ABSTRACT
Sir Frederick Wall, of the Football Association (FA), was appalled at the fact that there had been betting on the FA Cup in 1872, and Ainslie J. Robertson had critically surveyed the prevalence of the football pools in Liverpool at the beginning of the twentieth century for the National Anti-Gambling League. Such criticism was driven by a broader agenda of opposition to gambling in general, rather than a particular hostility to the football pools. Yet, as the football pools grew rapidly during the 1930s, that hostility increased. The Quaker ‘Sufferings, and Churches Committee on gambling, united with the football authorities in the failed attempt to get Parliament to ban the football pools in 1934, and the Football League, supported by the FA, suspended the football fixtures in the ill-fated two-week long ‘Pools War’ of 1936. Nevertheless, despite these failed attempts to stop the pools, in the face of the widespread criticism noted by George Orwell in his comment that the ‘whole of Yorkshire was in uproar’, the collapse of the ‘Pools War’ against the pools did not represent a turning point signalling the social acceptance of the football pools, that Mike Huggins and Emmanuel Roudaut suggests in their recent works.
