Great Britain: Fun for Mum

“It’s ever so much nicer than staying home with the telly,” cooed a middle-aged mum with crimped grey hair to her friend in flowered silk. Under the fringed pink lights of a big London ballroom, there were nearly 1,000 women like them—gossipping, knitting, spooning ices from paper cartons or drinking a “nice cuppa.” Suddenly, over a loudspeaker came the command, “Eyes down!” There was an instant of silence and adjusting of spectacles as everyone grabbed pencils and peered at an array of cards. On the spotlit stage, numbered pingpong balls in a glass case began to dance like popcorn in jets of air; as the balls fell one by one through a small chute, the announcer intoned “Dinkey-doo, 22” or “Clickety-click, 66,” and the air grew violet with suspense.

Last week the ritual was being repeated in ballrooms and cinemas all over Britain with a fervor that bordered on monomania. The British were out-bingoing the U.S. on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of the most game-happy Boston parish. The Mecca ballroom chain stages afternoon bingo games in 40 dance halls across Britain. But to bingo-mad mums, matinees at the Mecca were not enough, and the operators now promise bingo at least one night a week. Last week women began queueing outside one London hall at 7 in the morning to be sure of getting a seat for the afternoon games. The bingo bonanza has been an equal boon to depressed cinema owners; the Rank Organization plans to reopen a dozen shuttered film palaces and install bingo where once Bing reigned supreme.

Bingo was legalized six months ago when the gambling provisions of the new Betting and Gaming Act made playing for money legal if all money staked was returned in prizes. Since then, bingo clubs have sprung up by the hundreds, as warm with women ready to scream “Bingo!” when the magic square is checked. Profits to the house come only from admissions and sale of refreshments; by now, bingo is a $150 million-a-year business.

Bingo is particularly suited to the working-class British housewife. Unlike her U.S. counterpart, she is apt to have no hobbies, recreations or interests of her own; she does little social, welfare or community work, and frequently does not have a single book in the house. Her husband is notoriously uninterested in togetherness, prefers to spend his evenings in the local pub. Said one bingo organizer: “A social revolution has taken place. There is now something just as respectable for women to go to as a pub or club has long been for their husbands. No one would call a woman who played bingo fast. What has a woman past her first youth had to do until bingo came along, except watch telly or perhaps go to the cinema? Bingo has given her a new lease on life.”