Play Footie5 and you could, win £25 000
THE Football Pools offered people a chance to win large sums of money by predicting the outcome of matches - and tens of thousands of people played every week.
Coventry winners included Sandra Bombroffe, who was just 18 in February 1971 when she shared the £36,929 prize - more than £500,000 in today’s money - with her boss Vera Fellows.
Now there’s a new website, The Pools, which offers online games like the free to play Footie5.
But some may not have heard of the Classic Pools.
Why was it so popular, why did it stop and what did people win?
To answer these questions we go back to the beginning when The Football Pools first began.
The year 1923 saw the BBC being given its first licence to broadcast, the wedding of Prince Albert and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and the Liquor Act making it illegal to sell alcohol to under 18s.
The Empire Stadium opened its doors at Wembley, Dixie Dean started his footballing career at Tranmere, and three young entrepreneurs from Manchester started a football pools from a small office in Liverpool’s Church Street.
Littlewood Football Pools, named after the birth surname of one of that trio, got off to a shaky start, with hardly anyone approached with coupons outside football grounds being keen to play.
One of the three founders was Commercial Cable Company employee John Moores, the ambitious 27-year-old son of a Lancashire bricklayer. While the new business seemed shaky, he evidently saw something in it and bought out his two partners.
And Moores’ faith in the product was rewarded – because by the end of the 1920s it had become a success.
The end of the decade also coincided with the Wall Street Crash, and you would have expected the subsequent Depression to have sounded the death knell for the Pools. But instead, the 1930s were years in which Littlewoods flourished.
Not only did football and everything surrounding it – including having a flutter on the results – thrive in adversity, becoming increasingly popular, but it meant Littlewoods became an important employer in a city hit hard by poverty and hopelessness.
More than 10,000 staff, most of them women, were employed to run the pools operation, first at the company site in Whitechapel, then Hood Street.
And in 1938, the impressive Art Deco Littlewoods Building was opened in Edge Lane.
Littlewoods was one of a number of Pools companies operating in Britain, and during World War II it joined forces with Zetters and fellow Liverpool firm Vernons to become the Unity Pools.
Meanwhile the company’s Edge Lane headquarters were put at the disposal of the war effort.
In September 1939, its presses were used to print 17 million National Registration forms, and later the building became a factory producing parachutes made by the pools girls, barrage balloons and dinghies, as well as home to the government’s censorship department.
The end of the war only increased the appetite of the British public for the Pools. Littlewoods introduced the popular Treble Chance in 1946, Pools collectors in 1957, and expanded its operations with offices in Cardiff and Glasgow.
It might raise a few eyebrows now, but it also started a ‘Ladies Coupon’ which proved very popular.
The harsh winter of 1947 had been a challenge, and that was faced again in the famous winter of 1962/3 when week after week, matches were postponed or cancelled because of the weather.
It led to the formation of the Pools Panel, chaired by Lord Brabazon and made up of a group of referees and former players like Tom Finney, who met behind closed doors to decide the theoretical results of matches to use in the event they didn’t go ahead.
Spot the Ball started in 1973 and the competition, which had an intricate and highly-precise judging procedure, could generate some big wins. Staffordshire window salesman Bryan Shenton won twice in 12 months, netting him £118,000 as well as a Lotus Elise and a holiday to Las Vegas.
But it wasn’t just pay outs to winners. Littlewoods also ploughed money back in to the game through charities like The Football Trust, brainchild of Cecil Moores and funded with other pools companies, which worked to improve ground safety and crowd control.
In 1994, Littlewoods finally closed its landmark Edge Lane base, moving operations fully to its site on Walton Hall Avenue.
It was the same year a syndicate of regulars at a Manchester pub won £2.94m, and that one of the biggest challenges to the Pools was launched - the National Lottery – with its weekly multi millionpound jackpots.
Despite the odds of winning being much higher, the Lottery had a seismic effect on the Pools.
But Littlewoods fought back with a series of promotions, new games and technological innovations including going online and, just ahead of the new millennium, the introduction of the Poolscard and hand-held terminals.
Over the coming weeks we will bringing you more memories on The Football Pools.