On 19 November 1994, a television programme was broadcast that marked a watershed in Britain’s long history of gambling and lotteries. On this Saturday evening, Noel Edmonds presented the first draw of The National Lottery. The first draw saw 15 million people buy £1 tickets that gave them a chance of winning an estimated £7 million jackpot.

This marked the latest stage in long history of lotteries in the UK. In 1566, Elizabeth I had signed a charter for the first official English lottery, drawn for the first time in 1569. It was designed to raise money for public good works, with every ticket holder effectively giving an interest free loan to the government and getting, in return, a prize, such as fabrics, tapestries or, of course, money. The top prize in 1569 was £5,000 – equivalent to nearly £870,000 today.

Lotteries worked by putting tickets – with the buyers’ names on – into a pot or box. There would be an equal number of tickets, some with prizes written on them, and some which were blank, placed into a second pot. A ticket would be drawn from each pot, matching a name with either a prize or the unlucky blank ticket – we have this practice to thank for the phrase ‘drawing a blank’.

State lotteries were established to help the government fund various schemes – such as the Million Lottery of 1694, set up to pay for English participation in the Nine Years’ War, and the Malt Lottery of 1697. However, an act of parliament under William III in 1699 declared all lotteries to be public nuisances, and banned any public or private lottery that involved dice, lots, cards, balls, or any other numbers or figures. In 1710, a new State Lottery was established, but the Gaming Act of 1739 consolidated prior legislation, and made private lotteries illegal until 1744, when some private lotteries were permitted – often ones whose drawings were combined with the state lotteries. The Lottery Office, established to control state lotteries, also took control of these private endeavours.

The prizes in the State Lotteries were not to be sniffed at – in 1788, the top prize was worth £30,000, with there being a descending scale of prizes (the lowest prize, of £18, could be won by some 15,000 tickets). But it was not cheap to enter, either, with a whole ticket costing over £15 – nearly a year’s wages for the average labourer. As a result, more lowly workers would club together to buy a ticket, or buy a portion of one – to purchase a sixteenth of a ticket would cost you a guinea. However, one piece of legislation made clear that anyone who sold tickets for an illegal lottery could be fined £200 for each offence, and imprisoned for a year.

Excitement was considerable when tickets were drawn – the only way of publicising winners was in the newspaper, which would be avidly read or read out to those who were unable to read themselves; many people would gather to hear the winning numbers being read out. In 1760, for example, Richard Eden stood for several hours at the Guildhall in the City of London to see the lottery drawn.

By this time, the government had sold its lottery ticket rights to brokers, who in turn hired agents and runners to sell tickets on their behalf. The brokers and agents who sold tickets, or shares in tickets, worked from lottery offices, employing clerks to take on the administrative work. Fraudulent activity in some offices led to a requirement that all offices should be licensed, with the 1779 Lottery Office Keepers’ Act giving a Board of Stamps responsibility for granting these licences. The stockbroking company Hazard and Co ran its State Lottery Office at 93 Royal Exchange from at least 1777 to 1832, publishing details of tickets and prizes in the London Gazette. Peter Richardson and George Arnull, together with the perfectly named Elizabeth Goodluck, were lottery office keepers and stockbrokers with offices at Charing Cross and Cornhill, showing how both men and women were involved in the lotteries.

Although state lotteries were abolished in 1826, the 19th century continued to see gambling and racing lotteries be a popular way for all classes to spend their money. Much like sports betting today, people would gamble their earnings on a horse winning a race, for example. Although running a private or public lottery was illegal, the rules could be bent – or ignored. In the 1850s in Salford, for example, local people formed ‘money clubs’ – a cover for local lotteries. At the Dyers Arms pub in Salford, run by the appropriately named John Penny, weekly lotteries were drawn, with shilling tickets sold to primarily working class buyers. The men running the lotteries included 31-year-old book-keeper Elisha Worrall and 18-year-old spinner Preston Ridding.

It was noted in the newspapers that working people went with their wages to the pub in such numbers that they blocked up the passages, and the chief constable had to report the practice to the town council, resulting in placards being issued warning both publicans and the public of the illegality of the lotteries. However, those running them found them too profitable to abandon, and resorted to secretly hiring rooms in different locations to continue holding the ‘money clubs’. One location was an old school room, where the organisers were found sitting behind tables at one end of a room, some spinning the lottery wheels, while others tore out tickets and handed them to helpers who would enter names, numbers and prizes in books, or place the numbers in racks. Some 200 people would then stand in a semi-circle in front of the tables. At one lottery drawing, the police found nearly 13,000 shilling value tickets, worth over £600. There were 870 prize tickets, with the prizes starting at 10 shillings and the top prize being £40 – the equivalent of over £2,000 today.

By the 1880s, gambling for relatively high stakes was on the rise, both in London and in the provinces. Poker was common, and even young boys were even reading the sporting papers, avidly following the success of ‘their’ horses. In the absence of legal lotteries in England, Victorian newspapers were also full of tales of other nations’ lotteries – a way in which they could get a vicarious thrill from gambling without having a ‘home’ event to record. It was, however, illegal to sell tickets for a foreign lottery. In 1871, Edward Eberwein had been offered some tickets in a German lottery, which he paid six shillings for. The prizes included old paintings, clocks and other works of art. Those involved in the selling of these tickets again argued that they were unaware that lotteries were illegal in England, and this is likely to be true, as the sellers, and those buying tickets, were all German emigrés who were used to taking part in lotteries in their home country.

It was recognised that all classes enjoyed a gamble. As early as 1699, William III’s act for suppressing lotteries had noted how the families of gentlemen traders and merchants as well as servants had been financially ruined by their participation in illegal lotteries. In 1884, the Leicester Chronicle described the infatuated typical gambler – usually of the merchant or shopkeeper class, who would risk losing his business, money, home, wife and family in order to indulge his addiction. Yet it also noted how gamblers in factories and warehouses were regularly losing hard-earned wages and that for the working man, gambling, whether over pigeons, dogs, cycling, or anything else, is always unthrift, and often much worse. It concluded that the working man is not the sole dupe of the gambling spirit. In public and in private those who think themselves far above him in the social scale are snared already in the same net. What a commentator had referred to in 1801 as the gambling spirit of the nation was something shared by people from all tiers of society.

Although the last case involving an illegal or fraudulent lottery before the Central Criminal Court was heard in 1899, it wasn’t until 1934 that an act of Parliament made small lotteries legal, and it took further acts in 1956 and 1976 to extend these lotteries. But it wasn’t until 1994 that England again had a national lottery, and its continuance today shows that we still have the same hope of winning the jackpot as our ancestors did.