On 30th June 1790 Mr Ellis, Cambridge Uni bet Mr Brinkley 2s6d of strawberries that Sir Gerald Vanneck would win Suffolk in the coming Election. In fact Sir Charles Bunbury won
Betting on Elections: a matter of class?
As a socialist I don’t and never have bet. My late father a Glaswegian Communist drilled into me that betting was not something class conscious workers got involved in. This is a view echoed in Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism. As often reality is more complex as the Daily Worker/Morning Star long had the best racing tipster in the business.
When I started work in the late 1970s some of my colleagues bet on the dogs. These of course were small scale bets and depended on there being actual dog tracks for races.
As Ross McKibbin (Past and Present Feb 1979, Working Class Gambling in Britain 1880-1939) has noted from the 1880s onwards small scale working class betting on sport became commonplace. The amounts bet were small and quite often the bookies were informal. Most betting was on sport, primarily football and the rise of the football pools turned it into a mass pastime. These days the equivalent might be the Lottery or scratchcards.
Betting on horses was something also done by the better off, not least because there might be a financial interest in a particular horse.
Betting on Elections is more niche and not something working class people often indulged in. Laura D Beers, Punting on the Thames, Political Betting in Inter-War Britain (Journal of Contemporary History, April 2010 45/2) details political betting in the first decades of the twentieth century. Much of the betting was done in financial markets. While clearly there was money to be made that wasn’t quite the main purpose. Rather it was to bet on who might win or lose an Election and the impact this might have on the markets. If the impact was negative then a bet could act as an insurance policy on that.
By the 1930s the odds on election had started appearing in the Mail and Express where middle class readers could use them to bet. That remains a world away from the spread betting of recent times
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