The phrase breaking the bank at Monte Carlo suggests tuxedos and effortless luck. The man who actually did it around 1881 was Joseph Hobson Jagger, a bankrupt textile worker and father of four from Yorkshire. Born on September 2nd, 1830 in the village of Shelf, he worked the Bradford mills as a piece worker, then tried to start his own textile business. By the late 1870s it had collapsed, and in Victorian England that could mean the workhouse. This episode draws on census data, probate records, and a biography by his great-great niece Anne Fletcher to follow what he did next.

Decades among spinning machinery had taught Jagger that no wheel is perfectly balanced, and he reasoned that a roulette wheel is only a spinning wheel turned on its side. He borrowed money from friends and family, traveled to Monaco with his eldest son Alfred and his nephew Oates, and for a full month placed no bets at all while they recorded thousands of spins. One wheel favored six numbers. When he finally played, he won over 2 million francs in a matter of days.

• His winnings converted to roughly 80,000 pounds at the time, an amount The Times estimated at 7.5 million pounds in 2018 money.
• Breaking the bank meant draining a single table’s 100,000 franc reserve, after which owner Francois Blanc had staff drape the table in black cloth as theater.
• The casino answered with movable partitions so the numbered ring could be rotated against the bowl, making recorded data on a biased wheel useless.
• Jagger went straight home to Yorkshire, bought houses in Little Horton in Bradford, and housed his extended family.
• He died of diabetes on April 25, 1892, not from boredom as Brewer’s dictionary joked, and the famous music hall song is thought to be about Charles Wells instead.