GAMBLING ON THE UNBELIEVABLE
Retired bookmaker GRAHAM SHARPE shares the wackiest wagers of his long career, from bets on Nessie to odds on UFOs.
In nearly half a century as a bookmaker GRAHAM SHARPE accepted bets on everything from proof of Nessie’s existence being discovered to the US President confirming the reality of extraterrestrial visitors. Now retired, he shares the wackiest wagers of his long career...
Iretired in 2017, having worked in the bookmaking business for almost half a century. I had joined William Hill in 1972 and quickly became known for accepting bets on virtually anything and everything that customers were prepared to speculate on. In those days, horse and greyhound racing accounted for over 90 per cent of the company’s business, with major sports making up the rest. My job was to get as much publicity for the company as possible, and I quickly identified accepting unusual and bizarre bets as a key way of achieving media coverage.
Bets on the weather – how hot it would get in the summer? Would it snow at Christmas? – resulted in rich publicity pickings. In 1976’s scorching summer I offered odds of 10/1 for predicting the day on which it would next rain in London, garnering huge coverage. Two years later, as the weather resumed its default soggy position I was able to persuade both the Sun and Daily Mirror to run banner front page headlines of, respectively, ‘Betcha It Won’t Rain!’ and ‘Sodden Awful’, carrying the news that Hills were now betting on when the summer deluge would stop.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers, is a professional physicist and meteorologist, and he started betting hefty sums with me – up to £600 a month during the 1990s – on very specific weather predictions. It proved very difficult to beat him, to the extent that my bosses eventually gave him a frosty reception, ruled him too hot to handle and cold-shouldered all future weather wagers from him.
Introducing betting interest into TV programmes – who shot JR? for starters, followed by odds on events in the big soap operas like Corrie and East Enders – proved popular.
Letting people bet on themselves turned out to be irresistible. Forty-year-old Deborah Dale from Newcastle-under-Lyme bet £50 on herself losing 12 stone in weight from a starting weight of 31 stone during 2001; she duly collected £1,000 when she shed 168lb. Others bet on how old they’d live to be and pregnant women on when their babies would put in an appearance; one lady even bet that she’d appear on the cover of Vogue.
I encouraged bets from proud parents on their children growing up to achieve great feats, sporting and otherwise. In 2000, Pete Edwards took me up on it and risked £50 at 2,500/1 odds that his three year old grandson, Harry Wilson, would grow up to play football at senior level for Wales. Thirteen years later, Harry became the youngest player ever to win a senior cap for his country, coming on as substitute in a match against Belgium and clinching a £125,000 pay-out for grandad Pete, who immediately quit work – as I almost did when one of my bosses told me he regarded it as a sacking offence to have accepted such a bet. This despite the positive media coverage it secured for the company being estimated at around £10 million!
Andrew Wright gained A grades in 11 subjects in 1996 – good news for his father, David, who had bet £50 at 20/1 on him doing so and won £1,000. I had realised the odds might have been a little on the generous side when the boy’s headmaster placed his own bet of £10, which won him £200.
MONSTER STAKES
I soon started to receive requests for many fortean-style wagers, initially along the lines of “What odds against proof of UFOs/ extraterrestrial life/ghosts will you offer?”
The first two were quite simple to deal with and the standard offer became 100/1 that either the current President of the USA or the current UK Prime Minister would officially confirm the current existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life within 10 years of the bet being placed.
But in 2010 I took a single bet of £1,000 at odds of 1,000/1 from a client in Wiltshire (home, of course, to the UFO hotspot of Warminster) that within a year conclusive proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life would be forthcoming. The client hoped to be £1million better off as a result. He wasn’t.
Despite accepting these bets, I’m afraid a worthwhile definition of conclusive proof of the existence of ghosts consistently eluded me. However, I did come across some haunted betting shops. One, in Birmingham, was run by Peter Casson, who recalled two members of staff locking up and waiting at the bus stop over the road when they spotted a lad still inside the shop. They rushed back over, opened up the shop and searched it, finding no one.
Staff at a shop in Rhyl, North Wales, named their in-shop spectre ‘Little Sue’, after a former member of staff was tragically killed nearby, and customers and cleaners began to report ghostly goings-on attributed to her. When staff in a Launceston, Cornwall, betting office had a ‘team’ photograph taken, according to manager Jane Whitaker, “there was a ghostly apparition in the background”.
Around this time I also began to take bets on proof of the existence of a previously unknown creature in Loch Ness responsible for all or some of the confirmed sightings of of the ‘Monster’, with similar odds attached. I even sponsored and organised a ‘Monster Hunt Weekend’ at the Loch in the late 1980s, with a £1million prize on offer for anyone proving the existence of Nessie. A small flotilla of searchers appeared on the water, some utilising the latest sonar scanning techniques, but the media focused on eccentric politician Screaming Lord Sutch, who arrived armed with some British Rail sandwiches he’d acquired on his trip up, which he used as Nessie bait while paddling in the shallows of the Loch.
However, this bet did land me in financial meltdown at one point when some cunning customers seized on the discovery in the Loch Ness area of previously unknown nematodes and demanded payment – which, in order to avoid adverse publicity, my boss insisted that we should cough up. I was not amused.
On a similar theme, in 1988 I sponsored a Yeti Hunt led by renowned British climber Chris Bonington, who was also attempting to scale a previously unconquered peak in the Himalayas. As his group left, they placed a 500/1 bet that they would bring back proof of the Yeti’s existence. In a blaze of publicity, Bonington returned to the UK, carrying with him what he considered conclusive proof that the Yeti/ Abominable Snowman was real – only to have it confiscated at customs and destroyed by the Department of Agriculture before it could even be checked out.
BETTING ON THE END
This was all a little far-out, but then Matthew Dumbrell wrote to me from Hampstead Garden Suburb. Would I, he asked, accept a bet from him that: “This world will end with a Big Bang at exactly 12.50pm GMT on Wednesday 11 August, 1999 AD.”
I told him I would, and that he could choose his own odds; he settled for 1,000,000/1, staking £1 – but how might we be able to pay out in the event that his prediction came true?
“We can settle up in eternity later that day,” he suggested, “where I am sure God will be well advised by the founder of your company.” (The eponymous William Hill had died in 1971.)
Having lost out once, Mr Dumbrell tried again in May 2000 with a similar wager, “that the end of time will not be later than midnight, Saturday, 31 December, 2000 AD”.
Nothing if not persistent, he kept coming back, telling me comfortingly: “Whenever
I organised a ‘Monster Hunt Weekend’ with a £1 million prize
the chief bookmaker in the sky opens the seventh and final seal, may your name also be in the Book of Life.”
It wasn’t the Book of Life that Isle of Wight man Geoff Sartin contacted me in 1996 to bet on. Jobless Geoff, 43, was caring for his poorly wife, Barbara, after she had undergone three heart operations. While he was hypnotising her one day, he told me, she had revealed the date on which she would die: 25 March 2007. Geoff wanted to bet that her prediction would come true by staking £100 at odds of 10,000/1, potentially worth £1million. He explained that “death comes to us all, and if there’s a chance for the remaining partner to be comfortably off, then one must try.” It was okay, he added, Barbara didn’t mind. “I’m fully in agreement with Geoff’s bet,” she said. “The money will give me a good send-off. I want my coffin pulled through the streets by a black horse and carriage.”
Despite his unconvincing “I’d be delighted if the bet was a loser”, I disappointed Geoff by explaining that I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of this unprecedented request and declined the bet. I did, though, mention it to the Sun’s Chief Reporter, John Kay, who wrote a story about it in the paper.
Some years later I looked at my office calendar and wondered why the date of 25 March 2007 rang a dim and distant bell. Geoff Sartin’s name jumped into my mind for the first time in over 10 years. That was it: today was the day Geoff Sartin had wanted to bet would be his wife’s last.
I rang John Kay at the Sun, suggesting a follow-up story. He loved the idea and rushed off to check out Geoff’s contact details. Some hours later he was back on the phone: “This is bizarre. There’s no trace of the family at their old address, none at all anywhere on the Isle of Wight and we can find no email or phone details, and no reference to Geoff or Barbara wherever we search…”
On another occasion, though, I did allow one particular person to place a bet on beating the death sentence his doctors had served on him. Jon Matthews was diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma in early 2007 and told he was unlikely still to be alive by the end of that year. In his late fifties and a regular customer at a William Hill shop near Milton Keynes, Jon contacted me to ask if I would accept bets that he would defy the terminal prognosis.
I was impressed by always be-hatted Jon’s insistence that positive thought could extend his life, and accepted his £100 bet that he would still be alive on 1 June 2008 at odds of 50/1; anther £100 that he would still be alive on 1 June 2009 at the same odds, and a third of £100, this time at 100/1, that he would make it to 1 June 2010.
The indefatigable Jon steamed past the first two bets, winning a total of £10,000 and becoming something of a local personality in the process. In early May 2010, within a couple of weeks of beating the odds for a third time, Jon finally succumbed to his terminal disease. I was genuinely tearful when I heard. Jon had been treated at Harefield Hospital, so I arranged that the £10,000 he came so close to collecting should be donated to that establishment to buy a vital piece of equipment they required, to which a plaque bearing Jon’s name was affixed in his memory.
FUTURE FORTUNES
If Londoner John W Richardson, who now lives in Las Vegas, fathers a child during the year he has specified, he will win £500,000 from the bet he struck with me, of £50 at odds of 10,000/1.
Why such generous odds for a man to become a dad? Because he will have something else to celebrate in that year, 2040: his 100th birthday!
Caesar Milego-Pertierra could collect even more than Richardson, having bet £1,000 at 1,000/1 (which will pay out £1 million) in early 1998 that he will make it to his century in 2031. “I have a secret formula which I will publish when I’m 100,” the Spanish-born father of two told me when he struck the wager. “I drink a glass of port every now and then and am always optimistic about the future.”
To which I responded: “You can be sure we will not come to bury Caesar.”
I accepted an even longer-lasting bet, which won’t be won or lost until 2116, when David Christie of Glasgow might finally collect £10,000 for the £2 wager he placed with me that, during that year, the Earth will be involved in a direct collision with the comet known as ‘Swift-Tuttle’.
As for my favourite weird wager over the years? I think the flurry of 500/1 bets I took that it would be proved that a famous brother and sister were actually one and the same person: not Marie and Donny Osmond, but La Toya and Michael Jackson.
I bet it crossed your mind once or twice back in the day…
✒ GRAHAM SHARPE worked for William Hill for nearly 50 years. His latest book, Vinyl Countdown: A Sideways Look at Vinyl Records, Record Shops and Record Collectors, is published by Oldcastle Books in October.