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Legendary Festival bookie dies23rd June 2008
The bookmaker Freddie Williams, famous in betting circles for taking on JP McManus at the Cheltenham Festival, has died at his home in Ayrshire at the age of 65. He suffered a heart attack after working at Ayr races on Saturday afternoon and a Glasgow greyhound stadium that night.
The 65-year-old Scot's annual tussle with legendary Irish gambler JP McManus became an annual feature of the Cheltenham Festival.
"Fearless" Freddie was one of the few bookmakers with sufficient reserves of both courage and cash to take on McManus, probably the biggest racecourse punter of recent years. On the Thursday of the 2006 Cheltenham Festival, for instance, he was rumoured to have laid a bet of £100,000 to £600,000 on Reveillez, the winner of the Jewson Novices Chase and then another bet of £5,000 each-way at 50-1 on Kadoun, which cost Williams £325,000 when it won.
To add insult to injury, having lost almost £1 million to McManus, he was then ambushed by thugs wielding crowbars as he drove away from the racecourse, beaten up and relieved of a further £70,000. He hired a helicopter to be airlifted in and out of the meeting last year.
Mcmanus and Williams themselves became great friends, their relationship characterised by a striking degree of mutual respect and last night McManus said: "The betting ring will be a much quieter place without him."
Williams, who also ran a successful business bottling mineral water, was a lifelong racing fan who came to bookmaking only relatively late in life. He underwent a quadruple heart by-pass in 1998, a few months before paying £90,000 for the No 2 pitch at Cheltenham, when the course decided to auction pitches. He thus realised what had been a life-long ambition to take bets at Prestbury Park: "I got loads of get-well cards after I bought the pitch, not the operation. I think they thought I had finally cracked, I'd lost it, but there's no place on earth like Cheltenham and that's where I wanted to be."
Over the next 10 years, he proved himself a natural heir to other famous racecourse bookmakers, never afraid to offer well over the odds if he believed he could get the favourite beaten.
At the 1999 January meeting he had the first of many nail-biting encounters with McManus, who placed a fortune on a horse called Buckside in a bid, Williams guessed, to test his mettle. The horse was leading until the last fence, but was caught near the line, and Williams recouped the £90,000 he had paid for the pitch in one go.
At the subsequent Cheltenham Festival he took a £100,000 each-way bet from McManus at 7/1 on his horse Shannon Gale in the Pertemps Hurdle Final. Shannon Gale finished fourth and McManus collected £175,000 from the each-way part of his wager; had the horse won, Williams would have been on the wrong end of a payout of some £900,000.
Williams had his own rules as a bookmaker: "Go with your own instincts, not the form book, particularly at Cheltenham" and "You must trust yourself". Always impeccably polite whether taking money or paying it out, Freddie was as much of a racing fan as any of his clients. He will be mourned by all who knew or did business with him.
Williams on the course