In It To Win It, Innit?
Patrick Ryan takes a look at how lotteries have been sponsoring fantasies in Dublin and London for 300 years.
Admit it. You had the dream again.
Your lottery numbers came up, you’ve won a fortune, a house, a car – all problems consigned to the dustbin of history, as you promise to never complain about the shrinking length of a chicken fillet roll in Inchicore or cost of one more coffee in Kilmainham.
Dreams of winning jackpots are nothing new but it might come as some surprise that Ireland was the first country in the world where such draws were backed by the state, with the initial draw taking place in Fishamble St in the Liberties, and the money raised was used to fund major projects which remain landmarks in Dublin to this day.
Having seen his own wife and their son die shortly after the child’s birth, in 1737 surgeon Bartholomew Mosse obtained The Licentiate of Midwifery of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 1742, and mixed modernity with maternity in his Lying-In Hospital on Fade Street three years later.
Just over a decade on the Rotunda Hospital was designed by Mosse and leading architect Richard “Castle” Cassels, responsible for both Russborough House and Powerscourt House, to resemble these fabulous country mansions, even including pleasure gardens, a concert hall and a coffee house to generate further funds.
The physician used a so-called “Dutch Lottery” to raise much of the money required, a system that originated in the Low Countries in the 16th century which brought in over £11,000 (£3.2m/€3.7 today) between 1746 and 1753. London punters eagerly bought tickets in that city’s coffeehouses, leading to sellers being heavily fined, and threatened with prison as the practice was illegal. Bartholomew Mosse travelled over to try and sort it out but ended up in jail himself in Wales, from where he escaped, and hid in the hills for three weeks before returning to Ireland and reinstating his good name, to continue his Trojan work.
The Royal Exchange, now City Hall, was also largely funded through a lottery with architect Thomas Cooley’s splendid vision the first Neoclassical public building in Ireland costing £58,000, and £40,000 of that came through ticket sales.
“The fact that some of the city of Dublin’s most valued institutions (the Royal Exchange, Charitable Infirmary, Mosse’s Lying-in Hospital) and several public initiatives (Ballycastle harbour, Cork quays) were built with or supported by money raised through the medium of private lotteries in the eighteenth century underlines the significance and appeal of the lottery as a money-raising medium,” DCU historian James Kelly says.
In order to finance a link between the new Grand Canal and the River Liffey near the City Bason yet another lottery was launched resulting in the following advertisement in Saunders’s News-Letter on September 2nd,1774:
“The Trustees for executing the Canal of Communication between the Grand Canal and Harbour of Dublin, Toll free, confiding in the Determination of the Public, to support a Work of so great National Utility, have unanimously resolved upon the following Scheme, grafted upon the State Lottery for this present Year, for raising a Fund for that Purpose.”
By 1776 an independent, larger lottery with its own offices at Cork Hill close to Dublin Castle was raising significant sums for a charities which every vicar could approve of, from the the House of Industry, to the Clergymen’s Widows and the Relief of Prisoners, while a flat sum of £1,735 was set aside for the canal fund. The prizes were also much larger, totalling £28,615 (compared to £15,785 back in 1774) and the draws continued until 1780 when the state lottery appeared.
Keen on revenue for capital projects the Irish parliament had cast envious eyes on the English lottery, popular among rich and poor alike, and followed Perfidious Albion’s example, with the initial goal of raising a short-term loan of £20,000 (£3.3m today).
Across the Irish Sea State lotteries had first appeared in the 1690s from the Bank of England, raising money for a variety of good causes, prime among them putting a musket ball between the eyes of Napoleon. Over a quarter of the sums raised were used to thwart threats to the empire from the Caporal la Violette though this “Corsican Fiend” as Britons liked to call him was seldom defeated, and lottery organizers assured players that they wouldn’t lose either; as a minimum they’d get their stake back while serious players could take out a form of insurance to offset losses.
The Irish always love a good punt so it wasn’t a hard sell here. James Kelly notes 700 people turned up at the first draw at Fishamble St in Dublin in June, 1780 “fascinated by the drama of the occasion and gripped by the prospect of winning one of the thousands of prizes (14,045 in all), ranging from a modest £10 to an imposing £10,000.”
Over the 21 years of it’s existence the scheme would raise an astonishing £4.497m and even the poor were able to play by forming what we would call lotto syndicates to share the price of a ticket, showing, as Kelly called it “the public’s indulgence in the desire to escape from the humdrum routine of quotidian existence”.
Promoters here and in England reminded players that you too could emulate the poor women who won £16 on a 6d ticket, or the syndicate made up of a keeper of a fruit stall, a vegetable carrier from Covent Garden, and two servants who shared a £20,000 win in 1798 (£3.285m today).
In his book Gambling in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century Oxford University Professor of History Bob Harris points out the importance of generating interest among the public in a society obsessed with games of chance in this new age of social mobility.
“From newspapers to hastily printed single-sheet handbills, publicity was key to stoking contemporary interest in and demand for the lottery and its various derivatives,” Harris says.
Unsurprisingly most publicity was positive, though in Letters on the Irish Nation chronicling his visit here in 1799
English barrister George Cooper claimed Dublin was “filled with lottery offices beyond the conception even of a Londoner. In these shops are crowds of the most miserable ragged objects (of which Dublin contains more than any other city in Europe) staking their daily bread on the chance of gain.”
Just like in London the lottery here was closely linked to publishing, printing, and coffee houses which were often run by newspaper owners.
“The moderately priced tickets and the century’s fascination with gambling encouraged all levels of society to participate,” historian Rowena Dudley explains in her book The Irish Lottery 1780 -1801.
“Interest, at fever pitch during the draw, was stimulated and sustained throughout by the newspapers and the resourcefulness of ticket sellers whose ingenious schemes bolstered ticket sales.”
Though it did attract chancers and rascals, players trusted the process, Dudley says.
Commissioners and managers could earn between £200 and £500 a year from the scheme, which also provided employment for clerks, printers, and entrepreneurs.
“Everything depended on the public’s belief in the integrity of the lottery, and such doubts as arose on occasion could, and did, result in significant losses,” explains James Kelly.
Though fortunes could be made, and lost, there wasn’t a shortage of speculators.
“The Commissioners appointed for Managing and Directing the Irish State Lottery inform the public that the undernamed persons have taken out Licences for buying, selling, insuring, and otherwise dealing in Lottery Tickets,” ran an ad in the Hibernian Journal of May 15th, 1789, listing four outlets in Capel St, seven in Dame St, three in College Green and one in Grafton St, and namechecking a certain John Magee whom Dudley notes owned the Dublin Evening Post and claimed to have made as much as £4,000 per annum in the late 1780s from lottery.
Luke White, one of the most famous financiers Dublin has ever produced, also heard opportunity knocking. A Protestant, who enriched himself through marriage and business White ran a shop in Crampton Court offering both authorised British and European tomes alongside cheaper, locally produced “pirated” versions, and made a fortune through property speculation, eventually buying Luttrellstown Castle.
“A lucrative sideline was selling lottery tickets, a trade that made and broke the fortunes of several Dublin booksellers,” notes Bridget Hourican in her entry for Luke White in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
“However, as the countess of Hardwicke noted, ‘Good luck accompanied him in every speculation and he knew how to profit by it, but with the fairest fame’”.
Dudley mentions that White made £100,000 (£16.5m/€19m today) from the lottery a year after he was contracted with the government to run the whole shebang in 1798, but by 1801 the Act of Union spelled an end to the gravy train. However the concept was resurrected again 130 years later, ostensibly to raise money for hospitals in a skint Saorstát Éireann, and the Irish Sweepstakes became the largest employer in the country as staff struggled to keep up with the insatiable public demand.
Returned tickets were drawn from a giant barrel by Irish nurses, and matched with the the name of a racehorse competing in Ireland or the UK but punters would have been better putting their money on a trotter called Spin Me A Yarn in the 3.30 at Leopardstown, or Mayo winning five-in-a-row.
The Irish Sweepstakes was more scam as scheme, riddled with ineptitude, corruption and levels of downright dishonesty that latter day Dublin Del Boys would certainly admire.
The government had established a private trust to run the lottery and market tickets worldwide, but unfortunately nobody had thought to measure the drum which was found to be too small, so sackfulls of stubs in situ at the four acre HQ in Ballsbridge never made it into the draw!
The Irish Sweepstakes was an instant hit but existed in a murky space outside the law and eventually even the IRA were involved, selling tickets in America and Canada where punters were enticed by $500,000 jackpots meaning by 1963 some six million £1.00 tickets were – supposedly – entering the drum for each of the three annual draws.
In 1973 5-year-old Alan Wong was photographed along with his parents for the Toronto Star after winning a whopping $48,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes. Alan said he wanted ice cream, a banana split, and a football but the caption notes: “His father also had a ticket – and didn’t even receive a receipt.”
Much of the money raised went to further enrich a privileged few in Ireland and the chicanery would have earned the respect of the most ruthless mafia don.
“During the 57 years of its existence, the contest derived more revenue from the United States than from any other country, although all the tickets sold there were smuggled in and sold illegally,” wrote Encyclopædia Britannica Editor William L Hosch.
“There was much counterfeiting of tickets, seldom detectable because the purchaser had no further interest in the ticket if it was not a winning ticket.”
These misdeeds were swept under the carpet, and the enterprise replaced in 1987 by the National Lottery, with An Crannchur Náisiúnta holding the first draw on April 16th,1988. Today about 27 percent of sales go to fund good causes from sport and recreation, to culture, the arts, and appropriately community health, running to €6.5 billion to date.
Almost three centuries on from the efforts of Bartholomew Mosse who tried to ensure women and children didn’t suffer en masse the same cruel fate as his wife and son by offering Dubliners a chance of riches, whether its in a raffle to win a house with your local GAA side or the next Euromillions jackpot we’ll continue to play, and perchance to dream.
