The Druid's Lodge Confederacy: The Gamblers Who Made Racing Pay

When Barney Curley recommends a "Must read" book about gambling I take a definate interest. Unfortunately the book seems to be out of print at present which is unfortunate. Anyway here is the skinny on what occurred!!

Yesterday (3 Oct) marked the 100th anniversary of one of the more spectacular racing coups.

When Hackler's Pride won the Cambridgeshire in 1904 it is estimated his connections, the Druid's Lodge Confederacy, made, in modern terms, more than £10m from their wagers. Ever so slightly more than they had made the year before, when the same horse won the same race.

To win consecutive Cambridgeshires takes some doing. To take the bookmakers for such a monumental ride verges on the epic.

The story is best told by Paul Mathieu in The Druid's Lodge Confederacy - The Gamblers Who Made Racing Pay .

The Confederacy was an eclectic bunch. It was headed by Percy Cunliffe, an Old Etonian gold speculator who weighed in at more than twenty stones and 'was not a man much given to smiling'. The man responsible for 'planking' the money down was Wilfred Bagwell Purefry. Called 'Pure' by his friends, he collected rare orchids, invested heavily in music hall, bred racehorses and was a director of the Autostrop Safety Razor company, a competitor of Gillette.

The funds were fronted by Captain Frank Forester, a dedicated huntsman who was 'a rather terrifying man in the early stages of a run'. And Edward Wigan, a small, extremely uncommunicative man, with a fondness for milk puddings, who pronounced the word coup as 'cowp'.

Another Old Etonian, he was criticised by one of his masters for 'only paying enough attention to turn what I've said into a Spoonerism'. The quintet was made up by the Irish vet Holmer Peard, who bought Sceptre and The Tetrarch and oversaw the trials that the Confederacy ran at their stables at Salisbury Plain.

The planning behind Hackler's Pride's initial campaign was meticulous. After one early impressive run at Hurst Park she was, writes Mathieu, 'run neither openly nor very honestly'. To confuse the bookmakers further, the Confederacy indulged in a pea-and-thimble game by entering three other horses in the Cambridgeshire. This was so successful that when the London clubs started offering odds, Hackler's Pride was available at 25-1.

To say Pure took advantage is an understatement. Employing contacts as various as a Birmingham New Street station-master, a dentist in Woking and a priest, they piled the money down. She started at 9-2 favourite. The race was a formality. 'Almost from the fall of the flag it was a one-horse race. The judge gave it as three lengths. It might have been 33,' was the verdict in the Sporting Luck .

The next year they repeated the dose. Hackler's Pride ran unconvincingly, they played the pea-and-thimble game and then backed Pride down from 100-7 to 7-2 joint favourite. This time it was a closer run thing as the horse won by a neck. Before the race, a stable lad had approached Cunliffe to tell him he had dreamed that Hackler's Pride had won. Cunliffe, unsurprised, replied: 'Indeed. What were second and third?' - buzzle.com