Do Not Pass Go Read online

  I once went out with a girl from just outside Leeds, so I know there are some very nice places in Leeds, or anyway just outside Leeds. It was difficult to imagine a locale entitled Sheepscar being one of these, particularly given its challenging proximity to the unpeopled post-industrial wastelands of Chapeltown. Marooned in a bleak urban prairie of under-trafficked roundabouts and Victorian rubble, the West Yorkshire Archive Service had the air of a decommissioned signal box. Housed in a squat red-brick building, it was identified by rusting capitals spelling out SHEEPSCAR.

  Digits over the door dated the archive warehouse – once a local public library in the days when there had been a local public – to 1936, of appropriate, and I hoped auspicious antiquity. It smelt of Plasticine; a boss-eyed alderman glared down from his frame on the stairwell. The elderly archivist I’d spoken to had my material ready on a big oak table: three dusty cardboard boxes tied with cotton tape, very like those my grandfather used to have his laundered shirts returned in. ‘The Waddington files,’ he said, withdrawing immediately to a distant office.

  ‘Manufactured in Great Britain by John Waddington Ltd, Leeds’ was a phrase burned into my cerebral cortex. It was on the front of the box, and on the back of the rules, and I’d always known that if I wanted to get any closer to finding out why the London board was as it was I’d end up in West Yorkshire. I lifted the top one’s lid, sneezed twice, withdrew a 1946 Parker Brothers catalogue and in opening it felt corroded staples perish in my palms.

  ‘The Monopoly Story’ detailed within was very much the official one, describing how unemployed boiler salesman Charles Darrow had invented the game at his kitchen table in Germantown, Pennsylvania, during the spring of 1930. Darrow, a typical victim of the Depression, fancied himself as an inventor but had enjoyed little success with previous efforts that failed to find that elusive middle way between the dull (an improved bridge scoring pad) and the daft (anyone for a ‘combined bat and ball’?). ‘Why he chose to devise a game based on real estate nobody knows,’ a Monopoly website had claimed. ‘In later years he couldn’t remember.’

  Darrow died in 1967, still stubbornly failing to recall any contact with The Landlord Game, patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie of Philadelphia (Germantown’s nearest city) and widely played across Pennsylvania in the years after. Intriguingly intended to ridicule an unjust tax system and condemn rather than glorify ruthless property speculators, her game was played on a board with nine squares between corners, two of these being Go and Go To Jail. Proceeding around this board, players bought properties (as well as railways, water works and an electric company) and charged rent for them. The game became known as Auction Monopoly, and then – yes – Monopoly.

  In fact, Darrow’s sole contribution – not on the face of it one that merited a life of improbably moneyed leisure as the first millionaire game inventor, particularly when set against the $500 Magie later accepted to shut her up – was to place the emphasis on acquiring sets to build houses. A small but hugely significant step. Monopoly wouldn’t be much fun without the thrill of acquiring what the rules kept telling us to describe as ‘all the sites of a complete colour group’. Getting a set in Monopoly is a little like becoming a parent: you devote all your financial and emotional resources trying to nurture and develop your little ones, and when they let you down, you flog them to the bank.

  Monopoly would be no sort of game without the joy of sets. Elizabeth Magie might have invented the wheel, but Darrow came up with the axle that made it roll. And roll and roll: having first played his friends on an old piece of tarpaulin hand-painted with the names of Atlantic City streets, Darrow was soon taking orders from local department stores at four bucks a throw. When the orders went wholesale, Darrow’s cottage-industry production line couldn’t cope and in 1934 he contacted toy giants Parker Brothers.

  Knowing a thing or two about board games, but clearly no more than that, Parkers rejected Monopoly out of hand. The most heinous of the game’s ‘fifty-two fundamental errors’ was its lack of a specific end: a Parker Bros title was expected to last no more that forty-five minutes, but here was one which didn’t know when to stop. What Parkers failed to grasp was that in 1934 there were many millions of people with a lot more than forty-five minutes on their hands, but no money for extra-domestic entertainment. Here was a game that filled all those unemployed hours, and did it by pressing a satisfying wedge of fantasy dollars into your hand with the opportunity to develop this into a barely manageable mountain of cash through ruthlessness and wily investment. It was like the Crash never happened.

  It should have been one of those portentously spurned opportunities, like Decca turning down the Beatles or Margaret Thatcher’s chauffeur staying awake in the fast lane, but Parker Bros were given a second bite at Darrow’s plump and ripening cherry. Parkers’ chairman, Robert Barton, heard a friend of his wife’s raving about a board game she’d just been playing, and having borrowed her Monopoly set he didn’t get to bed until 2 a.m. There days later Darrow was in Barton’s New York office signing on the dotted line.

  ‘Taking the precepts of Monopoly to heart,’ said Darrow, recalling his decision to flog the rights rather than build up a one-man business, ‘I did not care to speculate.’ What? Reading this I questioned not just whether Darrow had invented Monopoly, but if he’d ever even played the game. The first law of Monopoly is always to speculate, to buy everything you land on (except possibly the crap-arse utilities), to invest in houses as soon as you get that first set. Play against someone who spurns even a single property-purchasing opportunity on that first lap of the board and you know you’re playing a loser.

  That was in January 1935. By mid-February, normally a dead time for the firm, Parkers were shifting 20,000 sets a week. In the company’s fifty-year history they had never seen anything like it: by Christmas, the backlog of orders was stuffed into laundry baskets stacked up along the head office corridors. For every dollar bill produced by the US Treasury, Parkers were knocking out ten Monopoly bucks – it really was a licence to print money.

  Founded in 1898, fifteen years after Parker Brothers, the John Waddington revealed in the archival documentation was a very different sort of company. Leeds, as everyone except the purveyors of youth fashion will be aware, is not New York. Waddingtons were printers, specialising originally in theatre programmes, who in 1922 had diversified into playing cards. In 1924 the firm was accused of plagiarising rival De La Rue’s ace of spades, which should by rights have spawned an entertaining slanging match in the press – ‘PACK OF LIES!’; – ‘YOUR ACE OR MINE?’ – but these were gentler times, and after a court case ended in Waddingtons’ favour the two firms buried the hatchet so deeply that they were soon playing each other in an annual cricket match.

  Nothing else happened until the mid-thirties when Parkers shipped a Monopoly set over to Leeds. One Friday night in the spring of 1935, the managing director of Waddingtons, Victor Watson, handed the set to his son Norman (at that time in charge of the playing card division) saying, ‘Look this over, then tell me what you think of it.’ Years later, Norman recalled this event in appropriately momentous terms. ‘I played an imaginary game against myself continuing through Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night. I was enthralled and captivated. I had never found a game so absorbing and thus the Monopoly game was first played in England at my home.’ Red-eyed, unshaven and consumed with evangelical zeal, Norman rushed into the office on Monday morning and persuaded his father to get on the phone. The transatlantic call that connected Victor Watson and Robert Barton that day was the first ever made by Waddingtons and the first received by Parkers. By the end of it, Victor had snapped up the Empire and European rights.

  Despite his son’s enthusiasm, when casually volunteering to head down to London to scout out appropriate equivalents for the Atlantic City addresses Victor can have had no idea how much he was biting off, even though he’d take his secretary Marjorie Phillips along to help him chew it.

  The whole business
was clearly rather half-cocked: the Waddington art boys knocked up some nice British locomotives to replace the cowcatchered Atlantic City jobs, but didn’t get around to sticking a Metropolitan wooden-top on that New York cop’s head or switching the Free Parking Chevrolet for an MG. The Electric Company light bulb remained a standard US-issue Edison screw; Charles Darrow’s crass error on the yellow set’s site-only rents sneaked across the Atlantic undetected. The prisoner looks British enough, a gaunt and shifty old lag you can almost hear blagging snout in a cracked hiss; but beneath his bars is a word few would have encountered in thirties Britain. In news stories and detective novels, ‘jail’ was always ‘gaol’ before Monopoly came along.

  Lifting the dusty lids off those Waddington boxes had been an act charged with portent. These forgotten documents would unravel all the enigmas of Victor Watson’s more obscure decisions: why he chose the streets he chose, and how he felt they encapsulated London as it then was. I’d imagined finding Victor’s handwritten notes from that weekend down in The Smoke with Marjorie, explaining that Tottenham Court Road was excluded after a bellboy in Heal’s laughed at his spats, and how Vine Street made it in when the wily Marge calculated that substituting it for Upper Burlington Gardens would save £59 4s. 3d. a year on ink.

  But rifling through to the bottom of the third and final box with ratcheting desperation, I’d uncovered nothing whatever from the relevant period. Waddingtons’ in-house magazine, The Team, had a complete run of back issues from the turn of the century until 1981 – complete, that is, except for a mysterious void from 1931 to 1940. Victor had died, aged just sixty, in 1943; Marjorie Phillips retired in 1952 after thirty years as the MD’s PA, still addressing her boss as ‘Mr Norman’. They had taken their secrets with them.

  Somehow putting out of my mind the implication that I had completely wasted my time, I leafed back through the files in search of anecdotal succour, and soon found myself becoming engrossed in the correspondence between Norman Watson and Parker boss Robert Barton, watching it develop from ‘Dear Sir’ in the first box to ‘My good friend Norman’ in the third. The initial talk was purely of business: ‘Regarding the games Oscar and XYZ – we must at all costs stamp very hard on any people who infringe our Monopoly copyrights.’ But these were men shackled together by a steely bond – each had played epoch-making late-night games of solo Monopoly. Theirs could never be a cold-hearted commercial relationship. The tone seemed to change after Norm sold Bob the US rights to Cluedo, a game Waddingtons had recently bought from a Birmingham solicitor’s clerk, Anthony Pratt. Released in 1948, Cluedo tapped so deeply into a global fascination with country house whodunits that it was able to overcome the daunting twin handicaps of a silly name and being completely crap: marketed as Clue it shifted a hundred million copies in the US and was licensed in twenty-three countries.

  With their business association on a more equal footing, Norm and Bob’s friendship blossomed. Their letters began to touch on politics, or at least a shared and strident distaste for ‘socialism’, and there were exchanges on the birth of Prince Charles, the Korean War and the voyage of the US submarine Nautilus beneath the North Pole.

  But through it all ran a constant theme: Norm and Bob were living out their respective roles in parochial Blighty and the cosmopolitan US of A as the balance of economic power tilted dramatically across the Atlantic. Bob on his summer: ‘I returned last night from ten beautiful days in Bermuda.’ Norm on his: ‘I have been somewhat miserable with an attack of the shingles.’ Bob’s visit to England in 1953: ‘I have reserved us tickets for the Coronation parade: third-floor window in St James’s, fifty guineas each.’ Norm’s reciprocal trip to the States: ‘It was the waste that was most noticeable – almost whole cigarettes thrown away before entering an elevator.’ That thirties smile had certainly been wiped off Leeds’s face, and by association it didn’t look good for London. In lifestyle terms, Bob was advancing to GO while Norm went back three spaces. The humiliations of rationing stretched the gap ever wider. In 1947 Bob had sent Norm a Christmas box comprising ‘5 lb of rice, bacon, butter and tea’. ‘Will you also be kind enough to give me Mrs Watson’s exact stocking measurements?’ he blurted the following November. Another note accompanying Bob’s 1949 food parcel read: ‘Sally has just reminded me of our terrible mistake last year regarding the size of Ruby’s legs.’

  Possibly through coincidence, the correspondence thinned out thereafter. After the winning revelation that Switzerland’s Cluedo players accuse not Colonel Mustard but Madam Curry I came to the final run of in-house magazines. It was all rather poignant. Even as Joyce Grenfell presented the board with the four hundred millionth Waddington-printed theatre programme, the hands on the games division tiller in the early seventies were steering the firm directly towards the rapids.

  It staggered me that a human composed of standard-issue parts could ever imagine that Beat The Elf or The Great Downhill Ski Game were worthy of development and promotion. While the printing side of the firm branched lucratively into fag packets and frozen-food cartons, the board-game boys were issuing press statements attempting to justify the release of an ordnance-defusing entertainment entitled Bombshell! in the midst of an IRA blitz on the capital (following complaints from the recently bereaved family of an Army disposal expert, the game was quietly withdrawn). Tesco threw a spanner in the Waddington works in the mid-seventies by stacking its shelves with imported Yugoslavian Monopoly sets, and disastrous investments in a hopeless home video-game system almost brought the company down in the early eighties.

  Stacking the letters and magazines back into their boxes with a sigh, I noticed a sheet of paper that had slipped out on to the floor. On it was a single pencilled paragraph: ‘The average gathering of friends in these days seems to revolve around cocktails and dirty stories sprinkled with spicy bits of scandal. These prevailing conditions trouble the conscientious parent who wishes to keep their children at home. They encourage their young people to bring friends home. It is the alternative to cinemas, the foxtrot. The cure is games in the home.’

  Perhaps because of that youthful exposure to the Atlantic City original, I’d always thought of Monopoly not as a stout home-grown bulwark against inappropriate American imports – cocktails, cinemas – but rather the thin end of the transatlantic wedge. You could change the streets and stick on trains like Henry out of Thomas the Tank Engine, but as with Cliff Richard’s youthful hip rotations or the vestigial fins on a Vauxhall Victor, the country of origin was obvious. But now I saw the game had been marketed in Britain not just as a simple family pastime, but as a governess, an hour-devouring parental conspiracy to keep us indoors when we could have been out sprinkling spicy bits of scandal into our vodka martinis. That strident manifesto painted a vivid picture of a nation as it stood at the cultural crossroads, and now it was time to go back to that crossroads and put the signs straight again. It was time to advance to GO.

  CHAPTER 3

  King’s Cross

  GO, I SUPPOSE, was the perfect motto of an age and a nation transfixed by speed. In the thirties Britons were the first to drive at 300mph and fly at 400mph; the water speed record set by Malcolm Campbell on Coniston Water in 1939 stood until the fifties. And the train Victor and Marjorie alighted from at King’s Cross on that unrecorded date in 1935 was a London and North Eastern Railway A4 class, the fastest steam locomotives the world had ever seen.

  If I’d known where GO had gone, I’d naturally have started there. Impatience and economy had lured me into my car for the Sheepscar run, and despite involuntarily recreating certain environmental aspects of Victor’s portentous journey when smoke started billowing out of the dashboard coming back down the M1, having eschewed the more authentic rail option I still felt slightly fraudulent. Grappling with the GO issue, it occurred to me that if not quite killed, two birds could at least be badly hurt with one stone by beginning my game at King’s Cross. It was Vic and Marge’s gateway to the capital; their GO would be mine.

 
Wedging my pre-war board into a backpack I set off into a veil of September drizzle. Despite the weather I felt warmly happy, partly because I was going to play Monopoly, but mainly because of the peculiar thrill of being a tourist in my own city, undeniably commuting and yet somehow on a giddily novel voyage of discovery. Between SE28 and NW11 there were 119 postcodes in London, and my lifelong residence had been almost wholly lived out in two adjacent ones well away from Monopoly’s main focus, the West End. Of the twenty-two streets on my board I could claim easy familiarity with fewer than half, hadn’t set foot in five and had no idea where one was. I’d never taken a train from three of the four stations, visited a water works or been in prison, just visiting or otherwise. I loved London, but like Hubert Gregg I couldn’t really tell you why. Perhaps when I’d advanced to Mayfair, taken a trip to Marylebone station and gone back to Old Kent Road I’d have found out. But if I tracked down some Free Parking, I’d be keeping it to myself.

  Hyde Park gave us a lane and the Battle of Trafalgar a square, but it was a further indication of the sprawling majesty of my ignorance of London that, these two and that old road to Kent aside, I’d had no idea how any of the Monopoly addresses got their names. King’s Cross hadn’t struck me as especially outlandish, so I was reasonably astounded to learn that the landmark which gave the area its name had survived for less than a decade. In the 1820s Battle Bridge was a benighted shantytown, stalked by highwaymen and dominated by a smallpox hospital and a towering slagheap of waste rubble piled up outside a brickworks. In the first round of what has proven to be a two-hundred-year struggle to make the area even slightly nice, the slagheap was imaginatively sold to the Russians to rebuild post-Napoleon Moscow and in 1836 a rather attractive 60-foot monument erected in its place. Not in any way cruciform, this octagonal structure was topped by a statue of the recently deceased King George IV, a monarch popular only amongst those of his subjects with an unusual tolerance for preening, fat-faced indolence.