From Smithsonian Magazine:
A working-class Londoner operated the most exclusive gambling club the world has ever seen
The redistribution of wealth, it seems safe to say, is vital to the smooth operation of any functioning economy. Historians can point to plenty of examples of the disasters that follow whenever some privileged elite decides to seal itself off from the hoi-polloi and pull up the ladder that its members used to clamber to the top of the money tree. And while there always will be argument as to how that redistribution should occur (whether compulsorily, via high taxation and a state safety net, or voluntarily, via the hotly debated “trickle-down effect”), it can be acknowledged that whenever large quantities of surplus loot have been accumulated, the sniff of wealth tends to create fascinating history—and produce some remarkable characters as well.
Take William Crockford, who began his career as a London fishmonger and ended it, half a century later, as perhaps the wealthiest self-made man in England. Crockford managed this feat thanks to one extraordinary talent—an unmatched skill for gambling—and one simple piece of good fortune: to be alive early in the 19th century, when peace had returned to Europe after four decades of war and a generation of bored young aristocrats, who a few years earlier would have been gainfully employed in fighting Napoleon, found themselves with far too much time on their hands.
The result was a craze for heavy gambling that ran throughout the notoriously dissolute Regency period (c.1815-1838). The craze made Crockford rich and bankrupted a generation of the British aristocracy; at the height of his success, around 1830, the former fishmonger was worth the equivalent of perhaps $160 million today, and practically every cent of it had come straight from the pockets of the aristocrats whom “Crocky” had lured into the luxurious gambling hell that he had built on London’s fashionable St. James’s Street. So successful was Crockford at his self-appointed task of relieving his victims of their family fortunes that there are, even today, eminent British families that have never properly recovered from their ancestors’ encounters with him.
Crockford’s background scarcely hinted at greatness. He was born, in 1775, in a down-at-heel part of London known as Temple Bar, the son and grandson of fishmongers. Brought up to the same trade, he acquired only the rudiments of an education. In his teens, however, Crockford discovered he had a talent for numbers and a near-genius for the rapid calculation of odds—skills that quickly freed him from a lifetime of gutting, scaling and selling fish. By the late 1790s he had become a professional gambler, well known at the races and around the ring, and an habitué of London’s many low-class “silver hells,” small-time gambling clubs where, as Baily’s Magazine explained, “persons could risk their shillings and half-crowns” (sums equivalent to about $7.50 and $18, respectively, today).
It took time for Crockford to rise to the top in this corrupt and viciously competitive environment, but by the early 1800s he had accumulated sufficient capital to migrate to the more fashionable surroundings of Piccadilly. There, Henry Blyth records, much larger sums were risked, and hence more rapid progress was possible: “The play was ‘deep’ and the players were of substance: wealthy tradesmen of the locality who were accustomed to serving the rich, and even the rich themselves, the young bucks from White’s and Brooks’s who had strolled around the corner to idle away a few hours in plebeian company.”
The gambling clubs that Crockford was now frequenting cared far more for wealth than background, and so hosted an unusually varied clientele—one that gave the former fishmonger an unmatched opportunity to mix with men who in other circumstances would have simply ignored a tradesman with his unpolished manners. They were, however, also thoroughly crooked, and existed for the sole purpose of parting their clientele from as much of their money as possible. A contemporary list of the staff employed by one Regency-era gambling club makes this clear. It required:....
....MUCH MORE, Mr Crockford is just getting warmed up.
