Race track

I'm a racecourse bookmaker first and foremost, I suppose, and everything else grew from that.

I have a degree in gambling studies from the University of Salford.

I am a regional director on UCORB, which is the United Council of Racecourse Bookmakers, and on course Bookmakers Association.

I am co-founder of Dragon Bet with my brother David.

And I suppose one day you'll kind of find me on a box laying bets on the racecourse.

Listen, it's tough.

It's hugely frustrating because we wanna look after punters, right? I've been around gambling literally my whole life.

My first memory was being on Chepstow Racecourse when I was five years old.

That ceremony was a burial ceremony.

It turns out that during the last months of the war, The Confederate Army turned the planter's horse track, a racecourse, it was called the Washington Racecourse, into an open-air cemetery, excuse me, prison.

And in that open-air prison, in the infield of the horse track, about 260-odd Union soldiers had died of disease and exposure.

And they were buried in unmarked graves in a mass grave site out behind the grandstand of the And by the way, there was no more important and symbolic site in low country planter slaveholding life than their racetrack.

They didn't have any names.

And they made them proper And they built a fence all the way around the cemetery, about a hundred yards long and fifty, sixty yards deep, and they whitewashed the fence.

And over an archway they painted the inscription, Martyrs of the Racecourse.

And then on May 1, 1865, they held a parade of 10,000 people on the racetrack.

So it seemed like a no-brainer.

The other thing that we should mention here with thanks is Ian Wright's Racecourse paper series was instrumental in providing most of the data in this document.

And we also had both Roger Smith and Fran James very closely involved in this at every line.

So we've been really lucky to work with a phenomenal team.