The Old Gold Racing Book Club - Edition 1

In partnership with Marlborough Sporting...

Welcome to a new monthly feature at Racing Weekly: The Old Gold Racing Book Club. Every month you will not only be able to read a compelling review of a racing, or sporting book, but if you like the look of it, you will be able to buy it with a 15% discount; yet another benefit of being an Old Gold Racing owner or club member. Thank you to Sir Rupert Mackeson, of Marlborough Sporting, a leading seller of new, signed and second hand racing books since 1983, for inspiring and fulfilling this initiative. Details on how to order your copy are after this week’s review.

This week Old Gold Racing’s chief executive, Ed Seyfried, kicks off the Old Gold Racing Book Club with his review of Stephen Little’s “From Bicycle To Bentley, a Bookmaker’s Story”:

Those who know me know that I like the odd flutter; I have a bet most weekends. The bookmakers with whom I have said punt know that I’m not very good at it and that generally I lose. I reckon I am a worse punter since we launched Old Gold Racing because I am more inclined to bet with my heart than my head now; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I have always wanted to better understand ‘the other side’: the house in a casino or the bookmaker on the racecourse. John Pearson’s The Gamblers told the darker side of the Clermont Set, Aspinall and Lucan, but in Stephen Little’s From Bicycle To Bentley, the bookie is vey much the hero. And a hardworking one at that who contends that it is bookmakers who create the atmosphere on a racecourse, particularly when compared to ill attended and stodgy provincial meetings in France, where the prize money is better. We know the argument.

Bicycle to Bentley is an easy and informative read, the Betting Appendix even explains the over-round in facile terms. The son of a Lincolnshire vicar, Little was something of a schoolboy maths prodigy who made his first book on the Lincoln Handicap aged only 12. Before he was 18 he set about bicycling to every UK racecourse and took out his first bookmakers licence in 1971 standing up at both horse racing and coursing events - indeed, Clonmel is now very much on my bucket list.

The foreword, by Sir Mark Prescott, attests to Little’s human decency “always his own man, devoid of pretentiousness, unfailingly logical and utterly dependable”

Little stood some of the largest bets of the era, trading blows with the likes of JP MacManus, Barney Curley, Michael Tabor and Harry Findlay - standing on the rails at any number of the major meetings: Aintree, Royal Ascot, Cheltenham et al.

The story is told with great humour: “…the only superstition I believe in is about seeing a funeral on the way to the races, which is definitely unlucky for whoever is in the coffin…” and also as befits a mathematics prodigy everything is logical and nothing left to luck, that is apart from the chance meeting at a railway station of the woman who would become his wife; that one tugs at the heart strings.

To order author signed copies for only £17 (discounted from £20) please contact Rupert Mackeson at [email protected] or give him a call on 01934613996.