Nicolina leads the dance

Jacquard, Dieu Soleil, Broadway Melody. Tishan out of trap 6. Faraway places with strange-sounding names. Sterrebeeke? Work on Monmore Green first, it’s probably closer. Charles Malizia and Arno Rudolf. 1 and 3 in the last at Hackney Wick, gone to developers long since. Psidium at 66/1, French chap on, Harry Wragg supposed to win with the other one. Funny name, not the Frenchy, the horse. Sort of shrub, my boy says. ‘Rub it on your belly like guava jelly.’ Sent us a card from Mexico. Should have backed it.

I was around when betting offices became legal and since 1961 I’ve bet in them, written about them and broadcast to them. I’m not going to ramble on about how much they’ve changed, though I would just mention that, whereas there were some 19,000 outlets at one stage, the figure these days is more like 7,000.

By and large, women still ignore them, despite the conversion from smoky bolt-holes to more salubrious surroundings with toilets and coffee often available. If you want to know how the shops used to look and how the relationship between customer and counter staff has changed, I recommend buying or renting the excellent BBC TV series Big Deal, starring the late Ray Brooks.

I found Marten’s recent piece about characters in the shops truly fascinating and maybe I can tell a few stories to augment his fine essay. I remember Broadway Melody as if ‘twere yesterday (it’s well over sixty years) and just as vivid is the ‘blower’ commentary voiced by a south Londoner struggling with Dieu Soleil  –  his best guess was Dough Sollil  –  in an endless final furlong.

Complete strangers talked to each other  – ‘I was unlucky there’ was a common assessment, together with ‘left it too late, didn’t he?’    –  even though pictures took another 30 years to arrive.

Conversations like the one at the top of this piece were both commonplace and very funny. And the thing is, the shop manager was often a punter himself and the sympathy was genuine. During the summer break from college, I worked as a boardman in the Ladbrokes shop in Pound Tree Road, Southampton. (Incredibly there came a time when Coral were on the other side of the wall and Paddy Power were bang opposite.

Charlie Malizia had several shops around the city and Ladbrokes took them all in the end but not before Charlie’s wife had asked me to teach their daughter French. They had a lovely place in Soton’s green belt, Bassett Green. Charlie’s book-keeping wasn’t all it might have been and he went down for a short time but people were very fond of him and even the obit in the Daily Echo in 1986 was kind. He was like that.

Anyway, the manager at Ladbrokes was Terry and his assistant was May Birch, a large, beautifully turned-out lady who stood no nonsense. Men were afraid of her. ‘Look out, here comes Rothschild’ she’d say for the room to hear as some hapless five-bob punter made his way to the counter. The other assistant was a well-equipped buxom girl who seemed to spend more time in make-up as the day wore on and favoured large earrings, bangles and beads. May called her Fandango. Honestly, they were wonderful days.

As Glorious Goodwood approached, Terry mentioned more than once a locally-trained filly called Nicolina who, he said, would be having a quiet outing in the Stewards’ Cup (run on Tuesday in those days) before performing rather better in a lesser handicap over course and distance on Saturday.

The big day dawned, by which time quite a few punters in the shop were prepared to go along with this assessment and a stream of minor bets crossed the counter. I suppose what followed will stay with me for the rest of my days. Nicolina had hardly been mentioned on the old, stop-start commentary until she was suddenly right there in the action. At this point Terry stood on his chair and urged her on with the help of a rolled-up Sporting Life. She won and the noise was deafening. Heaven only knows what Ladbrokes would have made of it but there was no area manager in sight.

Later developments never spoiled the story for me because I didn’t believe the tale her trainer, Roy Pettitt, sold to the Sun, claiming that he ‘perked her up’ with something illegal between the two races. He had hardly anything else that could win and I think he hit the skids financially. His foolish desire to cash in cost him dearly because he was stood down and never heard of again.

When David Ashforth and I returned to Cambridge for the autumn term we frequented the Laurie Wallis shop on Jesus Lane, a warm, smoky outlet which is probably best described as ‘multi-cultural’. There was the kind of flock wallpaper you see in Indian restaurants, which suited some of the punters, together with a few serious punters during their lunch break. Also, of course, a smattering of undergraduates one of whom, ‘Blackie’  –  his surname not his colour  –  was inevitably ‘writing a book’.

There was also a dead-pan character who had this habit, when the runners had been at the post for a while, of advising the rather austere female announcer to discard an item of her underwear.

They might almost have been a team because a few seconds later she’d say ‘They’re off!’ and he’d turn to the audience as if to say, there you are, told you so. Got a laugh every time.

But the real characters were the three counterhands  –  Foxy, Nice Man and Moonface, the last-named often doubling up as a punter when the mood took him. Nice Man would let me have four shillings win and place on the Tote when Ron Smyth unleashed a ‘dark’ one, seemingly useless on the Flat, over hurdles. Brilliant jockey and trainer of hurdlers, old Ron.

Moonface had a medical condition which could only be soothed by vast quantities of Lucozade and a large bottle would appear from his inside pocket whenever anything got to him. ‘What are the stewards DOING?’ he’d cry to general amusement, while he often sounded out a serious player whose name, as far as I could make out, was ‘Mr Iddle’. ‘Can I have your selection, Mr Iddle?’ Moonface would enquire, though whether he was taking the mickey I was never quite sure.

Mr Iddle was a man of strong opinions and asserted that Stubbs II had been decidedly unlucky In Persian War’s Schweppes. The place was simply alive with racing talk, jokes and hard-luck stories and Nice Man witnessed it all without comment, confining himself to the view that the only man to trust and follow was Lester Piggott. Not a bad judge, perhaps?

One of the first flats I shared with friends after graduation was on Holland Road across the roundabout from Shepherd’s Bush in London. I liked it there and even built a short story around the Kensington pub, which I renamed the Talbot; it’s in Not Minding That It Hurts, which Marten kindly published over 20 years ago.

I liked Holland Park Avenue even more. The playwright Simon Gray and his wife lived there, close to Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser. I believe the painter Lucian Freud was only a few doors away at one stage. One of the best stories about him is told by Victor Chandler, who said he and his accountant used to go down there for breakfast and they’d know if Freud started looking for his glasses it was good news on the payment front. If he didn’t, forget it for the time being. Of course, there came a time when Freud no longer needed to gamble because the paintings were selling for millions.

The celebrated football reporter Brian Glanville was based there as well, and cycled everywhere. A supremely intelligent man, he had many interests and I remember we were at a game one day and the conversation came around to Alida Valli walking straight past Joseph Cotten at the end of The Third Man. Everyone else was filing their report  –   Arsenal 3 Coventry 2 if memory serves  –  against the clock but, like Arsenal’s Liam Brady, he always seemed to have more time than those around him.

Funny thing, though. I never did discover whether any of these famous people used a restaurant on Holland Park Avenue called Au Caprice des Dieux  –  in the lap of the gods, which struck me as perfect for a committed gambler. It disappeared without my having paid it a visit, which is a pity because I could have put plenty of money its way.

Before I started in the wine trade and worked on Baileys Irish Cream I freelanced as a boardman, often travelling across London, and the shop I remember most fondly was an independent in Clerkenwell where the most striking individual was an Irishman called Jim, who occasionally did the board but was happy to let me take over.

He was a kind and generous man, totally in love with greyhound racing, and he became known for his particular affection for Commutering, a talented dog who often ran out of trap 1 at Haringey. By the time they arrived at the shop, regulars would already have perused the cards in the Life and if Commutering was there they’d simply say ‘Haringey tonight, Jim?‘ and he’d give his verdict.

We talked about racing books and he lent me a few, all eminently readable, including Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern. You might like to seek out a copy because it deals with events in and around Shepherd Market, where there was and is a William Hill shop hard by Ye Grapes, one of my favourite London pubs. There used to be a Turf Newspapers between the two establishments which was run by the rudest man in England and sometimes you had to go back because you couldn’t quite believe it. Gone now, sadly.

The book, which mentions the betting shop, was made into the film Frenzy by Alfred Hitchcock, shot around Mayfair where the passage to Shepherd Market runs from near the bottom of Curzon Street  –  real Lord Lucan territory many, many years ago.

By a remarkable coincidence, when I went to work for BBC Radio Sport I joined one of rugby commentator Ian Robertson’s racing syndicates. He was involved with Ryan Jarvis and Ian Balding but the trainer I came to know best was Gavin Pritchard-Gordon, who won a little race for us at Windsor with a horse called Walter Mitty (Willie Carson up), who was bought by a Chinaman afterwards to try and land a gamble in Hong Kong but it came fourth…..

Anyway, one of the syndicate members was Arno Rudolf and there is no reason why you should have heard of him except that he set up a perfectly decent debt collection agency linked to sport. He negotiated settlements between some household names  –  we won’t go into one or two Arsenal and Chelsea players  –  and major bookmakers and is still closely connected to racing.

I get things right sometimes and I told him his agreement with top trainers regarding tardy payers wouldn’t come to fruition. Irritated by the situation though they might be, when they thought about it they weren’t about to pressurise owners they’d been having for Sunday morning champagne for as long as they could remember. And that’s what happened and Arno took it very well.

He loves betting and betting offices and some years ago we started telephone betting (rash) over lunch at Morton’s on Berkeley Square, another venue sadly no longer with us.

That morning I’d been in a Kall Kwik shop on Great Titchfield Street and had to wait while the chap behind the counter  – the manager I’d say  –  finished a telephone chat. It became obvious it was about the day’s racing and I worked out he had a runner at Brighton later on. Polite but reticent, he wouldn’t tell me any more but from what he’d said it could only be Don’t Drop Bombs for Julia Feilden in the amateur riders’ race.

In Morton’s, Arno couldn’t stop backing winners. It was simply one of those days and the wine wasn’t bad, either. So we crossed Berkeley Square and wandered through the passageway in good time for the race, which was the last on the card. He likes a decent drop, old Arno, and is great company even when he’s not dancing. But he essayed a few steps and so did I when Don’t Drop Bombs went miles clear. I adore Brighton but I’ve never had a horse win as easily as that either before or since. He regaled the regulars in the shop with the story of how the bet had come about and in Cambridge or Clerkenwell they’d have rejoiced in our good luck but Mayfair is Mayfair and you know how it is.

I have a hundred stories like these and I’ve met some fascinating characters. One way or another they were all hooked and there was no way of going back, even if they’d wanted to.

‘Well I’ve been where you’re hanging and I think I can see how you’re pinn’d’ as Leonard Cohen put it in Sisters of Mercy. Gambling references tend to crop up in his songs. I don’t think he was a player himself which was just as well, because his manager swindled him out of a fortune. He took it on the chin and set about earning it back. Good solid chap, old Len. Not one to get the dancing started, though.

Ian Carnaby’s books are available to buy on our website by clicking here