GREAT SPOT BUT HALDON TO HATS

Simon Nott brings us the bookmaking gossip from a damp day at Exeter

- By Simon Nott

It must have been a day like today and not when there's freezing horizontal rain that some forward thinking soul back in 1600 and something decided that racing atop Haldon Hill would be a champion idea.

I for one love Exeter Racecourse despite the weather it can sometimes hurl at racegoers. Not least for being one of my local tracks and I've been attending since the 1980s and holds many fond racing memories for me.

One of those was a horse called Bootscraper that nearly finished my racing career before it had hardly started. I was working with Jack Lynn in the Exeter betting ring back in the early 1990s when it was horseshoe shaped. We were betting on a selling hurdle in the middle of the card, as I remember there were plenty of runners in the race but it was quantity rather than quality. Bootscraper had a row of duck eggs next to its name but had still been tipped up by Man On The Spot, Eddie Freemantle, that day, in the Sporting Life. Very little had been happening in the ring until one of the best organised gambles I've ever seen and probably the first I'd actually seen took place.

It appeared that one man had been assigned to each bookmaker with a stake according to the strength of that particular layer, at the allotted time, in they all went. What followed was a maelstrom, the Lynns called me in, they wanted £100 back on Bootscraper which was showing 9/2 or 4/1, or at least it was.