When Rams’ fixtures were a closely guarded secret
ON March 14, 1936, Derby County should have been at home to Arsenal. But now their fixtures were a closely guarded secret. Supporters would have to wait until two days before the game to discover who the Rams would now face on that day.
Why leave it so late to make the announcement? Because the Football League was attempting to wreck the football pools companies. By keeping the fixtures secret, the League prevented the pools people from printing their coupons.
After a long-running battle between the League and the pools promoters, in February 1936 it had been decided to withdraw the existing published fixture lists and instead reveal the fixtures only on the Thursday before the games would be played on the following Saturday. The aim was not to negotiate but rather to bring to an end to “the evil” of pools betting as one letter writer to the Derby Telegraph called it.
However, after only a second round of secret matches, the League rescinded its earlier decision and reverted as closely as possible to the original fixture list. The pools companies had been badly affected. But so was football. Posters advertising “Derby County versus ?” were hardly designed to bring in the fans. A ‘mole’ was also leaking the schedule to the pools companies.
Instead football’s governing bodies now copyrighted their fixture lists and since then pools companies and other betting organisations have had to pay a fee for the right to use the weekly schedule of matches. For the record, the Rams lost 1-0 at home to Stoke City on the day they should have been playing Arsenal.
John Jervis Barnard of Birmingham is generally recognised to have invented the first football pools, but it was three young men who in a Liverpool back street in 1923, with a working capital of £150, began what would become a multi-million pound pools organisation.
Barnard’s “football pool” saw punters bet on the outcome of football matches. The payouts to winners came from the pool of money that was bet, less 10% to cover costs. It had not been particularly successful, and John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes, friends who had worked as Post Office messenger boys in Manchester, decided they could do better.
First they needed a name for their enterprise. Colin Askham 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. And so Littlewoods Pools was born.
A small office in Church Street, Liverpool, was rented but the early venture never made a profit. Eventually, Hughes suggested they cut their losses. Askham agreed. But Moores bought the others’ shares, covering their £200 loss each, devised a security system to prevent cheating and the football pools took off.
The Moores family did all the early hard work of checking and distributing tens of thousands of coupons. The main attraction of the pre-Second World War pools was the “penny points” and the “penny results”, and five-figure dividends were not infrequent.
Indeed, the influence of the pools became so great that it was claimed that they were responsible for the boom of interest in football in the 1930s.
The Pools is now entering an exciting new digital era. There are no longer physical coupons and the “Pools Man” who knocked on your door every Friday evening has been consigned to history along with the milkman’s horse. We do, however, know who the Rams will be playing this weekend.