Purchased locally, they caught my eye on a cluttered shelf
Some history, as I dug in and found it fascinating. Apologies for the length:
Established in 1930 to support underfunded Irish hospitals, the Irish Free State Hospitals' Sweepstakes was one of the largest international lotteries in the world.
Tickets were tied to major British horse races, and the prizes if your ticket was drawn were rather substantial. Gambling was illegal in Great Britain and the US at the time, and these tickets were smuggled abroad en masse. Millions of tickets were seized and burned by customs, never having a chance to be drawn, without the ticket owner ever knowing.
Mervyn Richard Wingfield, the 8th Viscount Powerscourt, a member of the House of Lords, lent his name to the committee to assure international buyers it wasn't a cheap con. Drawings were done by women in nurse's outfits pulling numbers from a big drum under the supervision of Colonel Ned Broy, the Irish Revolutionary double-agent who smuggled Michael Collins into the British Intelligence Archives.
The sweepstakes was later found out to be one of the longest running and most successful scams in history (1930-1987), with less than 10% of proceeds ever going to hospitals.
Now here's where I have to add a disclaimer that the following is purely a statistically-likely, circumstantially-based, hypothesis...
Each note is marked Harold Davenport (or H + H Davenport, an additional relative perhaps) in pen, a renowned mathematician. I posit this was truly his trio of tickets as "The Cambridgeshire" was held at Newmarket, just 13 miles away from where he was working as a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. The race was also run on October 30th, 1935, which happened to be his 28th Birthday.
So... What are the odds of a mathematician betting on a horse race through an illegally imported Hospital charity front ticket established by an ex-IRA gunman unknowingly backed by a Viscount and supervised by an ex-IRA double-agent spy turned chief of national police ending up across the world and 91 years later being digitized and connected back to the mathematician who bought them based on his name and statistical probability given his location in time?
Conversely, what are the chances it's a
different Harold Davenport?
Posted Today 9H 29M ago
