(I) The amount spent on betting, on horse-racing alone, is toxday about £150,000,000 annually.
Mr. Joseph Marshall, for 23 years secretary of the National Sporting League, representing street bookmakers, speaking before the Commission of July 19, put the annual] turn-over at £500,- 000,000. Mr. W. J. Randall, secretary of the Turf Guardian Society, representing credit bookmakers, put the '"'new money" put into betting in one year at from 10 to 16 million, of which from seven to 12 million returns to backers in the form of winnings. He offers these estimates in a letter to the Manchester Guardian" published on July 25 last. I have had no difficulty in proving both Mr. Marshall's figures and Mr. Randall's figures to be absurd. My own estimate of £150,000,000 is supported, quite independently of me and of one another by (a) the first estimate of the Turf Guardian Society as to the amount likely to be raised by.a 10 per cent. tax; (b) the evidence, before the Commission, of Sir._Richard Hopkins, the chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, as to the returns made for income tax by 1,732 bookmakers; and (c) the statement of Mr. H. S. Cantley, x.c., chairman of the Commission, who said, when I named my own figure, that he himself had arrived at precisely the same sum.
Of this sum certainly £100,000,- 000, and probably £120,000,000, remains in the hands of the bookmakers, the balance being returned to backers in the form of winnings. Two or three quite separate and distinct lines of inquiry agreed, before the war, in giving the proportion of the bookmakers' winnings to those of the backer as five to two. That
on betting on horse-racing, 3 is to, say of the 3270, 000,000 spent any one year round about 1840, the bookie took £50,000,000 and his dupes got back £20,000,000.. have not had time to work out the proportion since the war. But odds to-day are certainly very much shorter (i.e. more in favour of the bookmaker) than they were before the war, and personally I have little doubt that the backer to-day gets back less than 50 millions of the 150 millions laid.
In addition to the above there are the immense sums spent on "coupon betting" on football. So lucrative is this form of bookmaking that one man -in Burnley had 1,500 coupons a week out in three mills and did not have to pay out on a single one in three weeks, while in another Lancashire mill town aman who had gone bankrupt in a small shop took up football bookmaking in quite a small way and at the end of his second season had over £4,006 in the bank, and four freehold cottages for which he had paid £500 each. The earn-the country, such as the one proings of firms operating: all over secured in Glasgow in 1921, are enormously greater. This form of gambling was made illegal in 1920, -as I was reminded when speaking before the Commission. L was able to reply that a printer in Manchester was supplying ove bookmaker, in a comparatively small way of business, with 15,- 000 coupons a week. Most of my readers have probably never. seen a football betting coupon such as I supplied to the Bishop of Wakefield when he was supporting the "Betting Inducements Bill" in the House of Lords in 1913 and the details are too complicated for discussion here. But immense sums are spent in this way.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.