From Bicycle to Bentley: A Bookmaker's Story

Chapter 1

Early days and schools, and first race meeting

Iam often asked what the largest bet I ever took was. There are three possible answers: the largest stake, the largest liability, or the largest take-out, i.e. potential return of winnings plus stake, which is the true measure of the size of a bet.

The largest stake was £150,000 to win £75,000 (2023 equivalent £280,500 to win £140,250) on Double Trigger in the Ascot Gold Cup in June 1996; to put the bet in perspective, the punter who had the bet was still in front on the week after it ran second to Classic Cliché. The bet with the largest liability was £250,000-30,000 (£492,500-59,100) Gimme Five, in one of the handicap hurdles at Cheltenham Festival in March 1994; it was difficult to hedge it properly as it started as 4/1 favourite, and though it finished well down the field to Tindari it was still an uncomfortable race to watch. But the real largest bet, with a take-out of £330,000 (£617,100), was £210,000-120,000 (£392,700-224,400) Sound Man, which finished third at 11/8 to Klairon Davis in the Champion Chase at Cheltenham in 1996.¹

These bets all lost, but there were also plenty of six-figure winning bets as well. I am still trying to forget Fujiyama Crest, Frankie Dettori’s seventh winner of seven at Ascot in 1996; that was one of those ‘I was there and I wish I hadn’t been’ days, as were two consecutive disastrous days at Cheltenham a few years previously. More about these and other mishaps in a later chapter.

What follows is a tale of slow progress from starting with next to nothing, except ambition and determination to follow my vocation of bookmaking, graduating from pedalling to the races on a bicycle to driving there in a Bentley, and finishing with more than nothing – ambition achieved!

During the war, my father had served in the RAF as a chaplain; his brother was a bomber pilot, posthumously awarded a DFC after his Stirling bomber was shot down near Berlin on his last scheduled raid. After my father left the RAF, in 1946 my parents and elder brother, David, were living with my mother’s parents in Mill Hill in North London. I was born during this time in a West Hampstead nursing home, and the family moved to Nottingham a year later when my father was appointed to his first parish at St Ann’s, one of the rougher areas of that city.

I don’t remember much about my early life in Nottingham. The vicarage was in Woodborough Road where it meets Robin Hood Chase; the church was at the southern end of Robin Hood Chase on St Ann’s Well Road. Both church and vicarage were demolished many years ago. From the age of 5 I attended Waverley School, a small private school not far from home near Mansfield Road, where I remember being very proud when I was promoted one class up in mid-term.

The few things I do recall give a flavour of the times. There were trams in Woodborough Road. There were bomb sites all over Nottingham. I used to help count the church collections; they often included farthings (£1/960, or 0.104p), which were current then. You couldn’t get anything for a single farthing, but there was a shop halfway down the Chase where you could get a glass of Tizer or dandelion & burdock for a halfpenny. A few doors down Woodborough Road was a post office where I opened my first savings account, and where I bought sweets on the day in February 1953 that they came off ration. My brother and I thought it was great that, wow, at last we didn’t need any coupons to stock up on fruit gums and Mars Bars! Unfortunately, we still needed to have money to buy them, which was also on ration as far as we were concerned. In the summer of 1951 on one of many visits to my grandparents in London, we went to the Festival of Britain.² When the Millennium Bridge over the Thames was first opened, there were many complaints about its apparent instability and unsettling motion, which reminded me of the Cakewalk at the Festival, a rickety tree-height walk that people actually paid to experience!

Our next move in 1953, shortly after my sister Elizabeth, aka Lizzie, was born, was to Skellingthorpe, a village five miles south-west of Lincoln where the skyline was dominated by the view of Lincoln Cathedral, set high in the upper part of the city. The parish was a combination of three parishes: the large village of Skellingthorpe, a dormitory for Lincoln; Doddington, a small village nearby that contains Doddington Hall, a large Elizabethan mansion; and Swallowbeck, a suburb at the southern end of Lincoln City. It was said to be the third largest parish in England by area at the time, before the more frequent combining of parishes. At first Swallowbeck had no church but only a corrugated iron church hall, but my father eventually oversaw the building of a new church there.

My father was appointed as chaplain to the judges when the assizes came to Lincoln. He said that his job was to say ‘Amen’ if a judge sentenced someone to be hanged, donned his black cap and said ‘May God have mercy on your soul’, but I don’t think he was ever called upon to perform that duty. Part of the village of Skellingthorpe, with a very smelly abattoir, was known as Jerusalem, but the designation of Vicar of Jerusalem, though accurate, might have been a bit misleading.

The vicarage was a large Victorian house set in nine acres of grounds, including some woodland, and a separate coach house with a hay loft. There was a long drive from the road bordered by rows of lime trees, with a paddock either side. This may sound rather grand, until I mention the rain that came through the large window overlooking the staircase, the crumbling plaster that regularly had to be scraped out of the bath, and the large growth of fungus high up on one wall of the dining room as a result of wet rot. There was no form of central heating, and many a morning I would wake up unable to see out of the windows because they were completely frosted over – but I could see my breath in the cold air. Behind the house was an apple orchard, with an old railway guard’s van plonked in the middle. It was December when we moved in, and many of the outhouses were crammed full of rotting apples – the smell of them persisted for a very long time. Eventually, after a long campaign by my father, during which he sent a large specimen of the fungus to the Church Commissioners, a new vicarage was built for us beside the drive in one of the paddocks. Later, the old vicarage was sold and split into flats, and several new houses were built in the old grounds.

Most ginger cats are male, but we had a ginger cat named The Guddle who was a rarity in being female. She had litter after litter of kittens, and we enjoyed seeing them all grow up until they had to be given away. I have never lost my fondness for cats, and now always have a few, currently five, at home, but my first equine encounter was less auspicious. One of the paddocks was rented to two local girls who would keep a pony or two in it. I once got up on one of the ponies, but it subsequently bit my arm, and ever since I have been reluctant to get too close to a horse.

I never grew to like Lincoln. Three things typified the city for me: the football team slid from the second division to the fourth in successive seasons; the racecourse, managed by the Council, was allowed to decline and closed in the 1960s, though it remains largely intact; and when the Council was thinking about a theme for road names on a new housing estate, hands were thrown up in alarm when someone suggested using Derby winners, which would have been an association with gambling, shock, horror!

On moving to Skellingthorpe I attended the village Church of England school for two years, and at the age of 9 I was sent to the Dolphin School, a boys’ boarding school in a large eighteenth-century house in extensive grounds near Newark. Founded by Rhodes Scholar Charles Roach, it closed in 1968 to become a private residence, now Grade II* listed. Sometimes we would attend the meet of the local hunt, and the headmaster, Charles’ son Peter Roach, always drummed into us that we should be very careful about standing behind any horse. Excellent advice of course, but it did increase my wish to admire horses only from a distance.

One term I was bet that I would not use any swear words during the whole term. I didn’t find this unduly difficult, but I had to be careful not to get caught out. For instance, on Sundays we attended services at the local church, All Saints in Winthorpe, which was unusual in being built of brick and having a hand carousel to allow all its six bells to be rung by a single person. It was also quite High Church, and instead of the congregation reciting the Nicene creed as is more common in Anglican services, we recited the longer Apostles’ creed, which contains the phrase ‘he descended into h**l’. The boys next to me were therefore checking that I briefly fell silent at that point.

My first venture into the world of bookmaking occurred at this school. It had been the custom for one of the boys to take bets on the Grand National each year, but during my last year there, someone else had claimed that position. I and two other boys decided to take bets on the Lincolnshire Handicap. This race and the Grand National were normally run on the Wednesday and Saturday respectively of the same week and formed the Spring Double, a popular ante-post bet in years gone by. We were not allowed to have money at the Dolphin School, so we had to bet in sweets, but although winner Marshal Pil was one of the favourites, my two partners and I had a good feed afterwards! By the time I was bookmaking, Lincoln had long closed, the Lincolnshire Handicap had moved to Doncaster 35 miles away in Yorkshire, and the notion of the Spring Double had faded.

Headmaster Peter Roach was a keen sportsman, especially for rugby, cricket and Nottingham Forest football. He was ecstatic when Forest won the FA Cup – he had even hired a special projector TV so that the whole school could watch the final. I was at the other end of the athletic spectrum, and conspired to be ‘off games’ whenever possible, so he was not impressed with me, though I surprised him by being one of few who did not succumb to any of the waves of illness that occasionally swept through the school. He warmed to me when I started to shine academically – I once got 147 out of 150 in a Latin exam, because I failed to realise that one word was a name that didn’t need translating, and the number 147 still haunts me to this day – and he was completely won round when I brought some glory to the school by winning a scholarship to Uppingham.

And so to Uppingham, in Rutland, in September 1959, where at 13 years and 12 days I was the youngest boy in the school in my first term. My attendance there was made possible because the scholarship was augmented by an allowance for pupils who needed financial assistance, another for scholars who needed financial assistance, another for sons of clergy, and another for sons of clergy who needed assistance. Although my scholarship had been based on Classics (languages not horseraces!), it was decided that I should switch to mathematics and sciences, so I took Latin and Greek O levels early in my second year at the age of 14 before changing to what were known as B-side subjects for those O levels the following summer. I found Greek harder to master than Latin, mainly because of the different alphabet and more complicated word endings of the Attic version. I believe I may have been the only bookie of my time with an O level in Greek, unless there was a Greek bookie somewhere who had bothered to sit the exam.

It was during my first year at Uppingham that I became interested in racing. At that time I wasn’t aware of any family connection to racing, but I later learned that my grandfather’s cousin Wilfred Crawford was a trainer near Edinburgh, and his daughter Susan one of the world’s leading equine artists whose best-known work is We