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Racing needs gamblers and three recently published books convey the pleasures of the flutter in very different ways. Michael Church’s Black Horse Red Dog (Highdown, £14.99) rambles gently through the gambling misadventures of his bunch of slightly dodgy relatives, a 1950s world of gypsy tips for the Derby, uncollected football pools coupons, mysterious legacies and getting the money on for a good thing coming out of Staff Ingham’s yard. The young Church, regularly in trouble with a cane-swishing headmaster for running books on school events, tried to rig a three-legged race. Most of us who like a punt started early trying to improve the odds. I began by persuading a church fête vicar to let me roll sixpences rather than pennies on to a chequered board. He never realised how much easier it was to land the smaller coins in the paying squares…
Patrick Veitch has the lifestyle to support his claims of having made £10 million punting and his Enemy Number One (Racing Post, £18.99) is on a different scale. He too started early, running a tipping service with 100 clients when a maths student at Cambridge. He chronicles the misses as well as the hits, revealing how he accommodated those wanting to bet on Frankie Dettori riding his seventh winner at Ascot that famous day, an entirely logical thing to do and one which lost him £30,000.
His advice to amateurs is simple: ‘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.’
Best racing read lately, as I was reminded when Sandown’s Loch Fyne restaurant took 50 minutes to produce our fish and chips, is Freud on Course (Racing Post, £18.99). He once called the object which eventually arrived ‘the piece of cod which passeth all understanding’.
Clement Freud wasn’t cosy. I sat next to him once at a lunch where his rudery reduced a polite lady autograph-hunter to tears. But his terse, to the core sports writing reminds us all that you can paint a verbal picture without spraying on the adjectives and this anthology does full justice to his wit.
Freud had fun naming his horses, like the Thatcher-teasing WeareaGrandmother and Dig Up St Edmunds, an attempt to cheer up the people who lived in Bury St Edmunds. My favourite was Overseas Buyer, named when Chancellor James Callaghan decreed that the only business expenses allowed were for entertaining purchasers from abroad. Freud set Overseas Buyer’s feed costs against his tax.
The late Robin Cook, who did so, once said that all politicians should write a tipping column to teach them humility. 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.’ But I don’t think he obeyed Veitch’s Law Number One.
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