‘Dice Swallowers’ in 18th Century England Were Either Mythical or Just Highly Effective

Posted on: April 7, 2025, 12:48h. 

Last updated on: April 7, 2025, 03:35h.

Philip Conneller @casinoorgphilc Read More
Expertise: Gaming Business, Regulation, Tribal Gaming.
  • Snopes finds no strong evidence supporting dice swallowing
  • Reports surfaced decades later as hearsay or fiction
  • This doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, Casino.org concludes

A “factoid” currently doing the rounds on social media platforms asserts that illegal gambling dens in 18th-century England employed people to swallow dice during police raids.

Snopes, dice swallowing, 18th-century England, illegal gambling
Dice swallowers in England in the 17th century, as imagined by artificial intelligence. While there may not be any direct evidence for their existence, illegal gaming dens would have been highly incentivized to employ people with the skills to ingest gambling equipment at will. (Image: OpenAI)

This is an era when many would slather themselves in deadly white leading to look pale and angelic while snacking on arsenic wafers to stay young. So, it seems plausible that at least some would agree to swallow a die or two to avoid being thrown into an overcrowded prison infested with rats, lice, and typhus.

The trouble is, there’s not a great deal of contemporary evidence to support dice swallowing, and less so to show it was a common profession among the criminal classes, according to fact-checking website Snopes.

While we do a lot of myth-busting here at Casino.org, on this occasion we’re indebted to Snopes, which has long been a valuable source for debunking or validating urban myths and internet rumors.

Aristos Lose Their Shirts

Despite being nominally illegal, gambling was highly popular in 17th-century England. From pubs to private clubs to the drawing rooms of the aristocracy, everyone was at it. It was not unusual for young upper-class men to gamble away their inheritances.

Dice games and illegal betting thrived in taverns, streets, and fairs. For the Church and social reformers, it was a cause for moral panic, especially when poor people did it.

Naturally, it was the poor who faced the greatest scrutiny from the Bow Street Runners, London’s first professional police force, and other incipient law enforcement outfits.

Occupational Choking Hazard

Snopes contacted published authors and university academics who have studied the history of gambling in the UK to ask them whether the profession of dice swallowing really existed.

It’s certainly true that gambling dens would have had a very good reason to value employees with such gastric skills. That’s because prior to the enactment of the 1845 Gaming Act, prosecutors were generally unwilling to proceed unless police could demonstrate that illegal gambling had occurred.

Moreover, authorities were allowed to seize all cash on the premises, including from inside the pockets of those present, if they had hard evidence of gaming activity – a further incentive to ingest gambling apparatus.

Considering the dice would have to be retrieved when they came out the other end, could this be a valid candidate for the origin of the word “craps?”

Dicey Evidence

While Snopes could find no evidence of dice swallowers from 17th-century court records or newspapers, the site did discover that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, a handful of newspapers reported hearsay that some Georgian-era London gambling dens hired dice swallowers.

From The Nottingham Evening Post, Dec. 24, 1909: “The Gaming Laws … are, of course, far stricter now than they were in the early years of the last century, but even at that time police ‘raids’ on gambling houses were frequent enough, and it is said that at one or two of the West End establishments persons were retained whose sole duty lay in being able to swallow the dice in case of a raid by the authorities.”

These reports then appeared to feed into the fictional works published around the same era, several of which mentioned dice swallowers. It was accounts such as these that probably inspired the viral internet claim.

But just because there’s no contemporary evidence for dice swallowers, it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. They would have lived in a world that was underground and secretive. And they swallowed the evidence. Maybe they were just very, very good at their jobs.