When Butlins introduced bingo at its holiday camps in the early 1950s it was more of a health and safety precaution than a business venture. It was illegal, at the time, to profit from “running lotteries” and the “Tombola Clubs” were launched, in the words of one journalist, “to keep campers from wrecking their quarters or trying to seduce the Redcoats during bad weather”. The new clubs achieved much more than that. Soon the red-blazered entertainment staff were calling “naughty-40” and “tickle-me-63” to packed crowds, rain or shine.
By the late 1960s, less than a decade after commercial bingo was legalised, attendance at dedicated bingo halls had eclipsed that at holiday camps and even the nation’s beloved picture-houses.
That heyday has passed. There are fewer bingo players these days, but it remains a wildly popular pastime. More people visit bingo clubs each week than go to church or attend Premier League football matches. Yet, in spite of its following, the game has assumed the status of a national joke, probably because many bingo lovers are on the margins of society. The typical player is a working-class woman, often single or widowed, over the age of 45. For them bingo is no trivial matter. The game has worked itself into the rhythm of their lives, becoming as routine as teatime and school runs. Bingo time is when they see their friends and forget their troubles.
My own impressions of bingo were formed over many evenings spent with Dawn, my guardian. She loved gossip, naughty jokes and bingo no less than twice a week. Playing with Dawn in Portsmouth showed me the bingo life, and why it is so important to so many people.
On visits to her club I was wide-eyed watching people of an older generation have fun, en masse. I soaked up the odd rules, the gaudy decor, the utter seriousness of the gambling. Players buy books of tickets containing grids of numbers. Once a number is “called”, they mark it off, looking to complete a line or a “full house”. Bingo callers once used traditional slang but the modern game is played too fast for that. It proceeds at a steady clip, in silence but for the caller, until some lucky punter shouts out loud - anything from “bingo!” to “’ere!” - to claim their prize
Night after night, I marvelled at how someone four times my age could play six tickets at the same time - which I struggled with - or even 12 tickets. Occasionally Dawn’s friends would spin their books and play upside down because they were bored. Looking back, I don’t think I have been anywhere where so many people knew each other’s names.
Patrick Duffy, a tall, theatrical Irishman, presides over the London Palace, one of the biggest and busiest bingo clubs in the country. Hidden in one of the poorest parts of south London, it stands atop a dilapidated shopping centre bordering the giant Elephant and Castle roundabout system. “Here we are with 1,600 people on a Thursday night, all very happy-looking souls,” Duffy says as we emerge from a dark room lined with flashing fruit machines into the main bingo arena. “This is a Shangri-La in the Elephant. No one expects to see this many people here.”
The floor, the size of a football pitch, is lined with long rows of seats, clustered in fours. Tables are strewn with fluorescent-coloured felt-tip “dabbers”, crochet hooks and half-eaten plates of chips. At the back is a platform like a pulpit that Duffy will use to call numbers and crack jokes later that evening. For now, he’s busy answering my questions and working the room in turns, hobnobbing with regulars about hospital-bound relatives and 70th birthdays. A woman in a tracksuit sneaks up behind him, crouching, to pinch his backside. “Oooh,” he coos. We drift past frail grannies, extended families on a night out and dreadlocked young men wearing Puffa jackets and sporting gold watches almost as big as the magnificent timepiece on Duffy’s own wrist.
There was once a time when bingo was glitz and glamour. But that image lapsed along with beehive hair-dos. “If you’re coming in here expecting to see four or five glamorous models sitting round the table, forget it,” Duffy says, swivelling back towards me ready for the punchline. “Jade [Goody] from Big Brother comes here from time to time - that’s about as close as we get!” Since the mid-1970s attendance at bingo clubs has been in chronic decline, falling from a peak of 475,000 admissions a day to fewer than half that today.
This has forced the industry to squeeze more money from fewer and fewer punters, a process which has had peculiar results. Operators twisted and contorted the bingo business model till it ended up on its head. “Main stage bingo”, the primary attraction with big prizes, has become a loss-leader. A token participation fee of about ₤1.50 is taken from each player and the rest is put “back on the board” in prizes.
Operators make most of their money in the intervals between games. During the hour’s-worth of breaks in each three-hour bingo session, the operators make their cash from the slot machines and “mechanised cash bingo” - a quicker game played for cash or small prizes.
This slim window has left the bingo industry acutely vulnerable to any changes in how people play. And an almighty change is approaching: the ban on smoking in enclosed public places, due to be enforced across the whole of Britain in July. It is not just that many smokers - who make up between a half and three-quarters of bingo players - may choose to stay at home. More importantly, even those smokers who do turn up will be rushing outside in droves during the lucrative intervals. This double-hit means that bingo will suffer more than any other industry when the ban is enforced - more than pubs, restaurants or the tobacco companies.
It could be a fatal blow to Duffy’s vast Palace. Hundreds of smokers at a time will need to leave the entire shopping centre, via rickety escalators, for their nicotine hit. “A man that does up to 15,000 people a week in a bingo club in the centre of London that was empty eight years ago has nothing to fear,” Duffy defiantly tells me.
His plan is to punch a hole in his ceiling to “open it up to the sky” and create a glass smoking area inside the club. Duffy is one of the most respected operators in the country, but his proposed solution seems starry-eyed. Others with more realistic interpretations of the smoking regulations are looking to change the nature of the business instead. Radical solutions are on the horizon: electronic gadgets, harder gambling and - perhaps most radical of all - “Spanish bingo”, a version of the game that offers sessions throughout the day, so players can turn up at any time.
As one operator told me: “This could be the biggest shock to the pensioners of Britain since we went decimal.”
Mandy Smith was doing the things the manager of a bingo club does on a Monday morning - checking the books, the safe, peeking into the store room, ordering more cordless irons for prizes - when one of her staff mentioned something out of the ordinary. Bert had not been in all weekend.
Smith, a formidable Scot with a disarming manner, knew something was wrong: “He never told me he was going on holiday.” Bert was an Irish gent in his twilight years. Like many regulars, he used the bingo club in Streatham, south London, as a second home. (Some bingo players eat all their meals in bingo halls, taking up ₤1 subsidised lunch and dinner offers.) As well as enjoying a pint and some company, Bert would, with Smith’s help, sort his meals on wheels and pay his gas bills. If the club had opened on Christmas Day, you would undoubtedly have found Bert at his seat in the corner.
Mandy visited his flat. There was no answer. “His neighbours said don’t worry, he’s a bit of a recluse,” Smith recalls. “Well, I wasn’t going to accept that.” The next day she returned and peered into the window. She saw the heater had been left on. Within an hour, the police battered down the door and found Bert dead on the floor. They told Smith he would have been there for months if she had not called. At his funeral, paid for by the council, Smith and her staff were the only mourners.
“That’s what bingo is about,” she tells me. “It’s all the little things. You keep an eye on them. We all do it. I’m not alone in that.” We were sitting in a meeting room that looked out on a flashy new bingo hall in Coatbridge, Scotland, her latest project. Smith was one of the first women managers in the bingo business, spending some three decades running clubs from Stepney in east London to the Gorbals in Glasgow. Over the years she has claimed bodies and arranged funerals, picked up groceries for housebound punters, banned two octogenarian women for a walking-stick fight over seats, and spent countless evenings at customers’ houses eating supper off crockery “borrowed” from the club.
The last journalist she had spoken to was from Loaded, the men’s magazine. It had not gone well. “Posh journalists who make comments about bingo people should really get to know them before they judge,” she said, leaning towards me. “This is a loving, caring environment, and a lot of the older customers know that. Don’t get me wrong, we’re here to make money. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t be a little compassionate along the way.”
Smith began her career giving out change to use on fruit machines in the late 1960s, bingo’s golden era. Picture-house attendance had plummeted as televisions became common. Cinema managers realised bingo was the easiest and most lucrative alternative use for their venues, and many of the grandest cinemas survived because they were converted to bingo halls. By 1967, just seven years after the birth of commercial bingo, there were 260 million admissions to bingo halls and 250 million admissions to the pictures.
Carolyn Downs recently researched the period for her PhD on the social history of bingo. She is the only person to have thought bingo history worthy of a doctoral thesis. Growing up “amongst the respectable working classes” in Margate, she was drawn to bingo by local characters like “Fat Ann” and “Big Ruby”, who loved a flutter. Trawling through back issues of the Bingo and Dancing News, in between raising seven kids, she found that the game played back then was quite different.
“Bingo casinos”, as the bigger venues were called, were all razzle-dazzle. Callers sported dashing white jackets while charming hostesses wore lavish ball-gowns. Prizes included mink stoles and dishwashers. Predictably, the rapid rise of bingo (which was also played in more humble settings) sparked a moral panic of sorts. The Times railed against “this cretinous pastime”. One article calculated, with horror, that a mining town in West Yorkshire - population 19,000 - had 3,500 bingo sessions a week. This indignation helped to ease the way for the most draconian of all the gambling acts in 1968. The strict rules laid down by the 1968 Act have only just been replaced by the far more relaxed Gambling Act that will come into force in September this year. (The change in the law gives bingo operators little to celebrate.)
This establishment revulsion is ironic. As Downs argues in her thesis, bingo may be a working-class game of ill-repute, but it was originally fostered by some of the nation’s most upright institutions - the military, the church and the Labour and Conservative parties.
The Royal Navy was first to sanction “tombola”, a variant of bingo, around 1880; the army soon followed with “housey housey”. Across the British empire men used buttons, bottle tops and pieces of stale bread to cover their cards in the fleet canteens, officers’ mess and trenches, usually on pay day.
As the men returned to civilian life after the first world war, the game’s popularity began to spread. Royal British Legion and ex-service clubs echoed to the calls of “legs-11” and “two-fat-ladies”. (Indeed many of the rhyming calls are based on military slang - “bang-bang-bang-21” - or philandering on shore - “pompey-whore-24”, “was-she-worth-it-seven-and-six”.) Travelling showmen touted the game at fairs and sideshows offering cash prizes, tin cars or kiss-me-quick straw hats.
The Catholic Church and political parties also raised cash by quietly exploiting the legal loophole allowing not-for-profit bingo. According to Keith Laybourn, professor of history at Huddersfield University, a 1954 Labour party audit estimated that one-third of its full-time agents were funded by bingo.
The evening session is under way when I arrive at Empire Bingo, a converted pornographic cinema in Edinburgh. Many of the 60-odd customers still call the club La Scala, the name of its disreputable former incarnation. The porno-feel is still there, with a pink embossed balcony and narrow, winding corridors, but the place has moved on to better things. The cinema seating has been ripped out and replaced with bingo seats. Prizes are chalked up on a blackboard on stage. Hot tea is served through a cubby hole, the projector’s old home.
The punters can get better prizes and food at a half a dozen other local clubs, but they stick to the Empire - their club. Since the Scottish smoking ban, introduced in March 2006, some players have stopped coming (the big gamblers are often big smokers) while new people have arrived after their local clubs shut down. Most of them, though, are spending less money.
During the interval about half the players pick up their jackets and bolt outside into the “smoking area”, a courtyard where the rubbish bins are kept. They stamp their feet in the cold while they light up. It is an unsettling sight, but this corner is at least sheltered from the wind, which makes it better than many smoking areas. The huddles of smokers on the street outside some Scottish clubs are so big that passers-by have been known to ask if the fire alarm has sounded.
The Empire and five similar clubs in Scotland are run by Mike Lowe, of KE Entertainments, a brassy man-about-town in a pinstripe suit who started in the industry as a car-park attendant in Barnsley. Sitting in a restaurant, he apologetically explains to me why he closed two clubs: “The smoking ban was catastrophic and the impact was immediate. I don’t think anyone really expected that it would be as bad as it turned out. The income went through the floor.”
“We run nightclubs, too,” he says. “If someone walks in and buys a pint of beer we don’t really care where they drink it, whether they drink it outside or inside. We’re not bothered. But a bingo club - if they are outside we are losing money. Simple as that.”
All the operators in Scotland have suffered. One operator told me he had not seen clubs so empty since the Pope visited Glasgow in 1982. (In reality, the launch of the National Lottery was a much bigger problem than the Pope.)
Rank, the biggest publicly listed bingo group, which owns the Mecca brand, said that since the smoking ban its turnover has dropped by 15 per cent in Scotland, with profits being hit even harder. It also, however, increased market share, suggesting that other operators did much worse. Senior industry figures told me that the national smoking ban will mean that between a fifth and a half of Britain’s 650-odd bingo venues will close in the next two years. Most of them will be small clubs in small towns.
Scottish clubs’ responses to the dramatic drop in income have at times been novel, even comical, but always ineffective. Those operators who lacked a convenient smoking spot outside saw admissions crash. Those who went to the trouble of investing in comfortable smoking areas - with heaters and chairs - realised that smokers simply lingered outside (sometimes with their non-smoking mates) while the games were on. Sessions times were moved, promotions were offered, but the core problem remained. One operator made plans to give out nicotine patches to encourage smokers, a promotion that one veteran manager described as “about as welcome and popular as handing out free condoms”.
The search for “the answer” to the smoking ban conundrum is being led by Simon Wykes, managing director of Mecca Bingo, and his rival and former boss Neil Goulden, the chief executive of Gala Coral, Britain’s biggest operator of bingo clubs (and Britain’s biggest private company). Whether “the answer” is found or not, the game will be very, very different in future. New gambling laws, new technology and the smoking ban will drive radical change. “The whole business model has to be re-engineered,” Goulden says. “But re-engineered in a way that does not piss off the customers.”
Wykes is a rising star in the industry, so proud of the game that he pins a gold Mecca badge to his suit. The survival of commercial bingo, he says in a soft Birmingham accent, is a “leap of faith”: “If you actually take out the way we make profit in our business - if you take that aside - we have a product that lasts for half an hour then has a break. What better product is there for a smoking ban?” he told me. “We just have to work out how to redo our business model.”
We meet at Mecca’s Fountain Park club in Edinburgh, the most high-tech bingo club in the world. All the games are played on touch-screen computers. Most important for the industry, the technology allows someone to buy and play more cards than is physically possible in the traditional game. So instead of the typical six books - which means every number called is marked once - punters can buy up to 92 books in some clubs (the participation fee is the same). The numbers are marked automatically but the player must stop the game to win.
In time, these screens will be replaced by a new generation of handheld devices. These let operators dream of smokers playing outside. The biggest obstacle to this vision is the “three-hands problem”: how do you smoke and play bingo on a handheld device at the same time?
Meanwhile, Wykes has been looking for a “cute” solution to the industry’s woes. The cutest solution of all - were it to be allowed - is keno, a game that works like a lottery with fixed odds. The advantage is that smokers can buy a ticket and go outside. They need not be in the hall to win. Also, players can stake as much as they like and potentially chase their losses - after one loss they can raise their stake to try to win their money back. This is more akin to a betting shop than a bingo hall. For this reason it seems unlikely the government will permit this harder form of gaming, in spite of the industry’s efforts.
Faced with declining income, Wykes fears many operators will reduce their prizes. “Our biggest risk as an industry is if we bugger up what we have,” he says. “The customers love the product. Our customers love bingo... If we start knackering our product we will kill ourselves.”
One of the more radical ideas on the horizon is “Spanish bingo”. It is perhaps the most logical format for smoke-free bingo in the modern world. Traditional British bingo, based on the “main feature” concept at the “pictures”, is played in set sessions, often three hours long. In Spain, by contrast, the game is offered regularly through the day - on the hour every hour, for example. Tickets are much more expensive in order to generate a consistent prize pot. Players turn up at any time they wish.
Every bingo manager knows that when Spanish bingo was tried in Derby, more than a decade ago, it bombed. So the industry approaches it with some trepidation, wary of mass revolt. But in the long term, the smoking ban and demographic changes mean British bingo-lovers may have to change their habits.
After years of telling anyone who will listen that bingo is not just played by old people, the bingo industry’s wishes may be coming true. A report by the Henley Centre for the bingo industry shows that the number of players between 25 and 44 has increased from a quarter to a third between 2000 and 2005. But, in a related change, the frequency of visits is falling fast, from 2.6 times a month to 1.8 times. Young people are playing bingo, but their visits are far less frequent. They visit with groups of friends and their focus is more on the gaming. Older regulars, in contrast, visit clubs alone or in a pair to socialise and see their friends at the club, but they spend less.
The bingo business has always tried to balance these customers’ interests. But it is likely we will see a shift towards flexible, higher-stakes bingo that is less reliant on slow but steady income from poorer people who spend as much time in a bingo club as they do at home. Bingo clubs will become a place where strangers gather to gamble. Already, the proportion of “regular” players has declined from 40 per cent to 32 per cent since 2000, according to the Henley report. “The world has just changed,” Wykes tells me. “That type of customer is fading into the distance. That generation who were happy to sit on the edge of a pier for eight hours is gone.”
Few have done more for bingo than Jimmy Thomas, yet Jimmy Thomas has decided that bingo can do no more for him. The son of a travelling showman, he worked in the industry for six decades - running clubs, heading the trade association, supplying bingo-ball “blower” machines and helping to open the first clubs in Spain and Sweden. Then, in mid-2006, he decided to sell up, leave bingo and open a casino. While all the eyes were down, the doyen of the industry sneaked out of the hall.
We meet at a hotel bar near his home in Chelsea where all the staff greet him by name. Thomas is a dapper dresser who would look at home in a gathering of 1970s Las Vegas casino moguls. But while he sees roulette as his future, it is clear he is still finding it hard to let go of his past. In the week before we meet - almost six months after he sold his Beacon Bingo business for about ₤80m - he has already made four separate visits to his old clubs in Loughborough and Northampton, working the tables and chatting to regulars. “It is good for the people who bought it,” he tells me, sipping champagne. “Customers see you walking round and say, ‘Ah, no change. I knew you really wouldn’t sell, Mr Thomas. I knew you wouldn’t desert us.’”
Did he leave the business because of the smoking ban, I ask. “Yes. Because of the situation with the law and because of the way they are treating the bingo industry. They are pulling it down,” he says, rather glumly. “The government have been so totally unfair to the nice side of gaming. They are supporting the hard gaming. They are supporting the casinos.”
Thomas is positive about the prospects for his old clubs, which he sold on to Hermes, the private equity group. But he reckons “a couple or three hundred bingo halls will close” after the ban - nearly half the total. Under the new Gambling Act, which will transform British gambling when it comes into force in September, bingo operators will be allowed to run roll-over jackpots - opening the possibility of ₤1m prizes. But they have little else to celebrate. Indeed, because of the act, some lucrative big-prize slot machines will be taken away from bingo halls just as competition from bookmakers and casinos explodes. The bingo industry will also continue to pay the highest rate of tax in the British gambling sector, excluding the National Lottery.
“Do they intend this? Do they want casinos to be the big success story?” he says, throwing his hands up. “You know I object to the big casinos and I’m building one. I object to them spread throughout the land.”
Thomas’s casino is to be in Leicester Square, London. It is likely to be a success, but one wonders if Thomas really wanted to leave bingo at all. “Bingo will survive,” he says wistfully. “The bigger ones will get bigger and the smaller ones will disappear. It is an anti-social thing that Mr Blair has done. He really is a very good Conservative.”
