiasm for the officers of the law—on the contrary, they showed considerable displeasure against those who had come there to preserve most of them from misery and ruin. The informer, never a popular character, was a lean, cadaverous old woman. She accompanied the swindlers in the first coach, with the hootings of the rabble in her ears, and the whole cavalcade moved off the ground, escorted by a very hostile crowd which accompanied it to Bow Street. Here the four men, who had been arrested with so much difficulty, were sentenced to six months' imprisonment each in the house of correction in Coldbath Fields.

It would appear that previous to 1778 gaming was never conducted upon the methodical system of partnership concerns, wherein considerable capital was embarked. After that period, the vast licence allowed to keepers of fraudulent E.O. tables, and the great length of time which elapsed before they met with any check from the police, afforded a number of dissolute and abandoned characters many excellent opportunities of acquiring property, which was afterwards increased in the low gaming-houses, by nefarious methods at Newmarket and other fashionable places of resort, and in the lottery. At length, though these individuals had started without any property, or any visible means of lawful support, a sum of money, little short of one million sterling, was said to have been acquired by a class originally (with some few exceptions) of the lowest and most depraved description. This enormous mass of wealth was employed as a great and an efficient capital for carrying on various illegal establishments, particularly gaming-houses, and houses for fraudulent insurances in the lottery.

Part of this capital was even said to be utilised in subsidising various faro banks kept by ladies of fashion, whilst a certain proportion was also devoted to fraudulent insurance in the lotteries, where the chances were calculated to yield about thirty per cent to the gambling syndicate, most of the members of which maintained a number of clerks, employed during the drawing of the lotteries, who conducted the business, without risk, in counting-houses where no insurances were taken, but to which books were carried, not only from the different offices in every part of the town, but also from the "Morocco-men," who went from door to door taking insurances, and enticing the poor and the middle ranks to become adventurers.

In calculating the chances upon the whole numbers in the wheels, and the premiums which were paid, there was generally about £33:1:3 per cent in favour of the lottery insurers: but when it is considered that the people generally, from not being able to understand or recollect high numbers, always fixed on low ones, the chance in favour of the insurer was greatly increased, and the deluded poor plundered.

In the early part of the eighteenth century, speculative insurance, which could be effected upon anything, including lives, was a favourite form of gambling in England. Any one's life could be insured, including that of the King, and, to such an extent was this carried, that daily quotations of the rates on the lives of eminent public personages were issued by members of Garraway's and Lloyd's. The highest premium ever paid is supposed to have been twenty-five per cent on the life of George II., when he fought at Dettingen. On the fall of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1745 very large sums changed hands; whilst a number of insurance brokers were absolutely ruined owing to the escape of Lord Nithsdale from the Tower—an exploit which this nobleman accomplished by the aid of his devoted wife. As time went on these speculative insurances became a public scandal, and they were finally made illegal by the Gambling Act of 1774.