Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Being for a few years a BBC News face on television had its pros and cons. There was a drunk in Kennington, where I lived for years, who used to accost me in the betting shop and try to touch me unsuccessfully for a fiver. Luckily he used to call me ‘Mr Brunson’, having confused me with my rival on ITN, Michael Brunson. I fear Michael developed quite a reputation as a meanie round the Kennington pubs.

  For most of my life my racing activities have had to be woven around my working life reporting politics. Some MPs and peers were aware of my dual role but I was careful not to pass on too many tips. I needed to get around and keep up my political contacts: I couldn’t afford to become like the Damon Runyon character the Seldom Seen Kid, obliged to make himself scarce on account of the amount of duff information he had passed on.

  I still reckon from my political reporting days, however, that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s long-time Press Secretary, owes me nearly £800. One Friday in September 2003 I was at Sandown on a day off. Cutting it a little fine, I was just writing out my placepot before the first race when CNN’s newsdesk called. They had a tip-off that Campbell was about to resign and wanted me back in action fast. I tucked away the ticket and headed off to Downing Street, only to discover later that my seven selected horses would have won me £789.30.

  Robin Cook was one who enjoyed horse talk, one-time Conservative leader Michael Howard another. Robin argued that every politician should spend some time as a tipster to teach him humility, although I am not sure that his own fulfilling of that function for The Herald in Glasgow quite completed that process in his case.

  Delwyn Williams, a Welsh Conservative MP whom I encountered on the track on occasion, discovered that Michael Cocks, Labour’s Chief Whip in his time, was partial to a little racing information. Supplying it, he found, used to make it much easier for him to obtain a ‘pair’ on the Labour side when he wanted to miss a vote.

  One day Delwyn was in one of the eighteen bars within the Palace of Westminster with a young lady who was the regular squeeze of a minister in the Thatcher government. Taken aback when, as he was plying the young lady with champagne, the minister suddenly appeared and asked, ‘What’s going on here?’, Delwyn scrabbled for an alibi and declared that they were celebrating in advance the victory of a horse for which he had been given a tip. Desperately he fished out from his memory the name of the only horse he could remember reading about that morning and urged the minister to back it too. Passing a betting shop later, he thought he had better supplement his claim with a little documentary evidence. He went in and had £20 on it, and was amazed to discover the next morning that it had won at 16-1. ‘Did you get on?’ he smugly asked the minister the next day – I think it was the 16-1 shot rather than the minister’s amorous intentions that he had in mind.

  Another one-time Parliamentarian, Sir Clement Freud, wasn’t the politest of men. I sat next to him once at a racing lunch where his rudery reduced to tears a woman whose only offence was to have asked him politely if he would autograph the menu for her aged father.

  Freud had fun though naming his horses, like the Thatcher-teasing WeareaGrandmother. Then there was Dig Up St Edmunds, an attempt, he insisted, to cheer up the people who lived in Bury St Edmunds. My favourite was Overseas Buyer, named when Chancellor James Callaghan in Harold Wilson’s government decreed that the only business expenses allowed were for entertaining purchasers from abroad. Freud set Overseas Buyer’s feed costs against his tax bill. Freud argued that all racing journalists who didn’t bet should be ignored: ‘The most readable writers are those activated to work by bookmakers bills.’

  Freud’s wry humour was sometimes cruel, as when he was asked his opinion of New Zealand and replied that he didn’t really have one ‘Because most of the time I was there it appeared to be closed’, but on racecourse cuisine he was irresistible, once describing what appeared on his plate as ‘the piece of cod which passeth all understanding’.

  When it comes to betting, my biggest sin is probably investing too much faith in information from those who I reckon are closer to the racing core than I am. I probably give far too much credence to snippets of information simply because they come from a ferrety-faced lad in a no-hoper yard or from the guy who delivers papers to a well-known breeder.

  Professional gambler Patrick Veitch has the lifestyle to support his claims of having made £10 million punting and I reckon the best bit of advice in his Enemy Number One manual on how to beat the bookies is the very simple maxim, ‘Any gambler worthy of the name should retain the discipline to keep records of every bet, otherwise it is human nature to remember the winners and conveniently forget the losers.’

  In betting though, as in life, it is not always the advice you get but how you use it that matters. I have in mind the two hunters in the American woods. One fell to the ground, his eyes rolling in his head. His companion called the emergency services by cellphone: ‘I think my friend is dead. What do I do?’ The operator cautiously urged him, ‘Now, sir, let’s stay calm. Let’s first of all make sure your friend is dead.’ The line went quiet. Then there was the sound of a shot before the caller came back on the line: ‘OK. Now what?’

  One bit of betting advice I would pass on is that there is often value to be had with foreign imports or horses from abroad racing in Britain. We are a nationalistic, not to say occasionally xenophobic, people and sometimes bookmakers and punters don’t do their homework on the horses that come from elsewhere to run here. The prime example was the Australian sprinter Choisir running at Royal Ascot in 2003 before we had become accustomed to horses sweeping in from southern parts and picking off our top sprints. The well-muscled Choisir, a horse built on the lines of a Brahma bull, had been horse of the year in Australia but in the King’s Stand Stakes on the first day he was allowed to start at 25-1 (paying 37-1 on the Tote). Having won that race, he was still allowed to start at 13-2 for the Grand Jubilee Stakes later in the week, before winning that too. (It was of course a nightmare for those of us with Australian cameramen friends. Modesty in victory is not quite the Aussies’ thing. They go more for the full ten-gallon, gold-plated, streamers-and-bunting, top-volume gloat. Thank God the England rugby team beat the Wallabies the same day or Earls Court would probably have been burned down.)

  In the same way in June 2009 I did quite nicely when the bookmakers were struck by some sort of collective blindness over a horse called Ialysos, running at Haydock in a five-furlong sprint. Ialysos’s seven previous racecourse outings had been in Greece, a country admittedly as much famed for producing top racehorses as Namibia is for turning out ice-sculptors. But there were two things to note. One was that Ialysos had won all seven of his races in Greece, the other was that he was trained in Britain by Luca Cumani and if there is anybody with a track record for doing well with imports it is Luca. Remember Falbrav and Starcraft, La Vie de Colori and Cima de Triomphe? And yet in spite of that, Ialysos was allowed to start at 14-1 and some of us did rather better than that. The bookmakers’ intelligence system rarely fails – I sometimes think MI5 should be on the rails recruiting at some of our bigger meetings – but on that occasion they certainly let one under the net.

  At Oxford I had a brief flirtation with system betting, having inveigled a few friends into joining a syndicate. The midday edition of the evening paper listed the selections of all the major newspaper tipsters. I kept careful records and every time a tipster reached his previous longest losing run for the season we began doubling up on his naps from that point. The theory was that we were tapping into expert knowledge at the point when the tipster was desperately anxious to provide a winner. We were running at quite a healthy profit when unfortunately I contracted glandular fever (I couldn’t think why I felt sick after every rugby game, and doubled my training, getting even sicker) and was taken into the Slade isolation hospital. A fellow student failed to maintain the records and the scheme slipped into disarray. It was fun though while it lasted and my system even won t
he commendation later of Sir Gus O’Donnell, the one-time Treasury Secretary and former Press Secretary to John Major, who had his own ideas about roulette table possibilities.

  I didn’t have anything so grand as a telephone account in those days and my punting was mostly done in an irresistibly seedy betting shop near Carfax Tower. You pushed your way through one of those long shredded plastic curtains into a smoky den with lino tiles on the floor and counters beneath the pinned up pages from the Sporting Life barely wide enough to write out your bets. That you did with stubby little two-inch pencils handed out by the betting shop staff with the grudging air of folk who had the costs stopped from their wages.

  Behind the barred counter was the lovely Lil, a statuesque lady who wore vivid lipsticks and buttoned jumpers strained so tightly over nature’s provisions that you feared as you approached with a betting slip that a pink or blue projectile might suddenly detach itself and blind you with the ricochet. We wrangled often over the place odds from the 100-6, 11-4 and 13-8 shots in my yankees and trebles but Lil never gave an inch.

  In the holidays I used to work on building sites and a little racing knowledge was my passport to acceptance by fellow labourers, chippies and brickies in tea breaks when we wrote out our bets for a runner to take to the bookie. All of us, that is, except mournful Joe, a Pole who constructed the hardboard columns for the concrete we poured from barrows. Why did he always look so sad, we asked Joe one day. ‘Ah you see,’ he said, ‘back home in Poland I was a coffin-maker. Very good business. The trouble with Britain is that not enough people die …’ It takes all sorts.

  In early days I sometimes used to travel to courses on raceday specials or take trains to particular meetings that were almost taken over by racing folk. Occasionally I would share a particularly smoky carriage with bookies and tic-tac men. I was invited once to join one of their card schools, but I remembered the travelling vicar invited to play by W.C. Fields, who inquired, ‘Is this a game of chance?’ and received the reply ‘Not while I’m dealing, it ain’t’, and decided against. I preferred to keep my stake money intact until I got to the races. But later we did fall into conversation about betting coups and they told me what has since remained my favourite near-miss story.

  At the start of one season a new, smart figure was to be observed strolling the scene at every race meeting that mattered. He arrived alone. He was invariably smartly dressed, with a distinctive flower in his buttonhole. He would walk the ranks of bookies checking the prices. Answering to the name of John, he would pass the time of day with all the rails bookmakers and knowledgeably discuss the day’s prospects. But he would never, ever have a bet. Eventually it became quite a game to try to tempt him. ‘Come on Johnny,’ some would shout, ‘a special price for you.’ He would smile quietly and say, ‘Not today’. Most of the season went by and then suddenly at Glorious Goodwood, on the final day, Johnny’s answer changed. To the first inquirer he said he would have a thousand on the third favourite, on the nose. To the second he had another thousand. On credit please. No need for the formality of an account, was there … It turned out afterwards that he’d been round most of the ring. After a gulp or two, credit was extended, with a few little jokes along the lines of ‘Well we’ll always know where to find you’, meaning that such a predictable figure could be relied upon to be doing the same thing tomorrow.

  Johnny’s selection, starting favourite with the weight of his money, was beaten half a length. And he didn’t turn up the next day to pay. Or the day after that. Or ever again. Nobody knew where he lived or even his second name. He was never seen on the racecourse again, but one leading bookie returned from a holiday in Thailand tortured by something familiar about the face of the well-dressed barman who had served him pink gins in the hotel’s cocktail bar.

  Looking back over my Spectator columns over nearly twenty years I am slightly embarrassed to see how much space I have devoted to relating the circumstances of a gamble that came unstuck, or occasionally bragging about one that came off, because the one boring thing about writing on horseracing is that people will come up and tell you, ‘My granny had an infallible system. She always backed a horse if there was green in the jockey’s colours and a three somewhere in the number. Worked every time …’ In listening to other people’s gambling stories I am always mindful of a lady doctor friend of ours who told us over dinner one night how she compiled notes on her patients. When they told her how much they smoked, she doubled it. When they told her how much they drank, she trebled it. And when anybody over 50 told her how often they had sex, she divided it by four.

  Do I make money from betting, friends ask, thanks to the contacts I enjoy with owners, trainers and jockeys? The answer is that overall, year on year, I lose, but I don’t lose much and I get an enormous amount of fun out of the process of losing that bit. I find betting is a bit like playing golf: in golf every round you play, however grotesque your final total, there is that one shot – or even two or three – which enables you to convince yourself, ‘If only I could give it the time, I could get quite good at this game …’ So it is with betting. Every now and then I bring off a punt that has me saying, ‘If only I could spare a little more time for the form books, I could really make a go of this.’

  There is of course always a new way of looking at familiar objects, especially if you are an academic. In 1998 a Dr Mark Neal of Reading University spent three years visiting betting shops for a research project and concluded that they did a good job in looking after the disadvantaged. ‘Strange to say,’ he declared, ‘but betting shops are actually a force for good in our society. They enhance social cohesion and a sense of community and they act as comfortable drop-in centres for pensioners, the unemployed and the homeless. In a way they have taken on the traditional role of the churches – except they are much more fun.’ Perhaps I could get a three-year research grant to supplement his work on the racecourse: something along the lines of ‘Barry Dennis: social menace or pastoral leader?’

  Ownership

  When I first began to follow racing as a teenager, the idea that I might ever become a racehorse owner on a journalist’s salary was an impossible dream. Since then the democratisation of racing through the growth of syndicate group ownership has enabled thousands like me to enjoy the very special thrill that comes with watching a horse run in your colours, albeit shared with ten or a dozen others. In a couple of small, friendly syndicates, first with Simon Christian and then with Andy Turnell, I have enjoyed a heady whiff of the pleasures which I had imagined would remain confined to the Wildensteins and Niarchoses, the Sangsters and the Aga Khans. I have been able to knock around stable yards and cluster on the gallops watching my horses being prepared and to cheer them home on the racecourse.

  I shall be very careful here saying just how much pleasure that has given me. Mick Fitzgerald’s relationship with the lady he was with at the time he won the Grand National did not survive long after his breathless post-Grand National comment to interviewer Desmond Lynam that the experience had been ‘better than sex’. But Mrs Oakley knows that she never gave me a better surprise present than the share she purchased for me to join the syndicate behind Sunday For Monday, initiated by my long-time Times colleague Richard Evans, who made the switch from politics to racing much more swiftly than I did.

  Sunday For Monday, whose colours, appropriately for a bunch of newspapermen including The Times editor Charles Wilson, were black and white check with a red sash, gave us plenty of fun with a few placed efforts, trained firstly by Simon Christian and then by Ron Hodges. Unfortunately for me, when Richard got together a succeeding syndicate for a horse called Northern Saddler, also trained by Ron Hodges, I faced a choice. I could either continue stuffing fivers into a manger in the hope of a return or I could guarantee that my two children didn’t go barefoot to university. I opted out. The canny Richard took 100-1 from Ladbroke’s against the horse winning three races in its first season. In fact Northern Saddler, a ve
ry useful two-miler with a bit of give in the track, won four of his first five and when he retired after winning, I believe, thirteen races in all, he had collected more than £60,000.

  Partly because I was by then involved again in writing regularly about racing, I was much more involved in the Rhapsody in Blue syndicate headed by Malcolm Palmer, Ladbroke’s courteous and ever-smiling PR presence on the racecourse. Rhapsody in Blue soon became Rhaps for short and I haven’t forgotten the promise of his first time out at Kempton. This was how I greeted it at the time:

  Move over Robert Sangster. Eat your heart out Sheikh Mohammed. Well, perhaps not just yet. But as this fifteenth part of the Eternal Optimists syndicate managed by Coral’s Malcolm Palmer joined the other proud owners huddling in the parade ring at Kempton evening meeting last week, my excitement was every bit as great as racing’s superstars when they introduce an expensive new star to the racecourse. One of 24 two-year-olds contesting the six-furlong European Breeders Fund Median Auction Stakes, carrying a prize of £2,386 to the winner, Rhapsody in Blue (no, I wasn’t responsible for the politically partial name) did not exactly earn rave previews on his racecourse debut.

  The Racing Post said ungenerously, ‘3,500 (Irish) gns foal from a stable hardly associated with first-time-out winners.’ The racecard noted, tersely if accurately, ‘This first outing will probably be required.’ Indeed, this was intended as an educational experience, a first trip to the racecourse for our son of Magical Strike (USA) out of Palace Blue (IRE) to learn what racing was all about.

  Six-furlong sprints will not be Rhapsody’s future. His canny trainer Andy Turnell, who had him looking a picture, told us he would almost certainly need further. He was the biggest horse in the parade ring at Kempton and jump jockeys who visit the East Hendred stable are already looking at his impressive frame and inquiring about the chances of getting a leg-up on him over timber in a couple of years. But he did everything right. Bright of eye, ears pricked, he strolled around the ring with athletic dignity, led by conditional jockey Colin Rae.