Memoirs of GD Fell

Next door to us at number 12 Spetson Street lived a Greek family called Toufexis who we got on extremely well with. Andreas, the husband, was a partner in a shipping firm. His wife was called Maro and they had a son called Hector and a daughter named Myrto. At times we would go with them to the very north of the island (the panhandle) where they had some property and there we would have barbeques with the cooking done over fires made from wood gathered in situ and allowed to die down. None of your refineries like burning coke, or charcoal. There was always plenty of wine flowing as well.

At work I got involved again with the trade union, becoming the treasurer and also becoming a member of the Local Whitley Committee. On the social side I joined the Anchorage club and became the social secretary, becoming responsible for the Tombola sessions and also Bingo sessions

as well as organising functions such as dances and children’s parties at Christmas.

In case you didn’t know, the game which is now generally known as Bingo is actually Tombola and is played with 90 numbers. The proper Bingo is played on a board using only 75 numbers with the letters BINGO on the top of the board.

Under the B were 5 numbers between 1 and 15.
Under the I were 5 numbers between 16 and 30.
Under the N were 4 numbers between 31 and 45 with the centre space always blank.
Under the G, the five numbers were between 46 and 60.
Under the O were numbers between 61 and 75.

Tombola was always played for cash and Bingo for prizes. We had a number of retailers in the town where we could choose articles on a sale or return basis and these articles would be put on display on three shelves with the most expensive goods on the top shelf, the next most expensive on the middle shelf and the least expensive on the bottom shelf. Before each house, it would be announced which shelf prize the game would be played for and also the configuration to be achieved such as, the letter T which would be all the top line and the four numbers under the N, or you could have the letter Z which would be all the top line, all the bottom line and a right to left diagonal.

It also had to be worked out on a running basis what prizes could be played for as the cost of each article on the shelves varied. For example, if you had £200 in takings for the cards, you could have the top shelf prizes being worth between £20 to £30, the middle shelf prizes between £10 and £20 and the bottom shelf prizes less than £10. This meant that if the first game was for a middle shelf prize and the winner chose something that cost £12 it would leave £188 in the kitty whereas if a prize of £20 was taken it would only leave £180. This meant that as well as being a caller you had to be a mathematician as well as you couldn’t afford to go over the limit of £200 and you had to try to get as near the limit as possible by varying which shelf prize was played for. Any prizes that hadn’t been won had to be returned to the retailer the following day and we received a discount of 10% on the sold items which went into the coffers for functions such as the children’s Christmas parties.