This was jackpot which gave us all thought for pools before the Lottery

Try to explain to a younger generation today the importance to virtually everyone in the land of the Treble Chance on the football pools and you will be met with blank, sometimes touchingly sympathetic, expressions.

They cannot conceive that every Wednesday or Thursday millions picked out eight numbers, either at random or through a mystical system known as a "perm", marked them with a cross on a piece of paper which bore the following Saturday's football fixtures, made out a cheque or postal order and sent their envelope off to the pools company, generally based in Liverpool.

There was another way of entering the pools, provided you worked at a place where the number of employees outnumbered the fingers on one hand. There, inevitably, would be a collector, a trusted gent who had been with the firm for years and knew everyone and all the gossip.

He would spend half a day of the company's time going from one to another taking their pools coupon and their investment.

He was paid 12 per cent of the take for his efforts and his absence for the afternoon would be ignored by his foreman – and probably his managing director – who would both be playing the pools themselves.

The lucky collector in a major business could make as much from the pools commission as he did from his day job.

We were all looking for eight draws, each of which would garner three points on the system perfected by Messrs Littlewood, Vernon, Cope, Zetter and a few other smaller organisations and 24 points would guarantee us a fortune on the Treble Chance, a game introduced to a nation of war-weary suckers in1946.

We were driven by the prospect of an end to work, boredom, poverty and powdered eggs.

For tax purposes the pools were described as a game of skill – not daft those Liverpudlians – but it was never apparent precisely which skill might be involved in predicting the result of a match between Forfar Athletic and East Fife in Scottish Division Two; we hadn't a clue where Forfar or East Fife might be, let alone whether they could play football.

It did, though, give us the weekly opportunity to listen attentively as Len Martin read out the classified football results – why classified? Were they a secret? – in the hope of hearing Forfar 4, East Fife 5; it never happened.

It was the fault of the pools that, to this day, we still have in our newspapers and on our TV and radio roundups the results of Scottish football matches which are played between clubs of no importance outside their own glen before "crowds" hardly breaking single figures.

There was a chap living at Keynsham, near Bristol, Horace Batchelor by name, who used Radio Luxembourg to advertise his ability to select numbers using his "unique infra-draw method" which was guaranteed to bring home the bacon.

There were also regular columns in every newspaper worth the name offering advice on how the next round of matches would end. Like Horace, they had their moments, so did some fortunate punters – sorry, skilled players – from Yorkshire like Viv Nicholson from Castleford who won 152,319 in 1961 and unforgettably vowed to "spend, spend, spend" and Elaine McDonagh from Haworth who pocketed 1m plus a few coppers in 1987.

Until the Lottery, it was a wonderful way for the pools companies to make money apart, that is, from those Saturdays when inclement weather meant football was not played. The winter of

1962-63 was all about bad weather, snow and ice by the ton and week after week the sport programme was decimated, not just football but rugby, horse racing, hockey, knurr and spell; anything going on outdoors, with the painful exception of cross-country running, was off.

No football meant no pools meant no income so Littlewoods, Vernons and Co – known collectively as the Pools Promoters' Association - put their heads together and came up with the perfect answer: a group of football prophets, chaired by a toff with no interest in the game but a reputation for doing things properly: the Pools Panel was born, profits were secure.

The group would meet every Saturday at a hotel in London, originally the Waldorf, later the Hilton, where they would take lunch, gather in a room to swat up on team information, then wait.

If there were no postponements, they could have a drink, pocket their (undisclosed) fee and go home, expenses paid, of course, by the PPA who could certainly afford it.

But if any matches had not gone ahead for whatever reason, these esteemed experts would decide how they would have finished, whether it was Manchester United v Arsenal or Halifax Town v Crewe Alexandra. The Panel knew it all.

Fortunes rested on their deliberations and one of them was a true Yorkshire character, a man who refereed at the highest level then rose to officiating in the TV classic It's A Knockout alongside Eddie Waring and Stuart Hall.

He was Arthur Ellis, from Halifax, who was in charge of World Cup matches in the three tournaments in the Fifties, took charge of several matches in the early days of the European Cup, including the first final between Real Madrid and Reims, and famously abandoned a match between England and Argentina after a South American player had refused to leave the field after being sent off by Ellis.

Ellis served on the Pools Panel under their Lordships Brabazon, Preston and Bath and took his duties immensely seriously, as did colleagues who included at various times Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt, World Cup winners with England in 1966, Stan Mortenson, one of the great goalscorers of the Fifties with Blackpool, and Ronnie Simpson, the Scottish goalkeeper who enjoyed FA Cup success with Newcastle in the Fifties then won the European Cup with Celtic in 1967.

It was a golden era for the pools and the panel but it would not last.

Littlewoods Pools was sold for 161m in 2000 and became part of Littlewoods Gaming, an arm (or leg) of Sportech plc, a London-based, FTSE-listed online gambling and entertainment company, which also bought Zetters (2002) and Vernons (2007).