Betting, Sport and the British, 1918-1939 (SECTION I LEISURE AND WORK‪)‬

The interwar period was characterized in Britain by an expansion of leisure spending, reinforcing and extending pre-1914 patterns. New leisure forms, ranging from the cinema and radio to speedway, motoring, the pools and greyhound racing, played an increasing cultural role. Major interpretative overviews by Stephen Jones and, more recently, Ross McKibbin, have argued strongly that leisure was differentiated primarily along class lines. But the preeminence of class as an explanatory category, in its various dichotomous, triadic, or 'seamless web' manifestations, has come under some attack in recent years. British leisure historians Doug Reid and Peter Borsay, separately attempting their own longer-term perspectives, have both recognized, alongside reworked class approaches, the part played by other self- and collective identities, such as gender, ethnicity, age and community. (1) Despite or because of the economic downturn after World War 1 betting on horses, greyhounds and soccer results attracted an increased proportion of national leisure spending. Unemployment may also have increased the number of gamblers. But its new forms attracted controversy and debate. Debates over drinking and gambling have a long history, and recent British controversies over public house opening hours and smoking in public places are certainly a pertinent and salutary reminder that social class has never been the only way Britain has been divided on such matters. Both Geoffrey Best and F. M. L. Thompson saw divisions as being between the 'respectable' and 'rough' in society. (2) Hugh Cunningham interpreted them as reflecting distinct leisure cultures. (3) In part such taxonomies still rested on class, though more recent work has increasingly argued that even in the supposedly more respectable middle classes a cult of bourgeois hedonism ran alongside, or at the very least that pleasurable leisure consumption increasingly became part of middle-class life. (4) So betting's multiple discourses did not always reflect the horizontal divisions of much simplistic class discussion. Whilst there certainly were class and cultural dimensions, betting represented a primary and controversial societal fault line that was more subtle and nuanced, linked to cultural attitudes to religion, politics and pleasure, and incorporating vertical dimensions to its trajectory.