petty criminals were pelted in the pillory, malcontents rioted in the street, brawls were commonplace and large crowds cheered at public hangings. In gin shops, taverns, cock-and-hen clubs, young men and prostitutes would drink, sing and have sex. Integral to this social milieu were gambling activities such as bear- and bull-baiting, cock-fighting, pugilism, wrestling, dice and card gambling, race-track punting and buying tickets in the state- run lottery Gambling was class-oriented and mostly deleterious.
There were laws against gambling, but aristocrats were seemingly unhindered by these sanctions and gambled incessantly on cards and dice in particular. Clubs established especially for the purpose ensnared the landed gentry, politicians and their retinues of beaux and lackeys. Members and their guests wagered tens of thousands of pounds at the tables. At Brooke’s Club in St James Street, London, the minimum stake for the dice game of ‘hazard’ was £50. Sons of the nobility who attended Eton or Harrow risked being trapped by the incessant card schools which ran in the back passages or distant fields. Such was the passion that some schoolboys were in debt for life. At least one, William Parsons, the son of a baronet, turned to highway robbery in the 1740S and 1750S to try to clear his obligations.
The gentlemen’s passion for gambling is well illustrated in the tale of the unfortunate pedestrian who suffered a severe stroke on the pavement outside the most prestigious of London’s gaming clubs, White’s in St James Street. The porter hauled him into the foyer and set off to find a doctor, but when they returned the members would not let the doctor approach the victim as they had laid wagers on when he would expire, and his intervention would spoil the ‘fair play’ of the bets.

Those who prospered from these gambling enthusiasms were the promoters—including royalty, who from George II onwards organised massive lotteries, and entrepreneurs such as William Crockford, formerly a Billingsgate fishmonger whose London gaming club was worth more than Li million when he died in
If club gambling became an aristocratic preoccupation it was also private and surprisingly socially acceptable. Not so among the urban poor, who gambled loudly on cards (faro, whist and loo), dice, pugilism, sports, coin tossing, horse races and lotteries in which the chance of winning a prize was minuscule. Although bull- and bear-baiting, and dog-, rat- and cock-fighting were outlawed in 1835, they carried on clandestinely in the Victorian period and were the foci of enthusiastic punting. Many new opportunities for gambling arose from the development of organised sports such as boxing, wrestling, professional athletics, sculling (which emerged from matches for wagers among Thames River watermen), pedestrianism, cycling, association football and horse racing from their origins in villages, schools or country estates.
There was no shortage of willing participants. Punters, usually men, bet on the results, both for the pleasure of being proved right and to make
money.

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