Cultural Baggage
This country''s earliest gaming activities arrived with its European settlers and were derived from their countries of origin. The nature and extent of gaming in early nineteenth-century Great Britain therefore provides clues to its characteristics in colonial New Zealand.
Gambling has been a widespread activitY for millennia, but by the seventeenth century its manifestations were having ruinous consequences in Britain. Charles Cotton, in his book The Complete Gamester (1674), described gambling dens of the time as places of continual brawling and drinking where the difference between riches and poverty hung on the throw of a dice. As he saw it, gambling was ''an itching disease that makes some scratch the head whilst others, as if they were bitten by a tarantula, are laughing themselves to death''.
British florida lottery gamblers came from all classes and both genders. The clever became ''rooks'' or professional gamesters who preyed upon naive young gentlemen in gaming houses and clubs. Few players made fortunes; most landed in penury, bringing ruin to their spouses and children as well as themselves. Occasionally, when all vestiges of propriety and honour had been stripped away, wives themselves became the stakes for play the florida lottery.
During the eighteenth century, betting on horse races, lotteries and other gaming pleasures developed rapidly as major forms of social activity. By modern standards, public entertainment was crude and extravagant: petty criminals were pelted in the pillory, malcontents rioted in the street, brawls were commonplace and large crowds cheered at public hangings. In gin shops, taverns, cock-and-hen clubs, young men and prostitutes would drink, sing and have sex. Integral to this social milieu were gambling activities such as bear- and bull-baiting, cock-fighting, pugilism, wrestling, dice and card gambling, race-track punting and buying tickets in the staterun lottery. Gambling was class-oriented and mostly deleterious.
There were laws against gambling, but aristocrats were seemingly un¬hindered by these sanctions and gambled incessantly on cards and dice in particular. Clubs established especially for the purpose ensnared the landed gentry, politicians and their retinues of beaux and lackeys. Members and their guests wagered tens of thousands of pounds at the tables. At Brooke''s Club in St James Street, London, the minimum stake for the dice game of ''hazard'' was £50. Sons of the nobility who attended Eton or Harrow risked being trapped by the incessant card schools which ran in the back passages or distant fields. Such was the passion that some schoolboys were in debt for life. At least one, William Parsons, the son of a baronet, turned to highway robbery in the 1740S and 1750S to try to clear his obligations.
The gentlemen''s passion for gambling is well illustrated in the tale of the unfortunate pedestrian who suffered a severe stroke on the pavement outside the most prestigious of London''s gaming clubs, White''s in St James Street. The porter hauled him into the foyer and set off to find a doctor, but when they returned the members would not let the doctor approach the victim as they had laid wagers on when he would expire, and his intervention would spoil the ''fair play'' of the bets. Those who prospered from these gambling enthusiasms were the promoters-including royalty, who from George II onwards organized massive lotteries, and entrepreneurs such as William Crock ford, formerly a Billingsgate fishmonger who’s London gaming club was worth more than £1 million when he died in 1844.
If club gambling became an aristocratic preoccupation it was also private and surprisingly socially acceptable. Not so among the urban poor, who gambled loudly on cards (faro, whist and 100), dice, pugilism, sports, coin tossing, horse races and lotteries in which the chance of winning number a prize was minuscule. Although bull- and bear-baiting, and dog-, rat- and cock-fighting were outlawed in 1835, they carried on clandestinely in the Victorian period and were the foci of enthusiastic punting. Many new opportunities for gambling arose from the development of organized sports such as boxing, wrestling, professional athletics, sculling (which emerged from matches for wagers among Thames River watermen), pedestrianism, cycling, association football and horse racing from their origins in villages, schools or country estates.
There was no shortage of willing participants. Punters, usually men, bet on the results, both for the pleasure of being proved right and to make money.
Proletarian attitudes to gambling were formed in part by a devil-may care attitude to incomes which were too irregular for an ethos of saving to take hold. More serious punters were attracted to sharp-talking bookmakers, some of whom won bets by outwitting or cheating their clients.
Bookmaking on all sports, including racing, occurred on a huge scale in hotels, side streets and back rooms, with look-outs posted to warn of the approach of policemen. As with other social activities, working-class gambling served as a form of defence in an exploitative capitalist environment of low wages, long hours, poverty, poor housing and political inequality. Class consciousness was deeply rooted and resilient, and involved the sharing of powerful ideological notions of sociability and mutual support in the face of adversity. Gambling was a welcome escape from the rigours of the daily grind, a gregarious activity shared by all who wanted to participate. Ironically many ''spielers'' (gambling organizers, sometimes dishonest), and bookmakers of plebeian origin were in fact petty capitalists, motivated by the same kind of greed that their clients despised among the middle classes.
Aristocratic and working-class gamblers had a symbiotic relationship.
The former provided patronage for pugilists, cock-fighters and horse racers in particular, viewing the contests from ostentatious stands while the populace crowded down below. This relationship reached its fullest expression in the organization of horse racing. From the eighteenth century royalty and members of the aristocracy owned, bred and trained the horses, organized contests (originally match racing between two horses with stakes and side-betting), and established the early Jockey Clubs. In the 1780s Richard Tattersall, whose surname later became synonymous with off-course betting and lotteries in Australia, provided facilities for the laying and selling of bets in a ''subscription room'' in the original Jockey Club premises at Newmarket.
Workers flocked to race-meetings en masse. Beyond the track there was a vast array of entertainment, from cock-fighting, boxing and wrestling each with their concomitant gambling components-to booths where punters bet on cards, dice and games of illusion. Sometimes there were races for working horses, although these could not compete against the gentlemen''s thoroughbreds. Social mixing was not encouraged and prevented entirely from the 1840s, when racecourses were enclosed and divided into separate sections for each stratum of society. Each had different admission prices and different forms of additional entertainment."
Perceived gambling excesses were partly responsible for Protestant attempts at the beginning of the nineteenth century to promote a new social order, one which demanded industry, and in which recreation existed only to prepare mind and body for work. These were effective to the extent that organized gambling was curtailed-casinos were closed, betting laws were introduced and the state lottery abolished in 1826. Later, a ''rational recreation'' movement emerged which encouraged the provision of libraries, museums, and reading rooms, public walks and gardens in the belief that such facilities would divert the working man from the public house and racetrack it was middle-class imperialism, of course, and it failed ultimately ugh a combination of working-class hostility and lack of official interest Nonetheless, the puritanical movement did remain a force throughout the Victorian period. It influenced all British churches and none more so than the Free Church of Scotland, whose Otago settlement was imbued with moral constraints, particularly in its earliest days.
In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain gambling was popular among men but anti-gambling laws were enforced in a discriminatory manner. The ''rights'' of the upper class were unquestioned. When police pursued working-class gamblers they simply went underground and operated in defiance of judicial sanction. These essential characteristics of British gambling were transplanted to New Zealand, as they were to other Colonies.
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