Tom Lehman
DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com wrote:
> Got a little spare time, so thought this passage from "Road to Wigan Pier"
> might be apropos (from the copy which sits on my desk next to "Soviet
> Planning Today" by Michael Ellman -- great fun when the boss started to
> idly thumb through my bookshelf the week before bonus time).
>
> ******************
>
> ....You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish
> and chips. Milk costs threepence a pint and even 'mild' beer costs
> fourpence, but aspirins are seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of
> tea out of a quarter pound packet. And above all, there is gambling, the
> cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a
> few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny
> on a sweepstake. Organised gambling has now risen almost to the status of
> a major industry. Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of the Football
> Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of it
> from the pockets of working-class people. I happened to be in Yorkshire
> when Hitler re-opened the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism and the
> threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the
> decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in
> advnace (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all
> Yorkshire into a storm of fury. And then there is the queer spectacle of
> modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty
> bellies. You may shiver all night through lack of bedclothes, but in the
> morning you can go to the public library and read the news that jhas been
> telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty
> million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to
> a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole
> sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really
> need are being compensated in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the
> surface of life
>
> Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the
> psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the
> best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned
> revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their
> tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip
> standard. The alternative would be God knows what agonies of despair; or
> it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed place
> like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage
> repression
>
> ****************
>
> [typos mine]
>
> Statistician's note: the Football Pools of which Orwell writes offer by
> far the worst odds of any form of gambling offered to the public in Britain
> -- the National Lottery looks almost fair by comparison.
>
> dd
>
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> uilt-°?