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The British national lottery celebrated its first
anniversary amid enormous excitement amounting
to lotterymania because a rollover prize of £40
million was offered in the first draw of 1996.
Ten scratchcard lotteries, instants, are currently
being operated by the same company. Those four
tagged words have been the buzzwords of 1995 in
the UK, attested by researchers who have examined
a computer database containing the text of British
newspapers. Activate the balls! is a catchphrase
that became part of the language when it was used
by Noel Edmunds in the first televised draw, the
reference being to the coloured and numbered balls
which are stirred by air jets in a transparent
container and then ejected one by one to give
the winning numbers.
But
lotteries have been the source of many other terms,
expressions and proverbs ever since Queen Elizabeth
I organised the first lottery in England in 1566
to raise money for such “publique good works”
as repairing harbours. The lottery tickets were
put into a container for the draw, often a earthenware
pot or jar, called a lot-pot or lottery-pot. Unlike
modern lotteries, the draw was in two parts. First
a number was drawn from the one pot, then a ticket
giving the prize from another. The snag, and this
must have caused enormous anguish to the person
whose ticket had just been drawn, was that the
prize slips were often blank. An idiom derived
from this lottery system, though long since defunct,
is it is lots to blanks meaning it is long odds,
say a thousand to one against. Some lotteries
were announced as “having no blanks”
meaning that every ticket drawn won a prize.
As
time passed, lotteries became ever larger and
with bigger prizes. Under James I a lottery funded
the colonisation of Virginia; London was provided
with water in the time of Charles I by one authorised
in 1627. William III used lotteries to finance
his wars against the French—in 1694 the
million lottery was authorised, in which a million
pounds was to be raised each year by the sale
of lottery tickets at ten pounds each; in 1697,
the government staked its revenues from the duty
on malt as security for the lottery of that year,
getting it the nickname of the malt lottery.
But
it was in the eighteenth century that lotteries
really became big business. Westminster Bridge
was paid for from the proceeds of a public lottery
in the 1730s and £300,000 was raised in
the same way twenty years later to build the British
Museum. The draws for the state lottery look place
in the Guildhall in London before a noisy and
enthusiastic crowd. Perhaps to make the lottery
idea more respectable-sounding (euphemism has
a very long history), prizes were often called
benefits, and a winning ticket was a benefit-ticket.
The old system of lot-pots had long since given
way to wheel-like containers into which the tickets
were placed and spun to randomise them: these
were called the wheels of fortune from the middle
of the eighteenth century onwards (the association
with roulette had to await the next century).
The dual system with prizes and blanks continued,
and it was in this period that the idiom to draw
a blank was born, though it doesn’t turn
up in print until the 1820s. The draw was presided
over by an official called a proclaimer but the
draw itself was often by a small boy, usually
from a charity school, though Charles II did it
in 1683, making him the first celebrity presenter
in lottery history.
There
were two types of lotteries, standing lotteries
in which money continued to be taken for a set
period, with the draw at the end, and running
lotteries which had daily draws. In the eighteenth
century, when lottery tickets were incredibly
expensive and not easily afforded by many people
(£10 was easily the equivalent of £500
today) tickets for running lotteries could be
hired out by the day, the slang term for one being
a horse. There were additional prizes for winning
sequences of numbers, three in a row being a tern
and four a quatern. Often the person having the
first winning ticket of the day won a special
prize, called a welcome, or it was given to the
first person drawing a blank as a sort of consolation
prize. A combined form of gambling and investment
was provided by the omniums of the same period,
in which funds were invested in lottery tickets
to produce a rather irregular return, rather like
the modern British Premium Bonds. The government
at this period made various attempts to stamp
out unlicensed lotteries, called little-goes,
these being outlawed by an Act of Parliament in
1802: “All such Games or Lotteries, called
Little Goes, shall ... be deemed ... common and
publick Nuisances, and against Law”.
The
excesses of the public lotteries caused great
revulsion among thinking people, who saw poor
individuals who could not easily afford the cost
of tickets being bankrupted by gambling. In 1808
a parliamentary committee found that lotteries
were “vicious” and they were banned
altogether in 1826. It was not until the 1976
Lotteries and Amusements Act that public lotteries
were again legalised in Britain (one paid much
of the construction costs of a museum I was then
developing) and the national lottery was re-established
well after they had become a settled institution
in many countries (and had, for example, paid
for the Sydney Opera House). Will the current
excesses of lottery fever cause a similar revulsion
in Britain to that in 1826?
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