Do Not Pass Go

by Tim Moore

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  1. ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’

  2. Advance to Go

  3. King’s Cross

  4. The Purples

  5. Free Parking

  6. The Yellows

  7. Go To Jail

  8. The Oranges

  9. Water Works

  10. The (Other) Stations

  11. Mr Monopoly

  12. The Reds

  13. The Light Blues

  14. Electric Company

  15. The Greens

  16. The Dark Blues

  17. The Browns

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Welcome to London. A city where a house is yours for £50, banks make errors in your favour and you can even park your car for free. In Do Not Pass Go, Tim Moore boldly tackles the Monopoly board’s real streets, telling the story of a game and the city that frames it. Moore stays in a hotel in Mayfair and one on the Old Kent Road, and solves all the mysteries you’ll have pondered whilst languishing in jail: how Pall Mall got its name, which three addresses you won’t find in your A-Z and why the sorry cul-de-sac that is Vine Street has a special place in the heart of Britain’s most successful Monopoly champion.

  Do Not Pass Go is a travelogue of one man’s erratic journey around those 28 streets, stations and utilities, and an epic history of London’s wayward progress since the launch of the world’s most popular board game.

  About the Author

  Tim Moore’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He lives in west London with his wife and their three children.

  ALSO BY TIM MOORE

  Frost on My Moustache:

  The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer

  Continental Drifter:

  Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist

  French Revolutions

  To Lilian and Felix

  Do Not Pass Go

  From the Old Kent Road to Mayfair

  Tim Moore

  Foreword

  TIM MOOCK RUSHED back in from the loo and swiftly counted the pink ones in the bank tray. One of us, he announced, had just stolen £500, adding that it wasn’t him. I was winning 5–4 in an increasingly ill-tempered series that had seen us holed up in the attic for most of a two-week holiday with his parents in South Wales, squatting on cold lino in a dark silence broken only occasionally by vicious barks of ‘RENT!’ He’d been my best friend since our first day at school, the two of us bound together by a haunting alphabetical proximity, but in three years I’d never seen him like this; even as I protested my possibly genuine innocence, he flushed furiously, ran a clawed hand messily through his ginger pudding bowl, then with a terrible, strangled shriek abruptly pushed me over backwards on to the board and jumped knees first on my stomach. It was twenty-six years ago but I can still feel that battleship digging into my spine.

  Everyone went through a Monopoly phase, and though my scars may be more literal than most, it has left a mark on us all. In the days when long hours of television broadcasting were devoted to the static image of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a toy clown, and when you didn’t have a PlayStation to plug in your aerial socket when she came on, board games were the baby-boomers’ time-sink, and Monopoly was the undisputed king. In Cluedo you plodded glumly about the billiard room for twenty minutes before a series of mumbled, half-hearted accusations heralded the real business of the afternoon: lashing Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum together with the rope and setting about their uncomplaining embodiments with spanner and lead piping. In Mastermind, which wasn’t a board game but somehow felt like one, you idly constructed lewd scenarios involving that peculiar Bond baddie/Bond bird couple on the box while an elder sibling detailed with waning patience and waxing volume the limited role played by favourite colours in the laws of logic and probability.

  But Monopoly you could play from the end of the Thunderbirds until the start of Dr Who, and wake up in the morning and play again, assembling and consuming hasty and inappropriate meals around the board and postponing visits to the lavatory until it was slightly too late. Because Monopoly made you feel important and grown up: managing money, doing deals, getting arrested. It was a fight to the death, a game that was all about forcing your family and friends ever so slowly down on to their knees before mercilessly punting them into the gutter. And, best of all, those were real gutters, on real streets, a real city.

  I put in most of my Monopoly hours with my elder siblings. I was always the neatly streamlined racing car; my brother went for the dreadnought. My sister, clearly lacking self-esteem, was the dog or the old boot. At home we played on a sixties board almost torn in half along the fold; at my grandparents’ house we played on a wartime set with a cardboard spinner instead of dice (pity the SS officer who peered out of his Panzer hatch and copped six sides of Empire Bakelite in the teeth). When my father came back from a business trip with an American set, we used to overlap the GO squares and play two-board, figure-of-eight transatlantic marathons. In the school holidays, entire weeks were swallowed whole.

  We learned to teleport our tokens without tock-tock-tocking them along for each dot on the dice: if you were on Trafalgar Square and rolled a ten, you cut right across to Bond Street. We learned to pass the little plastic cubes on to the next player with such practised nonchalance that they wouldn’t notice you’d parked your motor on their Mayfair until they’d rolled and it was too late. And we learned each other’s tactical quirks. My sister swore by the stations and the orange set. I always paid the £10 fine instead of taking a Chance. My brother inevitably assumed control of the onerous dice-related calculations that were the lot of the utilities landlord.

  Some of the small-print clauses in the deals we brokered reached management/union levels of arcaneness: I’ll give you Oxford Street for Strand and £350, but if she swaps Regent Street and you get the whole green set then I’m exempted from paying any rent on it for ten laps. At one stage there was an experiment with insurance policies: a fixed per-lap premium paid to a landlord in exchange for free lodging in any of his hotels you might land on.

  After honing our poker-faced virtuosity it was a terrible thing to play with outsiders, amateurs, people who counted out their numbers, who twittered ‘Just visiting!’ through smugly pursed lips whenever they passed through Jail, who sat there for an hour scanning the rules for any evidence to back up their insistence that you weren’t allowed to buy property on the first round of the board. In my pre-teenage prime I could look round a board of cousins and family friends and with a hustler’s practised eye pick out their aggravating foibles before we’d even started: he’ll try to put houses on GO; she’ll find that second-prize-in-a-beauty-contest card sofa-soilingly comical; and, dear God no, every time you hand over the rent to that one he’ll say, ‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you!’

  It didn’t take much to start a fight in Monopoly, particularly after the hotels started going up – if you’ve played it more than twice, you’ll have seen title deeds fly. Where theft wasn’t involved, these incidents could usually be traced to ugly triumphalism; in our family this was neatly defused by the smile-wiping ‘winner-puts-the-game-away’ rule which required the victor to sort out all the money into denominations and the title deeds into their sets. Get really mouthy, Mister Mayfair, and you might even find yourself putting the Chance cards into alphabetical order.

  Monopoly taught us the politics and diplomacy of brokering deals, the basic laws of probability, the art
of bending outmoded rules. In Moore Monopoly you couldn’t collect rent when you were in prison, there were no auctions, and if anyone tried to sell their Get Out of Jail Free card they got a flick on the ear. I still remember my brother going down under a hail of hotels for invoking the right to buy houses when it wasn’t his turn, as enshrined in the terms and conditions of play. You simply couldn’t imagine any rival pastime developing such a life of its own, evolving to suit its players. ‘Scrabble with the Ns? Well; it’s your house.’ ‘Sorry, Miss Scarlet always starts in the Naughty Corner.’ That my siblings and I enjoyed a special relationship with Monopoly was obvious – unavoidably so for the apple-cheeked uncles who jovially proposed a quick game of something before Morecambe and Wise and hobbled out to their Rovers at midnight, pale and broken men – and this relationship was soon blessed with progeny. We began adopting unwanted sets: a fifties one with flat tin tokens, a much earlier board with the stations marked LNER instead of BRITISH RAILWAYS and a dull, mid-eighties set with Mayfair purple and Pall Mall pink. I developed a draughtsman’s obsession with those Chance question marks, and painted one very badly on to a badge which I can only hope never got worn. But by the time The Monopoly Omnibus came into my possession, it was too late: the dog had bolted, the boot was on another foot, the battleship had long since steamed out of port. I was twenty and hadn’t played the game for years, not in fact since my siblings hit their mid-teens and became more preoccupied with the sort of activities familiar to me from the cheekier Chance cards. And in any case, it was written by Gyles Brandreth.

  The man famous not so much for appearing regularly on TV wearing ludicrously novelty pullovers as for doing so without even once being punched hard in the throat by a public-spirited member of the audience, Brandreth was until recently a Tory MP whose Commons speeches were instantly drowned out by endearingly unimaginative bellows of ‘WOOLLY JUMPER!’. I hardly need to catalogue the many good reasons for never opening this book – though it would be unprofessionally remiss not to mention his funny bug eyes and Teddy Bear Museum – and yet I couldn’t quite bear to dispose of anything decorated with those majestically evocative black capitals. Too large a percentage of my pre-pubescent life had been eaten up by Monopoly; the cord was too thick to cut. The book stayed and so did the boards. There was a brief Monopolistic resurgence during further education, and for my father’s sixtieth birthday my siblings and I created a bespoke Monopoly board tailored to his status as cruel and grasping overlord of many student tenants in Bath. That same year I fathered a son of my own, and I will leave you to imagine the lurid pagan rituals enacted when, at the appointed time, the boy was inducted into the Monopoly brotherhood. But though even as a six-year-old Kristjan proved so promisingly competitive that I had to read him the winner-puts-the-game-away riot act after less than fifteen minutes, a year later he still seemed reluctant to acknowledge its unique appeal. When he emerged from an obscure cupboard in my parents’ house with a look of feverish anticipation on his face and a dusty Cluedo box in his arms I knew I’d need to have words. But I’d yet to decide what these words might be when one morning soon after he came upstairs with the newspaper, his brow too deeply furrowed for one of such tender years.

  ‘Bad loser at Monopoly may go to jail’ read the headline he solemnly indicated, a headline which introduced a harrowing insight into the terrible hold the game could still exert on those of a certain age. The bad loser in question was a former Army sergeant who would regularly ‘cajole’ his reluctant son into lining up two tokens on GO; when the thirteen-year-old made the mistake of winning, there were ‘flare-ups’. Eventually the mother threw the game in the bin, but it was mysteriously retrieved and after a final ill-advised victory the boy found himself being kneed in the groin and slapped. Charged with assault, the man said the attack was incited when the child became ‘smarmy’.

  ‘Will you slap me if I win?’

  ‘Only if you’re smarmy,’ I could have said, but instead I placed a hand on my son’s shoulder and smiled sadly. Kristjan needed to know that Monopoly didn’t have to be like that, but at the same time he needed to know why it was sometimes like that. Actually, he didn’t at all – the boy was still only seven – but there we were anyway, settling down with Uncle Gyles for a glorious tutorial on the days when Monopoly ruled the world.

  Introducing The Monopoly Omnibus with the eye-catching claim that he owed his life to the game – his parents having met during a session that evidently got out of hand in a fashion I’d certainly never experienced – Brandreth’s essential theme was, and I quote, that ‘People seem to like playing Monopoly!’. Not a revelation in itself but the following pages offered Kristjan ample evidence of the game’s dominance of the post-war cultural scene. Taught the rules by their parents – as I suppose we must have been, though I don’t ever recall playing them – the children of the fifties and sixties clocked up so many laps of the board that for more than a few, a simple game was soon insufficient. When my siblings and I succumbed to Monopoly ennui we doubled the GO money for landing exactly on that square with the big red arrow; for others, this wasn’t quite enough.

  Once the non-stop straight-game record got up to fifty-nine days, people – or anyway students – quickly diversified. They played Monopoly in baths, in lifts, in tree houses; they played it underground or upside-down, suspended from helium balloons with the board stuck on the ceiling. They played on boards one-inch square, or painted them out on car parks and threw huge foam dice off a third-floor fire escape. Most especially, they played it underwater. The game’s American manufacturer went so far as to hire out a special sub-aquatic set, with a steel-backed board weighing 7 stone and houses stuffed with wire wool. In the seventies, it never had time to dry out.

  The mania soon went official, with Britain’s Monopoly manufacturer John Waddington organising championships in locations felt to be appropriate. It wasn’t so bad at first: the inaugural British finals took place on platforms 3 and 4 of Fenchurch Street station, and subsequent finals were played in Park Lane hotels. In 1977, however, a determination to work up a stunt appropriate to Electric Company ended with four unhappy contestants being zipped into anti-radiation suits and frogmarched up to the roof of the main reactor at Oldbury-on-Severn nuclear power station.

  Over 160 million Monopoly sets, I learned, have been sold worldwide, and most estimates suggest the game has been played by at least five hundred million people. Extrapolating from these figures, revealing as they do that each set is played by an average of three and a bit people, the twenty million sets sold to Britain’s fifty-eight million inhabitants since the game’s launch in 1936 have been played by 62½ million people. Even allowing for the sad but enduring truth that people sometimes die, this essentially implied that absolutely everybody in the whole country has played Monopoly. And there was more.

  I quickly acquired a repository of fancy-that Monopoly facts. In the war, silk maps were hidden inside Monopoly boards and sent out to Allied prisoners, inspiring hundreds of escapes and even more Get Out of Jail Free jokes. The game is sold in eighty countries and has been translated into twenty-six languages. The Great Train Robbers played Monopoly with real, stolen notes while holed up in that Buckinghamshire farmhouse. During the 2000 May Day protests, an anti-globalisation demonstrator hovered precariously around the relevant streets in a mobile hotel outfit.

  Soon, these facts filled my brain and began to overflow out through the mouth below. ‘In Finnish Junior Monopoly,’ I’d announce to a pub full of acquaintances, no doubt in a dispiriting nasal drone, ‘jail is a lavatory.’ Unusually, though, only a few heads would drop and begin to nod cravenly into their drinks; most eyes sparkled with animated glee and soon the room would fill with reminiscences of cheating and chicanery; inevitably, too, of boards overturned and tokens raised in anger. People helplessly blurted out the catchphrases, most often the nay, nay and thrice nay declamation on the Chance and Community Chest cards that sent you off to jail. Ours, I was reminded, was a generati
on brought up in a happier society where strangers threw about birthday cash, where banks made errors in your favour. Someone said their father had made a set, and then so did someone else, and the next week I’d find myself admiring individually crafted hotels and boards lovingly hand-painted in Humbrol enamels. Monopoly made people do things that other games didn’t.

  And everyone seemed to have questions of their own: why was there an American car with whitewall tyres on Free Parking and a New York cop on Go To Jail? Who else noticed that the site-only rent on Piccadilly was the same as the other yellows when it should have been £2 more? Did anyone ever bother with mortgage interest?

  Fielding these queries, I began to realise that despite the game’s straight-batted premise – the financial annihilation of your loved ones – the weirdnesses lurking behind Monopoly were reflected in its details. Take the head-melting arithmetic heralded by the landlord of several dozen red and green plastic edifices turning over the Chance card headed You Are Assessed for Street Repairs: £115 per hotel, £40 per house – it is as mindlessly convoluted now as it was then. And what of Community Chest, which has bothered me in a background way for years, ranked in my third division of incomprehensible enigmas between magnetism and the horridness of Somerfield supermarkets? It hardly helped when I learned it to be some sort of semi-official welfare system prevalent during the American Depression. Surely only the most cruelly capricious benefactor pays out £100 for matured annuities with one hand while snatching it all back as doctor’s fees with the other. There are sixteen Community Chest cards: would you apply for housing benefit if to do so incorporated a one in eight risk of either being carted instantly off to the nick or entered in an impromptu beauty contest?

  The tokens were another popular topic, largely because whereas in most games players pushed a nondescript nub of coloured plastic around the board, some loose cannon in the Monopoly design department had somehow managed to win over the directors with a diecast selection of pathological randomness. ‘Well, we’ve got a racing car, obviously, and this rather nicely detailed dreadnought. Oops! Yes, sorry, the funnels are a bit sharp. This? Well, it’s a hat. A slightly squashed top hat, you know, like a tramp might wear. Ah! I knew you’d love the little dog. A Scottie. Isn’t he sweet? Oh, and then there’s this sort of old jester’s boot thing. And an iron.’