Betting shops as such had been illegal since 1853, which meant that for most working-class people, unable to spare the time and money to get to horse-race meetings and lacking the necessary phone and credit to bet via credit accounts with well-established bookmakers like William Hill, there was no alternative but to use the ‘street bookie’ and his many ‘runners’. Fred Done was 15 when in the late 1950s he began working with his father in the family bookmaking business and discovered a well-established machinery for circumventing the increasingly anachronistic, deeply paternalistic Victorian legislation:
He traded in Knott Mill, one of the rougher areas of Manchester, under a tarpaulin in a back yard. He would open the shop from 11 to 3 and from 5 to 7 for the evening dogs. Bets were written on any scrap of paper, with a nom de plume on the back. We had runners in all of the factories in Trafford Park, one of the biggest industrial complexes in Europe. We would send a taxi round every day, and the bets would be handed over in clock bags [ie ensuring that bets had not been placed after a race had started]. There were no books, there was no income tax, no betting duty. What you had at the end of your day was profit. The only payment you had to make was bribe money to the police, two or three quid a week to keep them off your back. If they were going to raid you, they’d let you know. Of course, punters were not as well-informed then. I once said I felt sorry for them and my father said, ‘If I ever hear you say that again . . . Always remember, skin ’em and stamp on ’em’. You had to be tough to stay in the industry. We had runners in all the pubs as well, and there was a lot of competition. The pubs were probably worse than the factories to control.
Everywhere the urban working class lived, the street bookies and their runners (usually on 10 per cent commission) were there too. At Blaina’s Red Lion a runner was invariably in the public bar on Friday afternoons taking bets, usually 2s each-way; in inner-city Liverpool, noted Mays, ‘in the early afternoon clusters of men, mostly unemployed, gathered together in Wessex Street to await the pay-out from the bookies after the results become known’, playing ‘pitch and toss or dice in small clusters’ while they waited, ‘with look-outs posted at strategic points to warn of the approach of the police’; at every working-men’s club in Featherstone there was a runner, ‘often disabled workmen who make a “bit on the side”, as they say, by being available at the club to take bets’; and in Derby, at a bookie’s in Wilson Street based in a house entered via the back garden, the young Anton Rippon, taking an adult bet that had been scribbled in pencil on an old sugar bag, found a smoke-filled room occupied by ‘dozens of men, many of them Irish labourers who lodged in the area, listening intently to a race commentary coming over a wire service’. It was an early, unsentimental education. ‘Mary, aged 11, was absorbed in her Rorschach,’ Madeline Kerr related in her vivid account of the people of Ship Street, another rundown part of central Liverpool, in about 1952–3:
Suddenly she stopped, looked at the clock and said with urgency, ‘I must run an errand for me dad. I’ll be back in two minutes.’ It was 2.20 pm and she had instructions to put 2s on a horse for her father with a bookmaker round the corner. She had been given the money. The bet had to be on by 2.30. She had her little sister Mildred, not yet five, with her. She tried to leave Mildred with me. Mildred howled. Mary picked Mildred up and ran from the house. She returned out of breath but beaming, still carrying Mildred. The bet had been made in time.
‘When asked,’ Kerr added, ‘what would happen if she had forgotten, she said, “He’d shout.” ’27
Liverpool – in the form of Littlewoods and Vernons – was also home to the flourishing football-pools industry, an industry which during the 1949–50 season involved some 10 million people filling in their weekly coupons. Poolites came from all social backgrounds, but the Hulton Survey of early 1949 conclusively showed the working class to be the most assiduous coupon-fillers, running at about 55 per cent of the working class in the case of men and 20 per cent in that of women – the latter figure perhaps an underestimate, given Zweig’s assertion that ‘about one in three women workers go in for pools’. How much did the working class stake each week? Exact estimates varied, but the average stake – around 2s 6d for a reasonably well-off working man – represented an affordable loss. Overwhelmingly the favourite punt, introduced soon after the war, was the treble chance: in effect the challenge of predicting eight draws (each worth three points) from fifty-five fixtures. The rewards of pulling it off were huge – up to £75,000, a ceiling voluntarily agreed upon by the pools companies after a recommendation in 1951 by the Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting – but the chances were slim indeed.
Sociologically, the overriding impression is of doing the pools as an absolutely normal part of the urban working-class routine. ‘Most of the dockside dwellers accept the filling up of the weekly coupon as casually and uncritically as a trip to Goodison or the evening in the corner pub,’ remarked Mays in Liverpool. ‘It is a part of life as they have always known it . . .’ All over the country, the ritual of checking the scores was sacrosanct. ‘The women in the family were always friendly, it was a happy atmosphere,’ recalled a close friend of the future fashion designer Ossie Clark (born 1942), brought up in Liverpool and, later, Warrington. ‘But everyone had to be quiet as his father [a P&O chief steward] listened to the results as he religiously did the football pools. There was John, Carol, Ossie and myself and sometimes we would be squabbling together – his eyebrow would twitch with annoyance, he’d tell us all to shut up and then disappear behind his copy of the Liverpool Echo.’28
Why did working men gamble? A trio of industrial workers spoke in the late 1940s to a TUC inquiry:
I gamble every week because there is nothing to do at home, and it is amusing to work out the selection.
I gamble because I want to. The Churches are such hypocrites to say that I am sinning.
When we do the football pools every week it is the only time that the family is really together, and it gives us so much pleasure working something out together. We spend very little really, only about 2s 6d each.
Such responses would not have surprised Ferdynand Zweig. ‘ “It’s fun and you give yourself a chance,” was the most frequent opinion, and it is difficult not to regard this sort of gambling as an innocent and inexpensive pastime,’ he wrote about the working-class addiction to the pools. ‘ “You can’t get anything worthwhile for a shilling nowadays,” they say, “but there you have something to look forward and hope for.” And a man complains bitterly: “I am so hard up that I can’t do even the bloody pools.” ’
Yet there was a darker side to Zweig’s analysis of working-class gambling more generally. Not just those unhappy types, ‘men who go short of the essentials of life so that they continue to gamble’, to be found ‘mostly at dog races’, but also, more broadly, the sense in which gambling acted as a substitute for a satisfying way of life, above all in the workplace:
‘Anyway,’ a good observer among workmen told me, ‘I have found that the more a man stays put and the more fed up he is with his life, the more he will set his hopes on gambling. A man with the initiative to do something in life, to look for another job and change the way of his life, will be less likely to go in for gambling.’ And another man confirmed him with: ‘I’m sick of hearing: “If I win on the pools.” People keep on and on saying it . . .’29
Unlike most of the anti-gambling lobby, still a significant force, Zweig knew far too much about the crooked timber of working-class humanity to be a puritan. His critique carries a charge, even if only at an existential level, that transcends progressive pipe dreams about the active, informed, rational citizen.
‘Such excitement, and such cheering on those late nights in August in the Forties as we welcomed the heroes at the Cross back from the victories at the Eisteddfod,’ recalled the television journalist John Morgan about his childhood in Morriston, whose all-male Orpheus Choir won first place for four successive years. ‘They were the most powerful and made the love
liest of tenor sounds. Ivor Simms [the conductor] would always insist the choir was ahead of the note, and would permit no self-indulgence.’ But in many Welsh colliery towns and villages, it was the Miners’ Eisteddfod, from 1948 held each year in the seaside resort of Porthcawl, that mattered at least as much. ‘All of you come – you’re welcome – men and women, young men and youths, boys and girls – yes; cats and dogs, too, and the sheep from the valley – all are welcome!’ was how in 1950 one of the event’s prime movers sought to encourage local musical talent. And, having quoted him, Sid Chaplin, writing his monthly piece for the National Coal Board’s house magazine, commented warmly: ‘That’s the spirit of the singing valleys. A culture that can be shared, a welcome in song and speech, and a place always ready by the fire, with the kettle hospitably on the boil.’
Elsewhere, musical talent could be expressed through the long-established, still vigorous brass-band movement. ‘Fodens Motor Works Band [from Sandbach] defends its national title against 16 contenders in the most open championship since the war,’ the Daily Herald announced on the last Saturday of October 1951 (two days after the general election) about its National Brass Band Championship, following exhaustive area contests earlier in the year. Among the bands competing that day at the Royal Albert Hall, in front of an audience of 7,000, were Brighouse and Rastrick, Fairey Aviation Works, Hanwell Silver, St Dennis Silver (from Cornwall, founded 1837), Morris Motors – and, from Queensbury near Bradford, the Black Dyke Mills Band, returning after a rule-enforced absence following its 1947–8–9 triple win. Altogether, the bands included more than 400 men, but only one girl cornetist, Hazel Joll of Falmouth Town Band. Almost inevitably, Black Dyke Mills came through to win, with their acclaimed performance of Percy Fletcher’s An Epic Symphony. After their great day out, wrote the Herald consolingly, ‘the players go home to re-enter their workaday world as miners, motor craftsmen, china-clay workers, shipwrights and masons’. But for the triumphant Yorkshiremen, mainly textile workers, there was both a victory march back home on the Monday evening – ‘all the village is expected to turn out to cheer’, anticipated the Bradford paper – and, 17 years later, a starring role in the first batch of Apple singles.30
Choral singing and brass bands, though, were not the urban working-class norm. Something else was, as the 15-year-old Robert Douglas discovered in Maryhill, Glasgow:
‘Are you no away tae the dancing, yet?’ Uncle Jack looked at me as though considering reporting me to the police. Every time we had visitors during the summer of 1954 somebody would ask that question. You leave school, get a job and start going to the dancing. It was written down somewhere. Tribal. Another rite of passage . . . ‘Everybody starts going tae the jigging when they leave the school. Best puckin’ night oot in the world.’ He drew on his Capstan Full Strength. ‘Aye, a night doon the Locarno or the Barrowland. Ye cannae beat it. Time ye were away.’
The Economist reckoned in 1953 that ballroom dancing was the second-largest entertainment industry, with annual admissions at dance halls running at about 200 million, while that same year the mainly working-class Derby survey found that whereas 34 per cent of the 16–24 age group went dancing regularly, only 6 per cent of the 25–34 age group did, and even fewer as they got older still. Kerr in her study of inner-city Liverpool put it bluntly: ‘Dancing is extremely popular with the girls until marriage, when it is dropped at once.’
What were those dance floors like? Dennis et al in their Featherstone study have a nice description of the large Saturday-evening dances at the Miners’ Welfare Institute – several hundred people, almost all in their late teens, ‘dance floor crowded, conversation not urgently necessary, often limited to a narrow range of remarks on the size of the crowd and the quality of the band’ – but the most vivid evocation is by Steven Berkoff (born 1937), who by his early teens was going to the vast Tottenham Royal, a Mecca in almost every sense. It was a milieu where ‘you were who you wished to be – warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummel’; where ‘in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into with the expectation of a dream’; where as you entered ‘the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin lacquer, cigs, floor polish’; where ‘the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end’; where ‘the Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right’, with ‘no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize’; where the underlying behavioural assumption was that ‘this was the mating game and the locking of horns’; where ‘you wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance’; and where ‘as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11 pm when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gabardine rubbed against her taffeta’.
Nevertheless, for all the sexual subtext, most dance halls were essentially respectable: managements imposed minimum sartorial standards, including collar and tie for men; they were not licensed for alcohol; and, until the more gymnastic jive gradually took over in the course of the 1950s, they tended to be places where the patrons followed the strict, graceful codes of ballroom dancing (‘slow, slow, quick quick slow’) as ordained in print and broadcasting by Victor Silvester. Anyway, a glance at one of the best-known bandleaders of the day – the shrewd, dapper, smiling, indefatigable Joe Loss – was enough to demonstrate the underlying conservatism of the milieu.31
Nothing yet, though, rivalled the appeal of the flickering screen:
Every day of the week [noted PEP (Political and Economic Planning) in 1952, several years after the medium’s all-time peak] there are, on average, about 3¾ million admissions to the 4,600 cinemas in Great Britain, which is roughly equivalent to every person in the country going to the cinema twenty-seven times a year [easily more than anywhere else in the world]. Not everyone, of course, goes to the ‘flicks’, but four out of ten adults and five out of ten children do so at least once a week. In all, the British public spend over £100 million annually on cinema-going, which is twice as much as the total amount they spend on going to theatres, concert-halls, music-halls, dance-halls, skating-rinks, sporting events and all other places of public amusement.
Within that huge overall audience, there were certain clear patterns and trends by the early to mid-1950s. The preponderance of women had almost disappeared; the lower middle-class component was declining, the working-class component rising (to 82 per cent of the adult audience by 1954); and there were signs that the cinema would increasingly be a place for the young, among whom pupils from secondary moderns were three times more likely than grammar-school swots to go more than once a week. There were also telling regional variations: annual admissions per person ran at around 36 in Scotland and the north of England, around 26 in London and the Midlands, and only about 18 in the altogether less urban south-west and East Anglia. What about the refuseniks? ‘No, I’ve gone right off it,’ a 30-year-old working-class London woman told Mass-Observation in 1950. ‘They just don’t convince you. Look at the maids in Hollywood films. Do they look as if they’ve ever done a hard day’s work?’ A 40-year-old working-class woman was similarly disenchanted: ‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the lot, and too many of the same type just gets on my nerves. They’re all the same, either murder, or mystery, or something to do with shooting and killing. Well, we’ve lived through enough of that.’ And a 25-year-old working-class woman had the best of reasons: ‘It’s baby – since I’ve had baby, and she’s seven months, I don’t think I’ve been once . . . Well frankly, it doesn’t worry me whether I go or not . . . I’d rather sit by the fire and listen to the wireless.’32
What were the 4,600 cinemas (of which the majority seated over a thousand) like? A handful of memories give the distinctive flavo
ur:
In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just a walk or a tram-ride away – the Lyric down Tong Road, the Clifton at Bramley, the Palace off Stanningley Road and the Western a bit further on . . . Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing with the box office generally at the top of a flight of white marble steps, presumably to accommodate the rake, the auditorium itself was often not much more than a hangar, the aisle carpeted but the seats on lino or even bare concrete . . . We always called it ‘the pictures’, seldom ‘the cinema’ and never ‘the movies’. To this day I don’t find it easy to say ‘movies’ . . . (Alan Bennett)
Colchester boasted five cinemas. They ranked hierarchically, from the Regal (a custom-built picture palace, with restaurant, portraits of stars, pile carpet), the Playhouse, the Hippodrome (the last two converted music halls, the latter with some fine interior décor), the Headgate (a converted chapel) to the Empire, the town fleapit – still gaslit in the 1950s. And I seem to recall the usherettes going up and down in the intervals with Flit guns. Perhaps there really were fleas. (John Sutherland)
The only downside, so far as I was concerned, was the continuous performance where the main film and the ‘B’ movie (usually a black and white British cop drama), together with the newsreel, just kept rolling from 2 pm until the stampede to beat the National Anthem at about 10 pm. My father was a man who wouldn’t be hurried, so instead of dashing to make the start of the main feature, we’d always arrive in the middle of the film. The whole programme would continue until the point I always dreaded, when my father would nudge me and say, ‘I think this is where we came in.’ Up we’d get and stumble out in the dark . . . (Anton Rippon, Derby)
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 24