ABSTRACT
Gambling has been a contentious issue in Britain. The National Anti-Gambling League sought to restrict it, to ensure that the working class focused upon rational recreation rather than an impoverishing activity, whilst its supporters emphasised that gambling was merely a harmless ‘bit of a flutter’. This book aims to examine why the football pools dominated British gambling from the 1920s to the 1980s, the extent to which it was controlled by the state and the reason why it became a feature of working-class life and why it faded away in the 1990s. It suggests that conflict between gamblers and anti-gamblers lay at the very heart of the emergence of the football pools, and its growth, particularly between the 1920s and 1960s, as Littlewoods presented the football pools as a safe and responsible investment, indeed a family activity. Despite this conflict, football pools flourished, although historians disagree on whether hostility to it declined in the 1930s or the 1960s. Yet as full citizenship was given to the working class through gambling legislation in the 1960s, this new more liberal age saw a generational decline of interest in the pools, as other forms of gambling emerged, culminating in the rapid decline of the pools when The National Lottery, with its larger jackpots, began in 1994. This suggests that the football pools were not the traditional working-class activity they were often described as being and that the working-class gambler was primarily interested in the size of the jackpot.
