What London Owes Lotteries

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 118, 9 August 1927, Page 6

What London Owes Lotteries

Westminster Bridge & British Museum

How many or tlie thousands who will visit the British Museum to-day realise to what extent that national institution owes its existence to the i now illegal lottery ? A reminder that this and other famous buildings in London owe their existence to “sweeps” is given by “Bob Roy” in the “P.L.A. Monthly.” When the nucleus of the British Museum was brought together in 1753 the difficulty, we read, “was to find a suitable place at the least possible cost in which to house the books and other objects, but the same Act of Parliament by which the nation has purchased the collections also permitted a lottery, with tickets of £3 and a subscription of £300.000.” Moreover the trustees and managers were none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons, each of whom received £IOO for his trouble. The sum of £200.000 was to be distributed in prizes ranging, from £lO to £IO,OOO, the remainder of the subscriptions to go toward musueum expenses. Another Act of Parliament, passed in 1736, authorised 2, lottery of to raise money for building Westminster Bridge. Later in the same century, the wonderful architects, the brothers Adam, found an overwhelming task on their hands in their endeavour to beautify the riverside between the Savoy and Charing Cross, so in 1775 a lottery, hot to exceed £224,000 in tickets of £SO and 110 prizes valued at from £5,0C0 to £25,000, was authorised by Act of Parliament. That lottery gave London the Adelphi. “Rob Roy” also tells of a curious lottery instituted in Wapping and Shadwell in 1719, and still existing in a modified form. When inaugurated it was no • less than a lottery marriage portion to a girl brought up in the Raine’s School. Henry Raine, a brewer, left a perpetual annuity of £240 to provide 40 girls with instruction in needlework and housework in preparation for domestic service. At the age of 22 six of them who could produce certificates of good behaviour were to draw fop a marriage portion of £IOO twice yearly if the chosen husbands belonged to the parishes of St. George’s in the East, St. John’s, Wapping, or St. Paul’s, Sligdwell, and were considered by the trustees to be industrious and honest. But in 1892 the charity was revised, and the money used either for exhibitions or for maintenance grants. During the 18th century, when rates were almost unknown. State lotteries helped the Exchequer in a very subtantial way, and the Corporation of the City of London benefited to the extent of £4OO or £SOO per annum by letting seats to those who could afford to pay for admittance to see the draw.