The Casino at Monte Carlo was inaugurated in 1863. Since then the bank has been broken on a number of occasions. The expression ′to break the bank′ is used when a gambler wins more money than the reserve held at that particular table in the casino. At the start of each day, every table was funded with a cash reserve of 100,000 francs – known as ‘the bank’. If this reserve was insufficient to pay the winnings, play at that table was suspended while extra funds were brought out from the casino’s vaults. In a ceremony devised by François Blanc, the original owner of the casino, a black cloth was laid over the table in question, and the successful player was said to have broken the bank. After an interval the table re-opened and play continued. The names of only a few of the men who broke the bank are known, and some are listed below.
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Joseph Jagger (or Jaggers)
In his 1901 book, Monte Carlo Anecdotes and Systems of Play, the Hon. Victor Bethell writes about a man named Jaggers, ′a Yorkshireman, and a mechanic by trade′, who went to the casino in the 1870s. Jaggers' engineering experience told him that no roulette wheel could be mechanically perfect, and that any flaw in the wheel might result in a bias toward certain numbers. Assisted by a team of six clerks, he is said to have identified a wheel which displayed such a bias and backed those numbers which came up more often than others. Bethell claims that Jaggers won £120,000 [equivalent to about £12 million today]. However, searches of a number of on-line newspaper archives (including The Times Digital Archive and the British Newspaper Archives) reveal no references to Jagger at the time of his supposed wins, and the Wikipedia article on Joseph Jagger was deleted in about 2014 owing to the lack of credible supporting evidence. Yet, after Bethell's book appeared in 1901, the story was often repeated in newspapers as well as in other books. Some commentators interpret the absence of contemporary reports as evidence that Bethell might have created this story for his book, a view expressed by Robin Quinn, author of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo: Charles Deville Wells, Gambler and Fraudster Extraordinaire. However, in a letter to the Daily Mail, historian Anne Fletcher writes that she is a descendant of Joseph Jagger, and that she is currently (2016) compiling a book about her ancestor based on documentary evidence and interviews with family members, which will show that in fact he did break the bank.
Charles Deville Wells
Charles Deville Wells won large sums of money at Monte Carlo when he attended the casino in July–August and November, 1891. He inspired the song, The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, which was published in late 1891 or early 1892.
Lord Rosslyn and Sam Lewis
In the early 1890s the partnership of Lord Rosslyn and Sam Lewis broke the bank by betting on black, according to an account written by the famous inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim. 'There was great excitement [Maxim wrote]; hundreds of people were crowding about the table, and everybody that could stake a louis [a small gold coin worth 20 fr.] staked on black, and black continued to come up for seventeen times. Then on the eighteenth coup, which was red, Lord Rosslyn and Mr Lewis each lost 12,000 fr. This was the longest run that I had ever witnessed at Monte Carlo.'
Charles M. Schwab
US Steel magnate Charles M. Schwab is reported to have broken the bank at Monte Carlo.
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark
This Scottish industrialist was the father of Kenneth Clark the art historian. It is stated that he 'enjoyed gambling and frequented the Casino at Monte Carlo where he met with regular and extraordinary luck. According to Clark, after one such successful evening of roulette, he bought a small, recently created golf course at Sospel, behind Mentone, and then built a hotel there.'
Arthur de Courcy Bower
Arthur Bower (the self-styled ″Captain Arthur de Courcy Bower″) was a convicted fraudster who had been sentenced to six months hard labour in 1904. He was subsequently reported to have won the maximum payout eighteen times in a row, and to have broken the bank five times on a visit to the casino in 1911. Certain published works claim that it was Bower who inspired the popular song but as his casino wins occurred some twenty years after the song was published, this would seem an impossibility.