R U 18?

As this still from a BBC documentary on the new phenomenon of betting shops (1961) shows, you always had to be 18 or over to go in there. As far as I remember it was strictly observed. When I went to town on a Saturday with my friends as a young teenager, if I needed my Mum I couldn't just walk into her workplace (Ladbrokes). I had to peer round the door and wave frantically, then wait until she was able to come out to see me. 

But keeping gambling out of a child's life is almost impossible. Here's an extract from "Pollywasher" to demonstrate:


"And it wasn’t slapped down at home either because our Mother and Dad were in with it all, they half lived for gambling. I remember ever so well being upset when my friend at school, Sheila, got some new shoes and I was in need of some myself. I went snivelling to Mother, begging to know why I couldn’t have shoes like Sheila’s and she told me that the reason why she’d got them was that her Dad had been lucky with a treble. She said to me “Never mind love, me or your Dad’s bound to get something up sooner or later and then we can all have something new to wear.” Then she told me to pass over the Pools coupon and got me to help her decide where to mark all the crosses. They both had a line on the football pools and they kept a record of the season’s match results - a box of newspaper clippings in the sideboard. Dad had something on the horses nearly every day but Mother just stuck to Saturday because there were more meetings to choose from."


Pollywasher: Click here to go to Amazon



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