Ron Pollard

From the Daily Telegraph's Obituary pages, 5 July 2015:

Ron Pollard, who has died aged 89, changed the face of British betting by taking the bookmaking business beyond horse and greyhound racing into the more exotic arenas of beauty contests, politics, book prizes and the arrival of aliens from outer space.

Guided by his principle that “betting should be fun”, Pollard’s genius was to realise that many punters would cheerfully bet on outcomes far less likely than their being struck by lightning. “It was abundantly clear”, he once said, “that the public would gamble on absolutely anything. If it moved, if it was on TV, if it caused an argument in a pub, they wanted to bet on it.”

His aim was always for his firm, Ladbrokes, to be first with anything new, thus raising its profile and encouraging more punters to use it. Having introduced betting on cricket, golf, tennis, darts and snooker, in 1977 Pollard offered odds on the existence of the Loch Ness Monster; in the same year Ladbrokes started to take bets on the arrival of aliens on Earth, giving 500-1 to a group in California run by a woman who claimed to be a reincarnation of the Mona Lisa.

Pollard offered odds of 1,000-1 against Elvis Presley returning from the dead. Although he conceded that this was a “tasteless exercise”, Ladbrokes took so much business that it soon had a £2·5 million liability, and he had to cut the price to 100-1. The safest bet he ever laid was placed by a teenage girl: 5,000-1 against her taking tea with a reincarnated Elvis by the end of 1982.

Although these stunts were not always profitable – Ladbrokes had offered 100-1 against a man walking on the moon in the 1960s – he appreciated that they reaped for his firm “the most precious commodity of all: publicity”.

Pollard did not attribute his success entirely to his own acumen. He was a self-confessed spiritualist who believed that he was guided by a 15th-century bearded Chinaman in a white skull-cap. His interest in this field had been aroused in 1955 when, aged 29, he accompanied his mother-in-law to Kennards, a department store in Croydon, where she consulted a medium.

Although then a sceptic, Pollard also saw the medium, who caressed the young man’s comb before pronouncing: “Goodness gracious, I wish I was going to have your life. You are going to be in all the papers, everyone wants to know what you are saying, and you are going to Buckingham Palace [to] meet members of the Royal Family.” It was she who alerted him to the presence of his Chinaman. Twenty-four years lat er Pollard was honoured as “Spiritualist of the Year”.

His greatest coup came in 1963, when he introduced betting on politics with the “Tory Leadership Stakes”: “For two weeks I did not know if I was a bookmaker or a film star. The telephone did not stop ringing. I was constantly on television and radio. Everyone wanted a quote.” Sir Alec Douglas-Home (the eventual winner, who had initially ruled himself out of the contest) was installed at 16-1; Ladbrokes took £14,000 on the exercise, making a profit of only £1,400. But the company was now known across the world.

At the next general election, in 1964, Ladbrokes opened a book. The hotelier Maxwell Joseph bet £50,000 on a Labour victory, winning £32,272 when Harold Wilson emerged with a five-seat majority. Had the Tories won, the firm would have lost £1·5 million — money it did not have. Pollard was so concerned about this outcome that he resolved to commit suicide in the event of a Conservative victory.

The £640,000 that Ladbrokes took on that election was the record at the time for any single event (including the Derby or the Grand National). In the general election of 1966 the firm took £1.6 million.

Before long, Pollard was being entertained by MPs at the House of Commons. At the time of the Conservative Party’s leadership election of 1975 he was invited to lunch at White’s, where someone inquired what odds he was offering on Margaret Thatcher to win the Tory leadership. Pollard replied: “Fifty to one.” Pollard’s companion confided: “I would be very careful if I were you.” The odds were immediately slashed to 20-1.

Occasionally, Pollard’s political antennae (or his Chinaman) let him down, as in the general election of 1970, which the Conservatives unexpectedly won, costing Ladbrokes around £80,000. Some members of the board wanted Pollard sacked; but the chairman, Cyril Stein, remained loyal, telling his colleagues: “If he goes, I go.” The odds-maker survived.

Ronald James Joseph Pollard was born in London on June 6 1926. His paternal grandfather distributed relief money to the unemployed, and would visit pubs in Southwark disguised as a chimney sweep to see if any of his clients were spending their welfare on beer. Although Ron’s father was the accountant to a mineral water company, the family had little money and his mother worked from home as a glove machinist. At school in Peckham Ron failed to shine academically but enjoyed playing football and cricket. He left with no qualifications.

He got a job as an office boy in a building firm at Peckham, learning bookkeeping. On Saturdays he went greyhound racing at Catford. Then, in 1943, he became a ledger clerk with William Hill at the bookmaker’s office in Park Lane. At first he ran errands, such as paying a jockey who had obligingly finished second on a hot favourite at Goodwood. At this stage Hill’s was operating illegally by handling cash betting, which was then allowed only on the racecourse (transactions off-course had to be on a credit basis).

Although he was called up for the Army, Private Pollard was still at Westcliff-on-Sea on VE Day. He then served on the Gold Coast, where he was promoted to sergeant and won the Gold Coast ping-pong championship two years in succession.

He returned to Britain in 1947, and was demobbed the following year, returning to work for William Hill. He was made a course clerk, recording the bets taken by the Hill’s representative, and occasionally acting as the bookmaker at some of the smaller meetings; he was then appointed manager of the accounts department.

Pollard joined Ladbrokes as credit manager in 1962, the year the firm opened its first betting shops. “These were still the days of credit betting, and you had an account with Ladbrokes at their Burlington Street offices only if you were in Debrett,” he said. “If you were in trade, no matter how prosperous, you had no chance of an account with the firm that had a direct telephone link to Buckingham Palace for the regular royal bets that would be struck, sometimes daily.”

Before long he had been appointed general manager of Ladbrokes, and, in 1964, he was made a director of Town and Country Betting, the Ladbrokes holding company which was to become Ladbroke Racing. In the same year he became the firm’s PR director, remaining there until his retirement in 1989.

Among Pollard’s most famous stunts were his forays into the Miss World contest. These did not endear him to the organisers, Eric and Julia Morley. After Julia Morley accused him, apparently without irony, of “dragging [the contest] into the cattle market”, and banned him from the Miss World rehearsals in a television studio, Pollard disguised himself as a carpenter (complete with overalls, cloth cap and a tool kit) and spent a morning assessing the attributes of the candidates on whom he was to make a book.

On another occasion he assumed the character of a waiter, sporting a false grey moustache, to penetrate the dining room at the Dorchester where the finalists were attending a function. Pollard was extremely successful in predicting the outcomes of Miss World, and in 1982 personally won £5,000 when Miss Dominican Republic took the title. His guiding principle was: “The sexy ones never win.”

When it came to fixing odds for the Booker Prize, Pollard would read the first 60 or so pages of a novel; a similar number in the middle; and the final 60.

Pollard himself was not a habitual gambler (betting “only when I thought I knew something”) and did not have a high opinion of those who were: “The reason why people bet has nothing to do with money. They do it because they want to get one up on the other fellow and because they want to be right.”

He was an entertaining man and a fine raconteur who courted, and made many friends among, the press. A lifelong socialist, his greatest regret was that he never became an MP; he claimed to have been offered a seat by all three main parties.

In 1991 he published an autobiography, Odds & Sods: my life in the betting business.

Ron Pollard is survived by his wife, Pat, and three children.

Ron Pollard, born June 6 1926, died June 10 2015