Extract from Chapter One

Introduction

TARTAN.

Everywhere.

Lots and lots of it.

The carpet’s tartan and so are the curtains.  The cushions are tartan and the couch cover too.  There’s a tartan hip flask and a tartan hot-water bottle.  There are tartan cuddly toys and a tartan tea tray.  In the corner, there’s a tartan hat and a pair of tartan boots.  On the wall, there’s a tartan clock.  The window sill hosts a tartan notebook.  There’s even an unopened can of Tartan Special beer.

Not just any old tartan either.  This is Royal Stewart tartan, the official tartan of the Royal House of Stewart whose ancestral seat is Dundonald Castle in Ayrshire.

Given the view from the window, an unimpeded vista with that very castle at its heart, visitors might be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled into a tourist attraction’s gift shop.  Not the case.

This is the home of Kenny Easton, bookmaker, serial entrepreneur, and property magnate.  Clearly, he likes his Royal Stewart tartan.

Visitors could also be forgiven for thinking anyone who’s taken with a tartan might have taken a bit of a knock to the head.  In Kenny’s case, that’s exactly what happened.

It was late in the day and the odd half of beer and whisky had been taken when Kenny took a tumble and cracked his head on a table in his local bar.  He was relatively uninjured but that crack on the head caused a serious amount of bleeding, the extent of which he only discovered the following morning.  Not only was his bed linen caked in his blood, but the coat he’d worn for many a year as a bookmaker was sodden with his blood.

That coat, a camel-coloured wool coat of the type favoured by the television character, the downright dodgy Arthur Daley, had been Kenny’s uniform when he was running his bookmaker’s shops.  He’d worn it through thick and, now, thin, for probably 20 years.

In despair, he took it to a local dry cleaner who didn’t hold out much hope.  In the end, Kenny’s beloved coat effectively disintegrated when the cleaner went to work.

It had served him well, so Kenny wasn’t too downhearted.  And he figured, since he’d got out of the bookie business a few years back, he needed a new image.  What better, he thought, than tartan?

And so it began.  Now he’s got a proper Royal Stewart tartan suit with matching boots and hat that he’s happy to sport on many an occasion but particularly a day at the races.

“I look like an old-fashioned film star when I’ve got the tartan on and all the girls want to have their pictures taken with me,” he said.

He’s devoted to his tartan and Dundonald, the village he calls home, and where he’s a veritable pillar of the community, right down to being a trustee of the very castle that first brought that tartan to life.

And should you bump into him as he’s walking down the main street, looking for all the world like there’s no tartan on his person, ask to see the lining of his jacket.  Kenny’s got no fewer than 16 Harrington jackets, short bomber-style jackets that he alternates between.

There are no prizes for guessing how Harrington line their jackets.

Extract from Chapter Four

Starting Out

ARITHMETIC came in pretty handy when Kenny first moved into the workforce, landing a job in the office with Shanks’ Pottery, which made bathroom sanitaryware – sinks and toilets.  He had to find work somehow.  Kenny’s father had taken a number of strokes and was practically blind. Kenny was living in the house with his father and his sister Rowena.  While his pals were giving their parents the odd few shillings for their keep, Kenny had rent to find and bills to pay.  If his father hadn’t been so ill and finally died when Kenny was 17, things might have been different.

“It was simple, really.  I was looking for a job and Shanks were the first people to give me one.  They had 250 men working there, most of them starting at, say, 5.30 am and finishing at 3.15 pm, so they had eight hours at a shilling and threepence an hour, then maybe two-and-a-quarter hours at time-and-a-half and for every lavvy pan they made they got a bonus.

“I used to work this out every day, five days a week before there were computers or calculators.  It was good, old-fashioned arithmetic.  I’m not talking about Maths, just counting.  At the end of the week, I totalled it all up for each man and then took off their tax and National Insurance.  It was just a gift with numbers that I had.

“People can’t count these days.  They don’t have to.  If you can work a till these days you don’t need to count.”

But Kenny could count and, more importantly, he could count money.

“I always knew I was going to be in business.  I was always looking for ways to make money.”

And he still had an eye for the horses.

“I was still a punter on Saturdays and was still getting into the bookies’ shops years before I should have been allowed.  My first winner was a horse called William the Third – it might have been William of Orange, can’t remember.  Anyway, it won at 3-1 and I think, if you’re a punter, you’re better off losing and thinking: “I’ll not do that again.”  If you win you start to think you’re better than the bookie.  But the percentages show that for every £100 a bookie takes he pays out around £90 and that makes him £10 better off.

“There’s no such thing as a certainty.  I remember Kilmarnock was playing Montrose and a bunch of us were going to the game and we had a collection to pay for the bus.  We gave the bus money to this guy who went and bet the money on a certainty, a 1-4 shot that would give him an extra fiver.  But it got beat and he had to find all the money for the bus.  He had a big problem squaring things up that day I can tell you.”

The Shanks job was alright but Kenny figured early on he wasn’t going to get rich counting other people’s money so he kept his eyes open for opportunities.

“I enjoyed working with a lot of the girls in the office and had a lot of good fun. But the money was no good.”

As a lad, he discovered girls and drink but realised fairly quickly that he had to knuckle down if he was going to succeed.  He passed his driving test when he was 17 at the second attempt.

And then fate played its hand.

“I went on holiday to England with a few of my pals and I realised there was much more money in England than there was in Scotland.  My pals and me were looking out for cheap accommodation and ended up sleeping in a graveyard for a fortnight because it was cheap. I’d decided that I could make more money in England so I came back to Scotland and chucked my job ready to move back south when I saw a job for a trainee manager in a Coral’s betting shop in Kilmarnock.  I’d just turned 18 and they actually let me into the bookie’s shop legally then.

“There were no calculators or computers to work out the bet.  You had to do all that in your head.  So, I sailed through the Arithmetic test and, of course, I already knew about horses so I was into the job straight away.”

Ever ambitious, Kenny had been one of the first young men in Dundonald to pass his driving test and at 19 bought his first car.

“I still remember the registration number: BSN 57C.  Don’t ask me the registration number on the car I’ve got now.  No idea.  But my first car was a blue Vauxhall Viva and that was the plate.  That was when I started winchin’ – enjoying girlfriends.  I might not have been the best-looking guy in town but a car gives a lad an advantage.

“Then, sometimes you need a bit of luck and I got it when my manager was promoted and I got his job.  The gambling had paid off, even if I sometimes lost my dinner money.”

Kenny was just 20 when he took over running what was a massive betting shop.  This shop had previously been a ballroom, so it could hold a fair number of punters. It was also right across the road from the Department of Social Security offices, where unemployed guys would get their regular “dole” money.  In those days the guys got paid in cash and a lot of them got paid and went straight across the road into Kenny’s betting shop.

“It didn’t take me long to realise that the way to make serious money was to become a bookmaker myself.”

Extract from Chapter Five

Bookmaking Days

FACTORIES, sometimes even whole towns, would shut down for two weeks in the summertime in Central Scotland.  It was called The Fair, mainly because a travelling fairground would pitch up in whatever area was throwing its annual holiday.  For many firms, it meant they knew exactly when their workforce was going on holiday and it also gave many of them the chance to catch up on essential maintenance.

It might have been the Glasgow or the Greenock Fair but Kenny and a few of his pals decided to take themselves to Arran for a few days.  In Kenny’s case, it was a “bookies’ weekend” because he worked six days a week.  He caught the last boat to Arran on the Saturday night and teamed up with six or seven of his pals who were camped out in a two-man tent at the Glen Rosa campsite.

That night he went to the Douglas Hotel and then onto “the dancing” in Brodick, fully loaded with a carry-out. The following night the lads went to the dancing at Whiting Bay and that’s when Kenny met his wife-to-be.

“I saw her there on the dance floor and she dumped her bag in the middle and was dancing around it with her pals.  And that’s the night I got a “lumber” as we used to call it.

“When the dancing was finished we had to get back to where we were staying.  I think she was staying with her sister at Lamlash but she sat on my knee on the bus all the way back and then bolted up because she thought she’d missed her stop and got off in a hurry.

“As she was getting off I asked her for her phone number and she shouted it out to me along the length of the bus.  Thing is, I had a great memory for numbers so I memorised that number, and, two weeks later, I phoned her up and we ended up on a date.”

Vivien lived in Renfrew but that wasn’t an issue because Kenny had his Vauxhall Viva by then.  They dated for maybe three weeks before the night came that Kenny arrived at her door and Vivien said that her Dad wanted to talk to him.

“I got into the front room and it was like an interview.  He was asking about my prospects and what I did and I told him I was a bookmaker.  I think he thought I either made books or boots, like a cobbler.”

The parents figured out what Kenny did for a living and they didn’t approve.

“They did everything they could to split us up.”

Vivien’s father was a compositor for the Daily Express, her mother was a civil servant, they owned their own house and they wanted something better than a bookie for their daughter.

“They tried to put us off but we persevered.  I was staying in a council house with my sister and one night Vivien turned up at my door and told me she’d left home.  So she moved in with me and Rowena.  My other two sisters were living in a nurses’ flat by this time.”

It didn’t take long before they decided to marry.

“Cohabiting wasn’t the done thing in those days.  People frowned on it.”

Evens so, Vivien’s parents tried to persuade them to postpone the wedding, to no avail.

They married at the Register Office in Kilmarnock on June 14, 1974.

Kenny remembers it well: it was the day Scotland played Zaire in the football World Cup in West Germany.  Scotland won 2-0 but that was a poor result because everyone else beat Zaire by many more goals and Scotland, despite not losing a game, went out on goal difference.

“We drew with Brazil and drew with Czechoslovakia but didn’t get out of the group.  Disaster.”

Vivien’s parents may not have wanted it to happen but they attended the wedding and the reception at The Hunting Lodge in Kilmarnock.

“They were fine after that.  I think their first wedding present to us was a wee ornament or something but I’d been promoted to manager and I’d bought our own flat in Beansburn in Kilmarnock to live in after we were married.  After a year or so they gave us quite a bit of money, hundreds of pounds, to buy furniture.”

After the wedding Kenny and Vivien took themselves off to that flat for their first night as a married couple and headed off in the morning for a three-day honeymoon in Edinburgh.

“By that stage, I was on a career path and was winning prizes from the company.  It was all about percentages of your shop’s turnover.  Some managers were double my age but I was young and ambitious.  You make more money from customers doing doubles or trebles or Yankees, so I’d try to get in the customers who liked that kind of bet.  It’s a lot harder to make money from a customer who wants a £100 bet on a 1-2 shot.”

That betting shop had a nearby stationer where the workers would buy new envelopes and change their wage slips before taking their reduced wages home to their wives, dropping in to see Kenny on a Friday afternoon before doing so.

“Coral’s wanted to make me a regional manager running five betting shops in the Kilmarnock area but I wanted to go out on my own.  That was where the money was.”

Kenny applied for and got his bookmaker’s licence as soon as he was eligible, at the age of 21.  It meant he could legally take bets himself.

Vivien’s first job had been as a shop assistant but she didn’t like it much.  Her marriage certificate said she was a shoe-shop assistant and she wasn’t happy about that.  After the wedding she found an office job at the Rowallen Creamery and later started work in the local police station as a civilian officer, handling phone calls and administration.

“I figured two of us could live as cheaply as one and it meant we were able to save her wage packet.  Her wages were extra on top of mine.

“I was always planning to go on my own as a bookmaker and I knew there was a risk that I could go bust so Vivien’s wages meant that we had some back-up and that I could always come back afterwards.”

Kenny was still working for Corals when he got his bookmaker’s licence and started going to the local dog track and was an unofficial – and illegal – bookie around his local pubs.

“I remember pacing about up and down outside pubs a lot.  I had a few frights waiting for results to come in.”

Despite the risks – and the frights – Kenny opened his first shop in the December of that year.  It was an existing bookmaker’s shop in Dundonald, perfectly sited between the village’s two pubs.  And, while Dundonald was a sleepy wee village, it still had those three huge factories and their workforce passing through every day and there were people working on farms and quarries nearby so there were a lot of punters and the shop had a very good turnover.

“The guy who had the shop before me was married but he was also seeing one of the barmaids in one of the pubs so he was always in the pub.  He had guys working for him behind the counter but I’m pretty sure they were dodgy.  So he was forever laying off bets to bigger bookmakers but he was acting the big man with a fancy car and buying drinks in the pubs. But he couldn’t make the betting shop pay.

“So I made him an offer and he took it.”

Kenny paid £3,000 for that shop.  He took out a loan secured on his flat to find the money and repaid it in the space of three years – despite a crippling interest rate of 30%.

It was a poor first winter, though.  Frost meant race meetings were cancelled more often than not in the days before all-weather tracks.  But he survived and made it through spring with good Cheltenham Festival and Grand National meetings.

It was a wet spring and that’s good for a bookie. If it’s dry then the horses tend to run to form.  If it’s wet, then the horses can slip and that’s when the bookie wins.

He did so well that he opened another shop in Galston, next to The Standalane pub.  Vivien joined him in the business and took over running the Galston shop.  The previous owner couldn’t make it pay but Kenny did, often by simply steadying his nerve and taking the risk.  He had a maximum payout of £1,000 but that could be paid out over a £1 bet.

If a punter picks a 10-1 winner for that £1 and he’s got a treble bet going it means he’s got £100 going onto the next race.  And if that wins, there’s a small fortune going onto the third race.

Dundonald had three busy factories run by Massey Ferguson, Monsanto, and Skefco, all of them gone during the Thatcher era, but when Kenny opened his shops these factories were all on shift work, meaning guys could head out to work and stop to put a line on before their shift started or even after it finished.  Business became brisk very quickly, despite Dundonald being a small village of only a couple of thousand people.

Four years later he was 25 years of age and owned eight betting shops .

Suddenly he was on the other side of the fence, taking cash off punters instead of handing it over the counter.  And he was taking cash from his friends and acquaintances in the community.

“In those days you could lose money at the bookie’s but it was cash.  There were no credit cards.  The worst you could do was lose all your wages and, fair enough, some people did but they didn’t do it every week.  These days you can lose fortunes.  One bookie has just been fined £22m because somebody managed to lose £20,000 in one day on a credit card.

“Back then you could only lose so much and for most of them, it was pocket money they lost.  If they lost too much in the bookies’ they didn’t have enough money to go for a drink.  They weren’t losing their house in my betting shop.”

Kenny didn’t cost anyone else their house.  But he surely learned how to get his hands on his own.

Kenny very seldom hedged his bets – backing the same horse as his punter to offset the possibility of the horse winning.  In fact, he only hedged around 10 times in his whole career as a bookmaker.

This was despite his knowing that there were many ways the bookie could be tricked.  Results at the track were subject to a delay in messaging through the Tannoy system that routed the results through London before transmission nationwide.  And there was always the threat that telephone operators would delay sending results.  Those delays mean there was just enough time for unscrupulous punters to back winners before the results got to the bookmaker.

“There was a great story about the local guy here, a stockbroker, who had a horse called Gay Future and went to Ireland and bought another horse that looked just the same.  The real Gay Future had come in last several times but he entered the new horse as a “ringer” and it came home at 10-1 at Cartmel.  He got caught out because he’d backed the horse at a lot of bookies and he’d put the bets on as trebles.  The bookies were all looking to hedge that bet because that was a lot going onto the next race. Then he declared the other two horses as non-runners, claiming the horsebox had broken down on the way to the track.  So the bookies ended up paying out on the 10-1 shot.

“Somehow or other the Daily Record got a hold of the story and called up to ask what had happened to the other two horses.  It was the housekeeper who answered the phone and told the reporter that the other two horses were still in the field. So he was found out.

“He called that a ‘bookie coup’ and, of course, all the punters were on his side.  He’d got one over the bookies.”

And there were always arguments.  Vivien would always tell unhappy punters that they’d have to speak to her husband and Kenny had his own punters to worry about.

“You’d get guys who would just write ‘Favourite in the two o’clock race’ but if there were two races at two o’clock and the favourite won one of them and lost in the other, what do you do?

“And if there’s a horse called Uncle George and another called Andy Pandy and the guy writes down Uncle Pandy, what horse has he backed? And if neither wins does he get his money back because the horse didn’t exist?

“Whenever I had to speak to somebody I always used to have my hands in my pockets in case they thought I was up for a fight.  And I wore glasses and was quite small so I never really looked like I wanted to fight.

“Occasionally I gave in. I took the long-term view that I’d rather lose out on a single race than lose a customer who was likely to keep coming back for years in the future.  I tried to get by, keeping everybody happy.”

Bookmakers’ shops weren’t allowed to have televisions in them for fear of attracting customers.  They were “wee seedy places down a side street” and couldn’t have the words “Betting Shop” in letters any more than three inches tall on the outside.  Kenny would get around that by putting a big picture of a racehorse in his window and let the punters figure it out for themselves.

It worked because Kenny soon had shops in Kilmarnock, Irvine, and Dalry.  He put managers into all his shops and effectively became an area manager, the “spare man” running around them all, helping out at the busiest ones.

It meant a lot of stress.

“Apart from making sure all the shops were manned and trusting people to run them honestly, you had to keep on top of all your bets.  I didn’t want people phoning me up and telling me one of our punters had three bets up and was waiting for a fourth when I didn’t have time to hedge it.”

There was always the threat of going bust too.

“It got really close sometimes when I was about to run out of money.  If you had a bad run you could find yourself paying out a lot of cash.  You could always close the doors and you’d still have assets like the shop and your licence. But when the results were bad, they were bad in all my shops.

“I remember this guy who knew Michael Stout, the trainer, and he’d phone him every morning for information.  If he put the bets on early enough in the morning that would give me the chance to have a look at the other horses and see if they had a chance or I could decide to hedge the bet but if he came in and put it on just before the race I’d just have to take it.  He was a very hard man to beat.  He was always beating me.  John Brown his name was.  Used to bet in my Galston shop.  He was a businessman and wasn’t often around in the afternoon so more often than not he’d put the bet on in the morning and that gave me a chance.

“There was also this horse, Prince Carling, and they’d kept this horse away from the track, knowing it was a winner.  They went round all the wee bookie shops putting on small bets so they wouldn’t attract attention.  In the end, there was a lot of money on this horse and it came in at 33-1.  That hit me hard in all of my shops.

“This was money I knew I wasn’t going to get back.  Some bets I lost but I knew I was going to get the money back.  Some punters just keep coming back.  You could hand them £100 in £20 notes and you could practically write your name on the notes because you knew you were getting it back.  I wasn’t getting that money back.  That was planned.”

Kenny was just planning an expansion into Glasgow when his first son, Peter, was born.  He and Vivien had always wanted children and Peter’s arrival was planned.  He was interviewing a woman to be manager of his shop in St Andrew’s Drive, next to The Honours Three pub, and had just closed the deal when the baby arrived.  Fortunately, Kenny managed to be present at the birth.

“I was absolutely delighted.  I’d wanted our first child to be a boy, to keep the family name going and I called him Peter because my father was called Peter, as was my father’s grandfather.  It was the tradition in those days.”

By then Kenny and Vivien had bought a house in Kilnford Crescent, on the Auchans Estate in Dundonald with a view to starting a family.  There had been a gap between having five shops in Ayrshire and moving into Glasgow, so Kenny had money coming in without major outgoings, which was just as well.

“My biggest problem was getting a mortgage.  Banks didn’t trust self-employed people especially not bookmakers.  But I got there eventually.”

The Glasgow expansion continued quickly.  Kenny bought two shops from a chap called Thomas McGarrity, one in Partick and another in Scotstoun.  Then he closed the shop in Kilmarnock and opened another in Paisley.

That planned family was growing too.  Vivien and Kenny had two more boys, Alan in 1979, Steven in 1982, and Joanne in 1983.

“Seems alright, doesn’t it?  I was 30 with eight shops, married with four kids, and my own house.”

Kenny’s kids grew up in the village.  They all went to the village primary school, the boys joined the Cubs and the Scouts and Joanne took dancing classes and went to Rosebuds and the Brownies.

“I brought them up to appreciate their money.  By the time they left school, they all had a paper round, that they shared, taking turns about.  They weren’t overworked but they all had pocket money of their own.

“I remember taking Peter to the shop on a Sunday morning to buy the papers and he reached into the freezer to get an ice lolly.  I told him to remember he was paying for it himself because that was what his pocket money was for.  So he put this big ice lolly back and pulled out another wee one.  I think they all ended up quite tight with their money.

“I think I probably had something to do with that.”

THE EARLY ‘80s saw a strategic shift.  He went on to buy betting shops in Whiteinch, Govanhill, and Neilston but decided to move into property.  He bought four flats with four or five bedrooms each and became a bedsitting landlord.

“That was hard going. People don’t like paying their rent.  And I’m not a gangster.  The legislation was against me in many ways.  The sneaky way round it was to pretend I was running a bed-and-breakfast business.  But trying to get rent off people was very difficult.  I had to get people to sign contracts and if I had an argument I could always change the locks.  But just trying to get people to pay for their electricity and so on was very hard.

“The good thing was that values were shooting up in the areas I’d bought the flats.  Also, I got grants to do them up.  I got grants to repair the roofs and put in new windows. That area was becoming what we called a Yuppie area – Young Upcoming Professionals – and people wanted to live there again.

“But then people were installing security devices on the entrances and they became unsuitable for my bedsit business.  I bought two flats in Hillhead Street in Glasgow and I paid £15,000 each for them.  Four years later I sold them for £75,000 each.  Thing is, a few years later I saw one of them advertised for sale for £115,000 so maybe I should have held on to them.”

Kenny considered expanding the bookmaking business further but decided against it.  He had a small chain in Ayrshire and a small chain in Glasgow.  They all needed staffed and supervised.  If one of the shops was running out of money because they had a punter winning big, someone had to go there with the cash and if someone called in sick the shop still had to open so Kenny had to step in.  If the chains got any bigger he’d have needed to employ area managers and he didn’t want to lose his hands-on control.

“I was doing alright but I wasn’t doing as well as people thought I was going.  Taxes were forever going up and inflation was quite high too.  So, if you have a punter who comes in and puts a £1 bet on, two years later you can still only get that £1 off him, and all your costs have gone up.”

Bookmakers were taxed at 8% on their takings and there was a 1% levy that went to the racecourses, so margins were tight and getting tighter.

“If a guy comes in with £10 and has a couple of winners and he keeps backing horses it looks like he’s betting maybe £100.  That means you owe the taxman £10.  And that’s all the guy actually came in within the first place.  So if he ends up losing that £10 he walks away thinking I’ve got his £10 but I haven’t.  The taxman’s got it.  They were taxing turnover, not profit.

“That ended up putting all the wee bookies out of the game. These days they tax your profit.

“Then they started to encourage bookies to move into the High Street.  They allowed televisions and chairs and you could give the punters cups of tea.  Just so the Government could collect the tax.”

By the mid-1980s the big Ayrshire factories had all gone. There was a “fool’s paradise” period for a year or so as unemployed workers went through their redundancy package but eventually, the cash dried up and Kenny shut the shops in Dundonald and Galston.  He’d bought his first two businesses but he’d rented the actual property they operated from.  After that, he decided he’d only ever buy shops if he owned the property too.

“So I became a landlord.  The big bookies weren’t interested in property but my licences became very important.  They only wanted to buy the business and they wanted 20-year leases on the property.  So I ended up renting shops to Mecca, Surrey Racing, and William Hill.

“I sold the property in Neilston to a Chinese bookmaker.  Unfortunately, he got caught fiddling the tax and ended up losing a lot of money.  I sold the Dalry business to Ladbrokes.  They bought it to close it because they had another shop nearby and didn’t want the competition.  That shop became an amusement arcade in the end. And I still owned it.  I was the landlord for an amusement arcade.  Never thought that would happen.”

Kenny rented out both the Renfrew and Irvine shops to bookies before eventually selling the properties on.  He sold Govanhill and Pollokshields to The Tote because they wanted to close them.

“I did really well out of the Pollokshields shop.  It was right next to The Honours Three and that was one of the first pubs in Scotland to open all day so people from all over the area were going to that pub, drinking all afternoon, and coming into my betting shop. And there were people pulling up from all the nearby works that finished at maybe 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the streets outside my shop were packed with parked cars.  And then they put double yellow lines on the roads and that was the end of that line of business.”

The Galston shop had suffered a similar fate.  Punters could park outside but a new bypass meant that cars simply passed by.

“It ended up looking like the Bates Hotel in Psycho.”

By 1987 Kenny was out of the bookmaking business.  He’d either sold his shops or was renting them out.

“I sold the business.  All of it.”

Then all he had to do was figure out what he wanted to do instead.

These extracts are subject to copyright.