History of gambling in the United Kingdom

Puritan pamphleteers such as Philip Stubbes warned that these "tubs of pleasure" made drinking, gambling, and illicit sex available to all visitors.

[6] Many private lotteries were held, including raising money for The Virginia Company of London to support its settlement in America at Jamestown.

[10] King Charles II was an avid sportsman who gave Newmarket its prominence – he was a jockey in 1671 and built a palace there for his convenience.

[13] The availability of railways facilitated the rapid growth of the sport, making travel easy for the horses and running specials that attracted large audiences.

Newmarket and the Jockey Club set the standards but most of the racing took place for small cash prizes and enormous local prestige in landowners’ fields and in the rising towns.

With real money at stake, the system needed skilled jockeys, trainers, grooms and experts at breeding, thereby opening new prestigious careers for working-class rural men.

In the upper classes, gambling the family fortune was very common, with high-stakes and high losses--called "deep play".

[19][20] The most notorious case was the politician Charles James Fox In three years in his early 20s he ran up £120,000 of losses at the faro tables.

[21] In the middle class, a business orientation meant that recreational gambling at home was moderate, with limited stakes, and the goal of camaraderie and genial conversation rather than winning money.

The middle classes rejected blood sports, and discovered that music, conversation and cards suited their taste for exercise of intellect and ability.

Young people were allowed to play too, so they could learn to calculate quickly in their minds, and account for money lost and won.

[22] Historian Andrew August finds that, "In the face of efforts of radicals and middle-class reformers, drink, gambling and raucous conviviality remained central to mid-Victorian working-class leisure.

[24][25] The better educated gamblers focused on racing, where random luck was less important and where skill, the assimilation of fresh information, and analysis of previous results provided an intellectual stimulus.

[27] Upper-class England gambled heavily, usually in swank private clubs in the St. James district of the West End of London.

Bookmakers would set up a base in friendly pub, hire runners to tell what the odds were at this hour, collect bets, and pay off the winners, while lookouts warned about policeman.

Deeply embedded in working-class culture was, "a boisterous proletarian lifestyle dominated by drunkenness, street-fighting, horse racing, boxing and gambling."

These men were more comfortable with aristocratic Tories who gambled heavily in their upper-class clubs, as opposed to the middle class clergymen and philanthropists who ran the Liberal party.

[31] Furthermore, Constituency Labour Parties depended on lotteries and bingo for the revenue to keep operating and pay salaries to their full-time agents.

[32] Middle-class reformers were outraged,[33] and the working-class delighted, with the emergence in the mid-1920s of an entertaining new sport and betting opportunity: Greyhound racing.

[34][35] The experience of total war 1939 to 1945 meant much less leisure and highly restricted transportation, So attendance fell at gambling venues such as racing tracks for horses and greyhounds.

The Clermont Club, founded by John Aspinall in London's upscale Mayfair district in 1962, is often heralded as the first of its kind under this new legal framework.

Designed to cater to Britain's aristocracy and upper classes, the Clermont Club set a precedent for the future of the casino industry in the UK.

This evolution was a milestone in the broader acceptance and integration of casino gambling into British society, leading to the gradual expansion and regulation of the industry across the nation.

The establishment of the Clermont Club and subsequent casinos under the 1960 Act signified the beginning of a new era in British gambling, one characterized by legal oversight, economic contribution, and social acceptance.

Betting shops are seen in every high street, bingo games occupy redundant cinemas, every national newspaper provides a racing service and news of football pools; many operate their own form of lottery.

Its goals include breaking links with crime; ensuring that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way; and protecting children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited.