Vernons Pools.

 

Subject: Vernon's Pools.



There’s a television program called “talking pictures” which, as the name implies shows film made 30, 40, 50, 60 and more years ago and for me is a go to channel since, like any self respecting dinosaur I feel more at home with films made when I myself felt  more relevant and the norms of the time were more relevant to the values I had been brought up with.
This morning a documentary made at Vernon's Pools the football pools betting system when millions of men and women had a flutter trying to predict the winners of the weekly football game submitted their prediction’s. Today we have the Euro millions and Lotto entered electronically but in those days it was a  painstaking paper driven system which required thousands of women who were employed as checking clerks.
The documentary covers a week in the life of Vernons, as the teams of women, they were mostly women who carried out the task, on receipt  of the coupon from a member of the public to check its content and verify its validity. Teams of women batched the coupons and rebatched them locating the ones with a winning record of predicting which games had been a win, draw or a loss. The combinations were complex but the formula used by Vernons, or their competitor Littlewoods in processing this huge mass of paper each week was an instance of man’s ingenuity before the computer did it for us.
The passivity of the women doing this task seems so out of place with todays emancipated female, robotic is one word to describe it perhaps the production line in Henry Fords motor car assembly plant has some similarity but it’s quite a shock to see how plaintive these girls were, I suppose there’s the similarity with females working in the woollen/cotten mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire but in their case, amid the noise and the danger of machinery it seemed more industrial.
I suppose it’s the mechanisation of humanity and the collective mind which strikes me most as being inhuman but I suppose in the context that it’s simply a job and a pay packet at the end of it which itself converts into food, drink and a night out dancing at the Mecca. Each has its value, each is a trade off as is so much of our lives. Whether it’s worth it is another discussion for another time.