A public lecture from Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities, Keith Laybourn

Gambling is an endemic feature of twenty-first-century Britain, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries determined efforts were made to restrict it, particularly among the working classes. This lecture will show how the National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL), religious organisations and Parliament attempted to control popular gambling, most notably through the Street Betting Act of 1906, which outlawed off-course ready-money betting in public places. Yet enforcement was limited and working-class betting remained widespread, both illegally and through legal forms of gambling at racecourses, greyhound tracks and through the football pools. The lecture will focus particularly on the York Quaker, chocolate manufacturer and social investigator B. Seebohm Rowntree, who founded and financed the NAGL. Rowntree argued that gambling contributed to poverty and encouraged the pursuit of wealth without work. It will also explore how his views changed through his investigations of working-class life. By the time of Poverty and Progress (1941), Rowntree increasingly recognised that gambling was generally small-scale and regular, and was shaped by social circumstances rather than simply individual moral failure.

Professor Keith Laybourn is a Visiting Professor in History in the School of Humanities. He is a specialist in the history of the Labour Party and working-class cultures.

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