betting

Depending on your point of view, they are either the equivalent of the wardrobe through which you enter a Narnia of wealth and enchantment, or of Dr Caligari's Cabinet, full of horrors and disturbing visions. The former was represented in February by the £1m-winning, eight-horse accumulator of Mr Fred Craggs, placed at the William Hill shop in Thirsk. This was the biggest betting-shop payout in history. The latter was embodied by punter Graham Calvert, who lost a High Court action to recover £2m of losses incurred, he claimed, after his bookies had failed to enact his "self-exclusion" request to stop him betting.

The betting shop is neither extreme, of course, but its supporters and detractors are equally fierce in their praise or condemnation. Today – when the Grand National generates the biggest betting draw of the year, with Britain gambling an estimated total of £300m, mostly in betting shops – will polarise the pro and anti camps.

Supporters will point to the harmless entertainment the shops provide to people who, otherwise trapped in drudgery, can pop in to watch a bit of sport and try to win some money. The naysayers will point to the real possibilities of addiction and to dark pits of debt for people trying to escape whatever their plight may be by gambling. An element of this constituency was also infuriated by the recent opening of betting shops on Good Friday for the first time, even though there was no racing in Britain to bet on – punters had to get their fix from French and German courses, football and greyhounds. The prohibitionists and religious observants have lost the battle, for with the global reach of shops and betting websites, gambling in Britain is now a 24-hour activity, worth more than £30bn annually to the economy.
When betting shops were legalised on 1 May 1961, up to 10,000 opened within the first six months. Nearly 50 years on, there are scarcely fewer in operation and nearly every high street in the country seems to have at least one, most of them modernised and respectable, standing cheek by jowl with the butchers, chemists and building society branches. Like it or not, betting shops are now an established facet of the British landscape.

"I climbed the rickety wooden stairs to Jack Swift's first-floor betting office in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. On that first day of legal betting shops, this tiny emporium was glorious bedlam, packed out with punters shouting their horses home. The place was filled with cigarette smoke but that day a breeze of fresh air wafted into the lives of British punters. Gambling was being dragged out of the Dark Ages, when the only legal bets were made on the racecourse, or the phone. Street betting had been rampant and everyone knew it. Bookies' runners ferried bets between punters and bookmakers, collecting in pubs and clubs (commonly in the urinals), and on street corners."

This is how Channel 4's ebullient betting guru, John McCririck, recalls that moment in 1961 when betting shops came into being. OK, it's not exactly Martin Luther King's "Free at Last" speech but it does give a flavour of how Britannia began to loosen her corset from the 1960s onwards. And this first act of social reform came from a Tory home secretary, "Rab" Butler.

Big bookmakers rushed to open shops and take advantage of the legislation that had knocked their street-based competitors out of business at a stroke. Some of the illegal bookies made it through the new vetting procedures, established by the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, but a lot of them found that the capital required to set up premises, pay staff and "go straight" was beyond them.

The existing betting firms had run their businesses for on-course clients and for those with the financial (credit) and technical (telephone) means to place off-course bets. Scotland's most famous bookmaker, the Glaswegian John Banks, was in no doubt about the value of being on the high street, however: "Betting shops are a licence to print money."

Not all of them wanted to embrace the world of mass betting, partly because of the capital investment required. One of the godfathers of English bookmaking, William Hill, who had started his business in 1934, wanted nothing to do with betting shops, only buying into them in 1966.

The other source of the reluctance was Rab Butler's insistence that betting shops should have "dead windows", blacked-out or shuttered with no visible enticements to prospective punters. Butler noted in his memoirs that "the House of Commons was so intent on making betting shops as sad as possible, in order not to deprave the young, that they ended up more like undertakers' premises".

A small personal narrative kicks in here. My father worked for English Electric in Liverpool, a vast factory on the East Lancashire Road that in the late Fifties/early Sixties employed around 15,000 workers. One summer night, when I was about eight, he took me for a ride in his Ford Popular from our house in Dovecot to an art-deco pub called The Bow & Arrow in the sedate suburb of West Derby. He left me in the car for a moment as he went inside, carrying a small bag. I saw more cars pull up and more men go inside. Moments later, a scene reminiscent of the Keystone Cops ensued, as men fled from the pub, with many of them jumping out of windows.

I never did find out exactly what had happened that night but my best guess is that a delivery of punters' money was taking place to a bookmaker when tax officials decided to make a raid. I had clearly been used as a decoy, as no one would suspect a man with a small child in tow of such skulduggery.

The fact that one of dad's best friends at the factory left to set up two betting shops, and for whom he went to work as a settler (the person who works out the winnings of a bet) on Saturdays, convinced me that they had been in cahoots as runners inside English Electric. (I should also add that there wasn't a family holiday that didn't take in a trip to a racecourse en route.)

What clinched the case, however, was my dad's objection to having a betting shop open about 10 yards from our house. I can remember him saying: "I know the sort of people who'll be in there ... and I don't want them next door."

This element of seediness was assigned to betting shops at birth, some of it wilfully imposed by authorities, some of it inevitably inherited from the association of betting with rough behaviour and fecklessness. No wonder many bookmakers opted for the euphemism "turf accountant".

Inside, the betting shops of the 1960s were no brighter than their front windows. A mesh grille would guard a Formica counter, behind which the bookie would sit, smoking. The racing pages of the Sporting Life or The Daily Mirror would be pinned up around the walls. And somewhere would stand the "board-man". It was his job to mark up the results, and also the prices for races as they drew close to the off, so that punters could "take" a price if a horse's odds were shortening. The board-man, and everybody else for that matter, got their information from "the blower", a wire service from Extel, which relayed the prices from the racecourses and added a commentary.

Once the "off" was called, punters stared up at the speaker, imagining themselves to be out of their dull, urban world and away in the fresh air of a countryside racecourse. The commentaries from the blower were nothing like the frenzied, breathless accounts we get in betting shops today when, ironically, we can now see what is taking place, but rather bland, staccato bursts of information, without any hint of drama or emotion – perhaps that was another secret directive from government: don't get the punters excited.

It wasn't until 1986 that further gambling legislation allowed betting shops to be "improved" – the provision of hot drinks, albeit from a machine; brighter interiors, with seats for comfort; and, best of all, television pictures from the racecourses.

By this time, four major firms had grown to dominate the betting-shop market – William Hill, Ladbrokes, Coral and Mecca. The Tote, the state-owned on-course pool-betting facility – about to be put up for sale by the Government – was also buying shops in the high street. Such was the success of these operators that they became the subject of corporate mergers and takeovers, the sort of event that happened to industrial or retail companies.