Lucky Numbers

LUCKY NUMBERS by journalist Andy Murray

It’s Thursday evening, Top of the Pops is about to start and suddenly your household is gripped by a mild panic. Purses and wallets are mined for loose change and a flimsy spreadsheet-style form with a carbon paper section is being filled in. Soon, there’s a knock at the door, and there stands a figure with a satchel and an expectant look: the Pools Man is here.

This weekly ritual, or variations on it, will probably be familiar to those of a certain age. It’s estimated that, by the 1980s, as many as one in four people in the UK were ‘doing the pools’.  And yet, by the following decade the institution was dealt a devastating blow that almost – but not quite – killed it off completely.

It all dates back to the early 1920s, when a Birmingham man, John Jervis Barnard, devised a system of distributing coupons with which punters could bet on the results of football matches. It circumvented Britain’s strict betting laws – or at least, bent them slightly – and offered weekly winners a portion of the ‘pool’ of money paid in (and this at a time of widespread economic depression).

Barnard never quite made his idea fly, but it was picked up by John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes, three enterprising young friends in Manchester. One Saturday afternoon in February 1923, they distributed 4000 pools coupons they’d had printed to the crowd outside Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground. It was vital that the three worked anonymously or else their day jobs could have been at risk. Askham had been orphaned as a baby and his surname changed from ‘Littlewood’, so the group christened their company ‘Littlewood Football Pool’.

They each put in £50 seed money, a not inconsiderable sum at the time, and set up a small company office in Liverpool. But the whole scheme stood or fell on the willingness of punters to join in and return their completed coupons, and the first couple of years proved to be a serious struggle. In 1925 Hughes and Askham elected to bail, but Eccles-born Moores, who had a long-standing entrepreneurial streak, bought them out. His gamble paid off: by 1930 the football pools had caught on and Moores had become a millionaire.

The success of Littlewoods spawned a number of imitators: Vernons Pools, also based in Liverpool, was founded in 1925, and Zetters was founded in London in 1933. They remained the big three UK pools companies, but there were others, and indeed the idea was taken up all over the world. As for Moores, off the back of his pools success, he established a hugely popular mail order firm, followed by a string of shops across the country. His industry saw him awarded a CBE in 1972, then knighted in 1980, by which point Littlewoods had grown to become the largest private company in Europe.

Clearly, Moores was one of the real winners of the football pools. But in a way, so too was Liverpool: processing and checking the vast numbers of weekly coupons was a colossal operation, and Littlewoods became one of the city’s major employers. After a succession of bigger and bigger premises, in 1938 the company opened a large, bespoke Art Deco building on Edge Lane as its HQ – though during World War II staff switched over to making parachutes, the coupon printing machines being repurposed for manufacturing call-up papers. In later years, Littlewoods became pioneers in terms of technology, using the first high-speed optical scanners in its checking centres in 1961 and becoming the first company in the UK to install an optical character reading machine to identify client coupons in 1967,

The pools experience was by no means identical across the board: many people submitted their coupons direct to Liverpool via post, but in time they could choose doorstep collection by a neighbourhood agent (or ‘pools man’). Large companies would often have their own in-house pools agent or operate a staff syndicate.

Down the decades Littlewoods offered players a whole variety of games, including the Penny Points, Spot the Ball and even a ‘ladies’ coupon’ (details of which seem to be lost to the mists of time, possibly for the best). After the war, Littlewoods introduced perhaps the most iconic game, the Treble Chance, in which players selected eight fixtures from a list as possible score draws. Some punters worked on a system of closely studying the matches in question before coming to a decision, but just as many kept a worn and tattered coupon template marked up with significant numbers – ages, birthdays, house numbers – and copied them over every week with fingers firmly crossed. Whatever the chosen method, it ended up the same way: feverishly scanning football match results on a Saturday early evening – initially via a hot-off-the-press copy of the Pink Paper, later from radio reports or Grandstand on TV, with a ‘pools panel’ of experts deciding on results of any postponed matches – to find out if fortune had smiled that week.

It certainly smiled on Keith and Viv Nicholson when they won £152,300, 18 shillings and eight pence in a Littlewoods Treble Chance game in September 1961 (and were duly presented a cheque at a special ceremony by Bruce Forsyth). Viv’s exploits made her famous, but back in 1957, Stockport widow Nellie had bagged £205,235 (cheque presented by Norman Wisdom) on a Treble Chance, only to spend the money in less headline-grabbing fashion. On the other hand, the following year Wally and Kath Brockwell won £206,028, hired a coach to London and took 40 members of their family to Grosvenor House for a vast slap-up feast.

Over the decades, bigger and bigger pools wins were recorded – over half a million, over one million, over two million – until 19 November 1994, when a 24-strong syndicate regulars at Worsley’s Yew Tree Inn won a total of £2,924,622 (cheque presented by Michael Barrymore). With heavy irony, though, the same day saw the launch of the heavily-hyped National Lottery, which offered fans of a flutter convenience and simplicity – plus big money: the seven winners of the first week’s Lottery jackpot shared £5,874,778.

At the age of 97, John Moores had died just a few months previously, in September 1993, with a fortune said to be over £1 billion. Coupled with changes to UK gambling restrictions and the gradual rise of online betting, the National Lottery dealt a severe blow to the football pools industry, faced with a big, modern, all-singing, all-dancing way to win life-changing amounts of money. The industry survived, but only by adapting. In 2000, UK-based online gambling firm Sportech bought up Littlewood Pools, going on to acquire Zetters in 2002 and Vernons in 2007, finally uniting all three as ‘The New Football Pools’. In turn, this was sold on to private equity firm OpCapita in 2017 for £83 million, and today it still offers variations on the classic pools games, mostly now online.(Incidentally, the Littlewoods Football Pools Collection, which documents the history of the pools, is held by the National Football Museum, just a stone’s throw from the Royal Exchange.)

Even during its heyday, the pools divided opinion. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald dubbed it “a disease which spread downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich”. On the other hand, Robert James, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth University, has said: “The pools was significant because it gave the working class a sense of identity and community and of aspiration to something better by winning something”. Either way, there’s no denying its reach and significance. A win on the pools could change your life in an instant – though it couldn’t promise a fairy tale ending.

Andy Murray