BIG BOOKMAKERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 2, 10 July 1912, Page 13

BIG BOOKMAKERS.

NETTING £60.000 OVER ONE RACE. ‘'lt’s oi; !y fouls as backs ’osscs.” Robert Ridsdale used to say; “the bookie’s the wise man as pockets their money. ’ And no one knew better what he was talking about than the famous “penciller/’ who lived to make £47,000 over St. Giles’ Derby, and to drive behind a pair of high-stepping horses past the Doncaster inn, in which, as a young man, he had played the lowly role of “boots.’’ That he ended his days in a Newmarket hay-loft with only threchalfpence in his pocket was his own fault, and not that of the “profession” that had made a rich man of bim.

Ridsdale’s partner, John Gully, was a man of very different mettle, who knew how to keep the gold that poured into his coffers. A butcher and pugilist in his younger days, who had seen the inside of prison-walls, the “Game Chicken” (as he was known to fame for his prowess with his fists) was the “Leviathan” of the bookmaking world long before he reached his forties. Over one race he netted £60,000; he cleared £45,000 when Margrave won the Leger; he invested his riches in broad acres and coal mines, found a seat at Westminster, and when he died, at the age of 79, left nearly £1,000,000 behind him. And the same story of easily-won wealth is told of dozens of John Gully’s fellow-bookmakers, many of whom climbed the ladder of riches from its lowest rungs. Joe Bland was a post-boy when he made his first modest book

“for . silver money”; Bickham was a stableman; Fred. Swindell was, it is said, a potman when he pocketed £lOO on Charles XII. in the Liverpool Cup—ami so on through the long list of the “wise men” who have found the laying of odds such a profitable game. Davies, whose colossal bookmaking was the wonder of the Turf world in the first half of last century, was a carpenter when Attila’s Derby put £lOO into his purse. So rapid was his success that within a few years he had a balance of £138,000 at his bank, and was winning or losing thousands of pounds on a race as light-heartedly as if the sovereigns were pence. He dropped £120,000 on two races and cleared £200,000 on four others within the same year; while, in spite of the fact that Teddington’s Derby win cost him £lOO.OOO, he ended the year more than this sum to the good.

And such giants as Gully and Davies have had their successors in more recent days, in men like Mr. Dunn and Mr. Pry. the latter of whom died quite recently at Norwood. When Mr. Fry’s attention was first drawn to the possibilities of bookmaking as a road to fortune, he was a linen draper at Liverpool, who knew as little of horseracing as the man in the moon. One day he was asked by a bookmaker, who had got into difficulties’, for a loan on the understanding that he should receive a share in the. profits of the book.

These came as regularly as clockwork, and so satisfied Mr. Fry that there was money in the business that he put up his shutters and started on his own account with a capital of £BOO. “which,” he says, *T never had occasion to supplement.” Commencing in a modest way at Ascot, where he lost £9 on the week, success came so quickly that he was soon laying bets in thousands of pounds, and was making more money in a year than his shop would have yielded in a lifetime. On two successive Cambridgeshires he lost £60,000; but he could afford to smile at such misfortune—for his double loss was more than recouped by a solitary Derby. So enormous was the scale of his transactions that when he died there was owing to him considerably over £900.000, or more than 1000 times the capital with which he opened his first book.