MODERN BETTING ILLUSTRATED AND EXPLAINED.
I.
Having received the selection of his tipster, or having become enamoured of a horse selected by himself, the bettor proceeds to his club or other rendezvous where he knows he will find a bookmaker ready to lay the odds against the horse of his choice.
In this he finds no difficulty. In large towns and cities, and in smaller seats of population also, there are persons whose business it is to accommodate such customers. Bookmakers and backers have many ways of coming together; they meet at divers times and seasons and in divers places as a matter of course, and during those months when there is little or no horse-racing they keep up acquaintance with each other at billiard matches and in their clubs; indeed, sporting events of some kind on which "a nice little bit of betting" may crop up are always on the tapis, whilst during the winter season there are usually a score or so of steeple-chase meetings which are provocative of speculation in bookmaking and betting circles. The great coursing meetings which take place in the season when racing is pretty much at a standstill also give rise to a vast amount of betting, of which very little is known, because it is not published from day to day.
The enormous extent to which betting on horse-racing goes on all the year round is known to those only who make the matter a special study. It has been computed by persons who should know that not less than five thousand bookmakers are daily engaged throughout the United Kingdom in laying the odds against horses to stakes ranging from sixpence to perhaps, on some occasions, as much as five hundred or even a thousand pounds. Taking it, for illustrative purposes, that each layer of the odds deals only with a hundred customers, it becomes obvious that there must be at least five hundred thousand persons engaged in betting. The exact number, however, could it be ascertained, would doubtless prove much in excess of these figures. Were it said that at present there are over a million persons who take an interest in horse-racing or in some of the other sports and pastimes of the period to the extent of backing their opinions by a bet, it would not probably be an exaggeration.
In one Scottish city there is, it has been calculated, a hundred bookmakers at work every day on the streets or in clubs or offices, doing business with all comers at market rates, and to stakes varying in amount from shillings and half-crowns to "tenners and ponies" (£25). As that city contains a population of over half a million individuals, it affords data for calculating that there may be two hundred bookmakers for each million of the population congregated in the great cities and larger towns of the kingdom, which for London alone would give more than one thousand layers of the odds, whilst Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, and Birmingham, will undoubtedly have a number correspondent to their population. "Here, every one bets," said a London club steward one evening to the writer, whilst busy entering names for the annual Derby sweep, "every one from the City to the West End; the cabman who brought you from the railway station, the porter who took your hat, the man who sold you that copy of the special Standard, all bet, and in hundreds of our public-houses and tobacconists' shops you can find a bookmaker if you want him."
A glance at what takes place in large cities and big provincial towns every day, but more particularly on days set apart for the decision of important races, shows hundreds of people rushing about to interchange their tips and opinions and to learn what is being done. On such days telegraphic messages rain into the more important clubs, of which there are from six to twenty in each of the towns named, and in these places from three to thirty bookmakers will be found ready to bet with all comers.
In these clubs may be seen groups of bettors each with an eye on "the tape," which winds out its automatic lists of the running horses, their jockeys, and the odds at which they are being backed in the ring, followed in due course by the name of the winning and placed horses and that important item of information, the "starting price," so much valued by bettors. As race follows race the same routine is repeated, so that a flutter of excitement is kept up till the programme is exhausted. Winners over the first race take heart and go on speculating, while men who have lost make an effort to retrieve their bad fortune by extending their investments, and thus the game continues till the last race of the day has been decided.
There are men constantly engaged in betting who in their own circles are not suspected of doing so. Some of them do so by the aid of friends who possess a knowledge of the business, others steal into the bookmakers' offices, and looking about them fearful of being observed, whisper their business to the layer of the odds or his clerk. The lame and halt, the blind and dumb, the rich and the ragged, daily rub shoulders in quest of fortune in the betting arena. Men with well-ventilated boots and guiltless of linen under-garments pass their shillings or half-crowns into the jewelled hand of the bookmaker, who at once rattles off an entry to his clerk: "6 to 1 Gold for the Fortunatus Stakes."
A score, perhaps, of such poverty-stricken gamblers could not among them muster clothes of the value of the albert chain and pendant hung from the watch of the bookmaker's penciller.