Betting & Gambling: A National Evil

by Unknown

It will thus be understood that the general public, for a long time entirely excluded from the privileged betting circle, could only take part in the business by the connivance of some of the professional men having the entrée. In 1849, however, the Newmarket authorities, seeing the feasibility of largely adding to their funds, arranged that a small subscription should confer temporary membership of the Newmarket Rooms. This caused many complaints by the old habitués, and it was found necessary, in view of the dubious standing of some of the new-comers, to modify the credit system, and to insist upon daily settlements. The cash gaming of the race-course indulged in by the great bulk of race-goers was not betting, but was carried on by means of roulette-tables, lotteries, sweepstakes, and other adjuncts of the gambling-booth. The Select Committee of the House of Commons (1844), in reporting against the miscellaneous race-course gambling, clearly did not anticipate that the grand-stands and enclosures would take the place of these other methods, and become sources of great profit as places used for gambling by betting, and that the abolition of booths would merely result in the transfer of the gamblers to the enclosures or rings, as may be seen by the following paragraph from their report:—

Your Committee cannot consider the establishment of gambling-booths on race-courses as in any way an essential accompaniment to racing, and they feel that they cannot too strongly express their opinion that all such practices ought to be entirely and universally discontinued. If there is in any place a real demand for races, money enough is sure to be subscribed for plates and stakes to be run for, and if at any place sufficient sums for these purposes cannot be raised without the aid of gambling-booth rents, the races at such places had much better be left off.

Sixty years have gone by, and race-course proprietors acknowledge that the loss of the present gambling-ring rents, or entrance fees, would put a stop to three-fourths of the race meetings in the kingdom.

Legislative enactments followed the Parliamentary Reports, and to a great extent swept away the miscellaneous gambling, which was only to make way, unhappily, for the more subtle form of turf betting. For years before the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the proprietors of public-houses (or persons in collusion with them), and of specially hired offices in the great towns, had been in the habit of using their premises for the purpose of accepting betting money, and, after a time, relations were established between them and some of the credit-betting professionals belonging to the clubs and subscription rooms. This was how betting by those away from the race-course continued, and even increased in volume, notwithstanding the effect of the Betting House Act in 1853, which, immediate as it was with regard to these betting offices, was partially neutralised by the change of location brought about when the new railways were beginning to convey large numbers at a moderate expense to the course, and by the laying on of the telegraph offering the means to others of rapid communication with the betting men at the race meetings, for gambling purposes, by those unable to make the journey.

The time was one of transition, and legislators appear to have overlooked the fact that the miscellaneous booth gambling having been previously suppressed, their enactment putting an end to ready-money betting establishments, then chiefly in towns, would only result in their virtual transfer to every race-course and so-called club. There had been a great deal of irregular and surreptitious cash betting upon the race-course, but it was not a generally recognised system. It was one that had gradually grown. The bookmaker with a satchel taking money in advance and giving tickets, was unknown on our race-courses in the forties. Later on it was particularly recorded that at the Chester Cup race of 1852, one large bookmaker took a great many £5 notes, and the practice was then coming into fashion. It was, however, to laxity in applying the law that the ready-money, or deposit, system owed its subsequent continuation and increase in volume, for there is no doubt whatever that the Act of 1853 was considered at that time to apply to the evil in race-course enclosures as elsewhere. A recognised contemporary authority wrote: “The fatal facility induced by the open deposit system is nipped in the bud”; and another, “Cash betting stopped upon the passing of the Act.” The temptation, however, to race managers to wink at wholesale infraction of the law was very great. Entrance fees to the enclosures promised to become their financial backbone, and to enable them to add enormously to the value of the stakes and cups. And it was found that to permit ready-money betting was to turn a few score of entrance fees to the rings into thousands. That the practice was even many years afterwards considered illegitimate is shown by the Jockey Club notice in the Racing Calendar of July 23, 1874, and the official notice at Goodwood by the Duke of Richmond, “No ready-money betting will be allowed upon any part of the course or park,” in the Calendar of the same date.

An Account of the Present Increase

Betting

It is not necessary to follow in any detail, beyond this period, the growth of horse-racing, and the practice of betting connected with it which had now become a national foible. The foregoing sketch was desirable for the understanding of the subject, owing to the absence of any other authentic continuous record, and by the fact that the masses of the nation had not become a gambling people as compared with foreign populations, either in other ways or in this, until long after the introduction of the sport. The above review of the past takes us up to the year mentioned (1874), when the failure of a prosecution, owing to the interest or prejudice of the Newmarket magistrates, for permitting ready-money betting in the rings, finally opened the flood-gates of the system, which now, aided by railway, telegraph, and press, spread over the country in an ever-increasing volume, and from tens of thousands of sources in city, town, and village drew its main increment from the money-making and wage-earning classes. Hardly any portion of the country, any section of the population, was free from the blight. The bookmakers multiplied. The wealthy and the idle squandered fortunes on them; the toilers brought their sovereigns and half-crowns in myriads. A large portion of the press battened upon the advertisements of prosperous betting men. Servants of the state in high legal positions, devotees of the race-course, and others of subordinate station, gave decisions as to the construction of the law so framed as to put no check upon the spread of professional betting; and horse-racing became a trade instead of a sport. The enormous money interests honeycombed it with dishonesty. Sometimes owners, and more often trainers, jockeys, touts, and betting men, arranged which horse should win, according to the exigencies of the betting market; and, not unfrequently, poison played its part when it was necessary, from the trade point of view, to prevent an animal from first passing the winning-post. The very atmosphere of the turf was pestiferous; it corrupted everything of it and connected with it. The pretence that it was any longer a noble sport was only countenanced by the fashion of titled people patronising it. The ancient plea as to its improving the breed of horses became a byword as the number of yearling races increased and the length of the courses was reduced. The pregnant sentence in the Report of the old Committee (1844) of the House of Lords was forgotten: “The Committee would consider the advantages of horse-racing more than problematical if they were to be unavoidably purchased by excessive gambling and the vice and misery which it entails.” The streams of small bets swelled into rivers, and the rivers filled an ocean swamping the land. The twenty or so bookmakers of the beginning of the century grew into an army of twenty thousand. Many made fortunes; nearly all made a living. Those who confined their operations to the race-courses might be said to do less harm than those who offered facilities away from the course, only that they usually acted in relation to these latter as the wholesale dealer does for the retailer. One of these retail men who was not given to boasting (Chambers’s Journal, 1898) admitted that his business had a turnover of £250,000. It must be remembered that the individuals in the streets are merely the journeymen of well-to-do bookmakers. During last year, amongst the many thousands of fines for the offence, evidence was given—and there are scores of similar cases—that a lad of 16 was one of several servants of a master bookmaker, who mapped out the district amongst his subordinates.

From unofficial but perfectly reliable sources, hundreds of items of information quite as striking as the above could be given, but they are unnecessary in view of the statements of officials and others made before the Select Committee of the House of Lords (1901-2). Briefly summarised, the evidence showed that the practice of betting had grown to such an extent amongst the working classes that it was quite commonly carried on in factories and workshops by agents of the bookmakers, and outside of them by the street betting men. In speaking of the former method, one of many testimonies was given by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, who said that betting was carried on to an enormous extent in the great workshops there; while an idea of the latter can be obtained from Police Superintendent Shannon’s statement that in Lambeth alone 441 persons had been proceeded against in the previous year, the fines amounting to £2000. The evidence proved also that it was not confined to men, but had spread to women and children; that it caused the neglect of wives and children, disregard for parents, and carelessness and indifference in their occupations, frequently resulting in embezzlement from their employers; that this professional betting was largely responsible for corrupting the police, for turning athletic sports into a trade, and for a general neglect of duty amongst those who indulged in it; that all efforts to cope with it under the existing law had failed to restrict it to any extent, including those of the trade unions, some of which exclude from official positions any one known to be given to betting. Excepting those witnesses who in some way, direct or indirect, were interested in the professional betting business, there was a volume of convincing testimony as to its baneful effects. A former prison chaplain, through whose hands in ten years a hundred thousand persons had passed, said that in one jail a whole wing had been set aside for prisoners in connection with betting, which was now increasing more than ever. Several years subsequently to this a carefully kept unofficial register for Great Britain (which is probably a very imperfect one in the sense of much understating the numbers from the difficulty of compiling a comprehensive list by private effort) showed that in the previous five and a half years no less than 80 cases of suicide, 321 embezzlements, and 191 bankruptcies had appeared upon the records of the Courts owing to professional betting, and it must be pointed out that probably not nearly all the embezzlements resulted in prosecution. The Mayor of Salford, for instance, told an influential meeting at Manchester that he was responsible for the conduct of a large business in which several cases of embezzlements had been discovered, but that in no instance had a prosecution taken place. A continuation of these statistics for the three following years, as quoted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords on May 3, 1904, adds to the significance of the figures by revealing that not only has the evil gone on, but that the embezzlements have increased at the rate of 40 per cent. With regard to the allegation that betting was often pleaded as an untruthful excuse in the Police Courts, the senior Metropolitan Magistrate, who spoke with twenty-five years’ experience, and others averred that this statement had been investigated, and proved to have very little foundation; in the very great majority of cases the magistrates having come to the conclusion that betting was at the root of embezzlements.