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When Bingo Ruled the World

Date: June 13, 2006 | Category: Free bingo games editorial |

Did you know that, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill played bingo?! According to a national newspaper, not only did he play bingo but so did many of his friends and colleagues. We found this very interesting article by Martin Wainwright in The Guardian, Friday May 12th 2006.

Fascinatingly, bingo was a played by the Government and other such influential figures. Bingo was apparently played at Political fundraising events and no doubt went down a storm! In fact it became quite a craze and a very lucrative event for the political parties.

Perhaps we'll see today's politicians following in their footsteps. So keep an eye out in your local club or in your online bingo chat rooms, as we might just see Tony or David shouting 'House'!

Here's Martin's article as featured in The Guardian on Friday May 12, 2006...

Bingo! Could that be the answer for political parties embroiled in cash-for-honours rows and links with big donors with a habit of being extradited from Spain? Why stuff the Lords with cronies when you can legally get ordinary members to fill a different sort of house?
Calling out numbers once played a huge but often covert part in financing political parties - both Conservative and Labour - as one historian is about to haul into the light of day. Political giants such as Winston Churchill and Nye Bevan sat on a heap of cash raised by bingo sessions to an extent now almost entirely forgotten - and only partly realised at the time.

Housey-housey, as it was called by, became a craze of fantastic proportions in the years of post-war austerity, ranking somewhere between the hula hoop and rock'n'roll. Political fundraisers instinctively cashed in. Party accounts checked by Keith Laybourn, a bookies' runner at the time who now teaches history at Huddersfield University, show constituencies raising up to £4,000 a year from the game (£80,000 in today's money).
In 1954 a Labour party audit found that a third of its full-time agents - the crucial local officers in those days - were funded entirely by small-scale bingo. Activists who could no longer canvass on the doorstep did their bit by shouting out the game's familiar nicknames, from two fat ladies (88) to clickety-click (66). But money and politics never go happily together and, then as now, the phenomenon prompted police raids, arrests and prominent party figures in court.

"It was tricky keeping on the right side of the 1934 Gaming and Betting Act," says Laybourn. "Everyone involved had to tread an extremely careful line." It only took one complaint from a disgruntled anti-gambler for the police to wade in, as five Roman Catholic priests seeking new ways of supplementing their church collection in Huddersfield found to their cost.

The parties responded by using exactly the tactics of their successors today, combing the legislation to find chinks. It was found that bingo could proceed if the cause was charitable, players were members of a limited club and there were no cash prizes. Thus an age was ushered in when winners went home with unfeasibly large vases, boxes of chocolate and teddy bears.

Eventually, gambling law reform arrived, helped by MP Quintin Hogg, later the lord chancellor, who admitted in parliament to playing bingo in Bognor Regis with fellow Tories including the speaker and the leader of the house. "We could be up before the beak on Monday," he said. Commercial gaming was legalised in 1960, and soon afterwards, the reign of the high-street bingo hall began.

Source: The Guardian, Friday May 12th 2006

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