A Win On The Pools

Remember when all games were played at 3pm on a Saturday, usually regardless of the weather. In fact the whole day seemed to be devoted to football.

Football interest though would commence earlier in the week with the filling out of the Pools Coupon which necessitated buying a Postal Order and ensuring it was posted by Friday at the latest. This was later followed in 1957 by a collector, 'the pools man', who would come round to pick up your small stake and carefully filled-in coupon at your door. Liverpool bricklayer’s son John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes were friends who had worked together as Post Office messenger boys in Manchester for the Commercial Cable Company. Developing a failing idea but not wanting their employers to know what they were doing, Colin came up with a solution. He had been orphaned as a baby and been brought up by an aunt whose surname was Askham, but he had been born Colin Henry Littlewood so, on the 1st of February 1923, the Littlewood Football Pool was started. The Littlewoods name was the best known of a number of Pools companies operating in Britain, including Zetters and fellow Liverpool firm Vernons.

Littlewoods introduced the popular Treble Chance in 1946 with a £75,000 first dividend limit.

To check the coupons, an army of staff was employed at the Littlewoods Pools building, which opened on Edge Lane in 1938 before moving operations fully to its other site on Walton Hall Avenue and at its height, Littlewoods Pools had 15 million players. If you were a checker that found a jackpot winner it could be quite disconcerting as you would face an interrogation to see if you had any connection to the winner! When it was at its most popular, around ten million people played the Pools on a weekly basis, which was about a third of the adult population at the time.

Littlewoods Pools building in Edge Lane, Liverpool,

Many would sit by the wireless on a Saturday night waiting for the football results, pools coupon at the ready to check the ten predictions, wishing and hoping they had picked eight elusive score draws, worth three points each.  With two points for a goalless draw, 1½  for an away win and one point for a home win, any total above 22 points was virtually guaranteed a jackpot win. 'Spend, Spend, Spend' legend Viv Nicholson, whose life famously unraveled after her husband Keith scooped £152,319 in 1961 (equivalent to £3,167,827 adjusted for inflation) achieved everybody's dream at the time. Horse Racing betting was still illegal so this was the only legitimate form of gambling open to most people, although it was low-level, low-risk, a 'everyone-does-it, not-really-gambling' kind of thing.

So you would hear the theme tune for Sports Report at 5pm on the radio and then you heard the voice of James Alexander Gordon. A deadly hush while the coupon was checked as in those days if you missed it you would have to wait for the local 'Football Pink' usually. These would arrive at newsagents/shops within 90 minutes of the games ending, a tremendous fete as in the early days reporters would have to use pay phones to phone their match report through. If somebody bought something new in those days the comment would usually be, "Ooh, look at you, have you won the pools?"

Back in the days when Littlewoods dominated the football pools scene, they also introduced a weekly competition called Spot The Ball. On the face of it, the game looked quite simple. All punters had to do was look at an action photograph taken at a football match, with the ball removed, and try to put a cross in the exact centre of the ball’s position. In its Seventies heyday Spot the Ball was played by around three million people a week, all chasing a jackpot of £250,000 – although it was rarely won. Trying to accurately pinpoint the centre of the ball proved to be quite a challenge