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Racing Rogues

The Scams, Scandals and Gambles of Horse Racing in Wales

Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd

THE RINGERS

1.1 THE SILVER BADGE AND SHINING MORE CONSPIRACY CASE

A report in the Western Mail dated October 22 1920 read: "The Stewards of the National Hunt Committee have disqualifed Jazz the winner of the Cottrill Novices Hurdle at Cardiff on Easter Monday and also disqualified Silver Badge which was in reality Shining More, winner of the Malvern Selling Race at the December Cheltenham Meeting."

Let us go back to that December 29, 1919 Cheltenham meeting to find out what that report was really all about. It was a fine day and crowds were flocking to the spiritual home of steeplechasing by car, bus and train to witness the riding skills of the famed Welsh jockey Jack Anthony who landed a brilliant hat-trick over the Prestbury Park course with Wavylace, Tally-Ho and Garryvoe.

The First World War over, people were beginning to enjoy themselves again and most of the large crowd were, understandably, still in good spirits after the Christmas holiday. The third race on the card was the Malvern Selling Hurdle run over two miles with prize money of 100 sovereigns. There were only six runners and the locally trained Governor Wood was made a 6/4 odds-on favourite. The Gnat was second best at 4-1, Tom Berney a 7-1 chance with the three remaining runners – Silver Badge, Mount Felix and Vaulx – all on offer at 10-1 or over.

It is worth mentioning that the last named was ridden by Lester Piggott's father Keith, who incidentally finished down the field, but went on the win the 1925 Welsh Grand National at Cardiff.

One of the runners on the racecard, which was trained privately by Samuel Berg, of Epsom, was described as "Silver Badge, a bay mare (pedigree unknown) purchased at Army Sale, Bristol, March 18, 1919." Shortly before the race, Cyril Lawley, aged 43, a motor-engineer of Wentworth Mansions, Hampstead, and the apparent owner of Silver Badge, had approached Tom Hulme, a well-known jockey, and asked him to ride Silver Badge telling him it was a good jumper. He offered him £50 to ride it and after agreeing to take the mount Hulme asked Lawley to get the mare saddled. Lawley did not seem to understand and it was left to his companion Peter Christian Barrie, a 32 year-old racehorse owner and amateur rider, to saddle up Silver Badge. It came as a great shock to those who had backed the odds-on favourite, and indeed to most of the other punters, when the said Army remount, confidently ridden by Hulme won, easing up by six lengths from The Gnat with Governor Wood a further three lengths back in third place.

Very little interest had been shown in Silver Badge before the race. This was not really surprising as the mare had been almost covered with rugs. But, the race over, it did not take long for someone to smell a rat, as can be seen by this report which appeared in the Western Mail the next day: "The Malvern Selling Hurdle went to Silver Badge who, though starting without a quotation, was so much liked when she entered the sale ring that the bids went up to 510 guineas before the hammer fell." Then, in somewhat guarded terms, the report went on to say: "Silver Badge, as a matter of fact, might be a valuable mare, for no-one knows who she is or what she is. She may have won hurdle races and steeplechases innumerable under another name for anything anyone knows to the contrary, she being one of the animals who have left their identity completely behind them in France."

Seven months later, in July 1920, at Bow Street (London) Police Court, a turf conspiracy case began that was to shock the racing world. Before Graham Campbell K.C. were Norman Weisze, aged 40, London's biggest pearl merchant, who resided at Hailsham Road, Kensington, and Cyril Lawley. Both were charged with conspiracy along with Barrie, in that they tried to obtain money by fraud at Cheltenham Races by running the more than useful mare Shining More in the name of Silver Badge when in fact the latter horse never existed. To complicate matters, Barrie and a bloodstock dealer and trainer called Walter Hopkins, aged 42, of Ashstead, Surrey, had been previously charged with conspiring to obtain money from Messrs Weatherbys in connection with the alleged substitution of the three-year-old Jazz for the two-year-old Coat Of Mail at Stockton in the October of 1919.

However, in the Silver Badge/Shining More case, it was revealed that Weatherbys had received a letter from 86 Belsize Lane, Hampstead, which had been signed by a Cyril S Lawley, Lieut. R E(retired) describing how he had purchased a mare at some Army Sales yard held in Bristol. He told, in his letter, that he had been unable to trace the mare's pedigree, but he wished to enter her for the Malvern Selling Hurdle in the name of Silver Badge. A few days later, Weatherbys having replied to the letter, Lawley called on them and gave them the information identifying the mare he had described as aged, brown in colour, and of unknown pedigree. The court heard how on the morning of the race,the Clerk of the Course received a telegram from Lawley, giving the racing colours in which Silver Badge would be running and declaring her weight as 11st 13lb. They also heard how jockey Tom Hulme was engaged at the last minute, for a fee of £50 and how Barrie, having been seen giving him his riding instructions before the start, took his place in the stands to watch the mare win very easily indeed. In accordance with the conditions of the race, the winner was put up for auction. This was where Norman Weisze, the actual owner of Shining More, became involved.

There was some brisk bidding and Weisze, as Mr Norman, had to go to 510 guineas to buy back the mare. No doubt it was the fact that Weisze, who had put up the money to organise the coup, was prepared to go to 510 guineas, a considerable sum then, to buy the mare back that started tongues wagging and enquiries to be made. The cause of the perpetrators was not helped when it was discovered that the owner's address was entered as Downs, Hurst, Epsom, instead of Belsize Lane, Hampstead. Enquiries at Epsom soon revealed the fact that a day or two before the race the mare Shining More had left Samuel Berg's Epsom stables and was sent to Waterloo. Later the horse was traced to Cheltenham and eventually back to London. When Shining More was brought up from Epsom stables she was subjected to some treatment which made her colour very dark. Also, a white blaze on her forehead, along with a white patch on her hind fetlock, were completely obliterated.

Stable lad Alexander MacFarlane, employed by Barrie at Downs House, Epsom, told the court that Barrie had one or two good horses in the yard including Shining More, which he described as a very good mare. In fact, Shining More had actually won at Cheltenham a month before she scored over the same course under her false name, Silver Badge. MacFarlane told how, on Barrie's instructions, he had taken Shining More from Epsom to Hampstead and went to fetch her back after the race.

When Berg was questioned by the police at Epsom Police Station he said: "Treat me kindly. I shall give you no trouble. I was going to give myself up. Whatever I have done I have been the dupe of others. I know nothing about Jazz or Coat Of Mail. I trained Shining More. I got permission from the Jockey Club to train for Mrs Barrie. I know that Shining More went and ran at Cheltenham and when it came back to my yard I could not believe it was the same horse. It had been coloured over and it had been well pulled."

As it happened, they had made such a good job of disguising Shining More that pints of petrol and other cleaners had to be used to get the mare back to her natural colour. During the trial, Cheltenham Course bookmaker Louis Burnett told how Weisze had placed £600 on Silver Badge. Several different off-course bookmakers gave evidence that they had accepted from Weisze one bet of £100 by telephone half-an-hour or so before the race, another of £500 and a third of £25. But how much was wagered off the course in telegrams, no-one will ever know.

For his part in the conspiracy, Weisze, who had left Hungary in 1890 to live in England, was sentenced to 15 months jail and after council had contended that the verdict was a grave miscarriage of justice, leave to appeal was granted.

Lawley was fined just £100, the judge taking an extremely lenient view, while Barrie, the only one to plead guilty to all the charges against him, was sentenced to three years penal servitude. Justice Greer said in sentencing the former Australian soldier, who had been wounded at Gallipoli, that he was: "One of the prime movers in a series of racing frauds." Berg, who was found guilty in this particular case, was sentenced to nine months for his part in another racing fraud involving the running of a three-year-old in a two-year-old race.

However, like the Jazz and Coat Of Mail affair that's another story altogether.

1.2 THE RINGER SCANDAL THAT SHOCKED the RACING WORLD

On August Bank Holiday Monday 1978, bookmakers at Newton Abbot Racecourse were stunned when a horse down on the racecard as In The Money, which had been backed from 33-1 to 8-1 before the bookmakers refused to take any more bets on it, stormed home a 20 lengths winner of the Hatherleigh Selling Hurdle race. The horse, which was supposed to have been racing for the first time in three years, was ridden by Welsh jockey John Williams, one of a handful of jockeys who can claim to have ridden in the Derby and the Grand National.

In The Money's trainer, Crickhowell's John Bowles, a former amateur rider of note, who was saddling his first winner as a trainer, had to go to 1,100 guineas to retain the horse at auction following the race which had netted him £525 in prize money. One of the bookmakers on the racecourse that day was Cardiff's George Parsons, secretary of the Welsh Bookmakers Association. He was to tell the press: "With 20 bookmakers at the course there was a minimum of £15,000 to £20,000 paid out to backers. That was without reckoning what could have been won off the course and on the Tote."

With bets placed at bookmaking shops throughout the country, the betting coup was later thought to have netted around £65,000, quite a considerable sum in 1978. With this amount of money involved and the amazing improvement in form by the horse in question it was little wonder that racecourse security officers on behalf of the Jockey Club began to make some enquires. After all, In The Money, later to be described as "A pigeon-toed, broken down hack" had ran half-a-dozen or so times in the past and had failed to complete the course on each occasion!

Calling at Bowles's training yard, so that they could compare the identity marks on In The Money's official passport documents, the Jockey Club officials learned that the horse had been slaughtered at a Bristol abattoir the morning after the race. Bowles told them: "In The Money went lame and I did not wish to see the old boy suffer." However, following a tip-off received by former National Hunt jockey Taffy Salaman, who had been associated with Bowles but who was then training at Lambourn, police later visited Bowles and asked him about another horse called Cobbler's March, a more than useful sort, and a winner of six races. Bowles admitted that he once had the horse in his yard.

He claimed that he had bought the horse for a local girl, Becky Beaumont, to ride in point-to-points adding that he didn't tell his wife as she might have thought that they were having an affair. He also said that Cobbler's March had died a few months before adding: "The horse never got fit for racing. It died in May. We gave proof to the Jockey Club and they accepted my explanation."

Miss Beaumont, then in her 20s, who lived near Abergavenny not far from Bowles's yard confirmed Bowles's story: "We don't have a relationship. He bought the horse for me only as a point-to-pointer."

However, by an amazing coincidence, a former owner of Cobbler's March, a racecourse photographer called Colin Wallace, who was on duty at Newton Abbot that day, had in the past taken pictures of both In The Money and Cobbler's March and still had them in his possession. It was mainly on photographic evidence that in 1980 after a two week trial at Exeter Crown Court, Bowles was given an 18 month suspended sentenced and fined £1,500 after being convicted on two counts of deception. Throughout the trial and afterwards, Bowles insisted that it was In The Money and not Cobbler's March that had won the Newton Abbot race.

The Jockey Club though had no doubts and declared him a disqualified person until the year 2000, one of the severest sentences to be handed out by the Jockey Club in the history of the turf. However, Bowles continually defied the Jockey Club ban and had the cheek to turn up at Newton Abbot in August 1986 where he was escorted from the racecourse by security staff. He was also a regular visitor to point-to-points and eight years after being warned off was fined £500 after attending various point-to-points and Cheltenham Racecourse.

In 1989 he failed in an appeal court bid to clear his name, claiming fresh evidence. The judges, headed by Lord Lane the Lord Chief Justice, refused to hear evidence from a former stable lad and apprentice jockey Jeffrey Kear who claimed that he had lied when he gave evidence for the Crown at Bowles's trial. That same year Bowles's son Lee was fined £50 by the Jockey Club. His horse Katesville, winner of the men's open at the Tredegar Farmers at Llantarnam in May was not qualified to be entered or start in the race as its parentage was not as previously recorded in the General Stud Book. The disciplinary committee of the Jockey Club considered the evidence, including a written request from Mr Bowles that the committee deal with the evidence in his absence, and found him to be in breach of Jockey Club regulations. His father was also fined £1,000 after the same disciplinary committee ruled that he had been in breach of Jockey Club regulations by attending the Pentyrch point-to-point on April 22 while a disqualified person. In a statement to the Jockey Club, Bowles had admitted that he had attended the meeting.

1.3 GOMER CHARLES AND THE FASCINATING FRANCASAL AFFAIR

Walking home from the Western Mail offices in Cardiff, in the early hours of the morning of December 12 1966, after finishing my night shift, I saw two policemen standing outside number 22 Park Place which was the residence of Mr Gomer Charles.

I was soon to learn that Mr Charles, who has been aptly described as "a jolly looking, double chinned Welsh bookmaker", had, around seven hours earlier, been killed. Two men had rung his doorbell and when he had opened the door, one of them threw pepper in his face and the other shot him in the chest.

Twelve years earlier Mr Charles, then aged 46, had found himself in the dock of the Old Bailey along with Henry George Kateley, 42, a Maidenhead bookmaker, Victor Robert Colquhoun Dill, 56, a Chelsea dealer, William Morris Williams, 47, a builder's assistant from Kentish Town and William Rook, 57, an engineer from Buckinghamshire. They had all pleaded not guilty to conspiring to cheat and defraud Bath Racecourse Company by falsely representing that a horse running in the two o'clock race at Bath on July 18,1953, in the name of Francasal, was in fact, Santa Amaro; and conspiring to win money by false pretences.

Had they not employed a Rhondda Valley scrap metal dealer called Leonard Phillips to scale a telegraph pole and cut through the 'blower' line which linked the racecourse to the outside world they might well have got away with it.

Mr Phillips, when he was charged with "unlawfully and maliciously cutting a cable, being part of a certain electric telegraph belonging to Her Majesty's Postmaster General, contrary to Section 37 of the Malicious Damage Act,1861," told the police, "A fellow I know as Bill came to see me. He offered me 35 nicker (pounds) to do the job … I am only a small end in the big wheel I don't know the big shots." Phillips went to jail for three months refusing to name his accomplice who was said to have actually cut the wire while Phillips held the ladder.

The coup had been planned some months earlier with the setting up of betting contacts throughout the land. Firstly, accounts were opened up with other bookmakers so that those involved could place bets on the horse that would win them a fortune. Then, to land a coup of this magnitude, two horses that looked alike were to be bought very discreetly. One of the perpetrators of the scam, Morris Williams, took a trip across the Channel to France where he bought two two-year-old bay colts. He paid £2,000 for Santa Amaro and £820 for Franscasal, whose form was inferior to that of Santa Amaro.

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Excerpted from Racing Rogues by Brian Lee. Copyright © 2016 Brian Lee. Excerpted by permission of Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd.
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