barney curley - working man's hero.

​A while back a friend offered to lend me his copy of ‘Giving a Little Back’, Nick Townsend’s biography of Barney Curley. I turned away the offer with the excuse that I already had a bundle of books to read and not enough time to do them justice. It may well have been the unvarnished truth. At present I have three books waiting for me once I have finished the current book that helps send me to sleep at night. But in truth I just didn’t fancy Barney Curley as subject matter. Barney Curley, or so I believed, lived amongst the more undesirable characters of the sport; in the shadows, undercover, the gamble of far more importance to him than the sport.
In part, I suspect, my assessment of him is correct. He also is rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth and he looks for all the world like an aging spiv. On the whole, though, I am wrong to besmirch his character. He might even be one of the good guys in the world.
I am wrong, on occasion. I admit to it. But then Barney Curley goes out of his way to create false impressions, to put people on the back foot. Barney Curley may have a good heart but he allows only the privileged to glimpse his good and kindly spirit.
While successful gambles or coups are thought of these days as something undesirable, gambles plotted and landed in days gone by are considered as ‘great stories to tell’, nostalgia for a time gone, to never return. The Druid’s Lodge Confederacy and in particular how Hackler’s Pride won the 1903 Cambridgeshire is a tale written about with awe and respect, even though it involved ‘getting one over the bookies by way fraud and deception. The career of that notable trainer Barry Hills would perhaps never have got off the ground but for one big winning bet, Frankincense in the 1968 Lincoln, though that comes under the category of gamble as opposed to the perhaps illegal coup of my first example.
Although either despised or held in fear and no little respect by the bookmaking fraternity and held up as a hero of the working man by punters, Barney Curley is undoubtedly an individual the like of which we shall never see again in racing, and in Nick Townsend’s book on the two triumphal gambles of his life, ‘The Sure Thing’, the intricacy of his character is rolled out with the reverence accorded to men of state or church. The book, worth seeking out and reading, certainly changed my opinion of Curley, even if my thoughts on gambling remain as entrenched as ever.
There should be a film made of Curley’s life or at least the aspect of it that involves the ‘Yellow Sam’ Bellewstown gamble or the extraordinary May 2010 Yankee that must have torn the heart out of the bookmaking fraternity, achieving what he did at the expense of a system that should have prevented at source the size of pay-out they had to endure.
The Yellow Sam gamble was only possible because Curley knew that back in 1975 there was only one public telephone at Bellewstown, the only means of racecourse bookmakers had of knowing what was going on in the betting shops around the country. By having someone occupying the telephone in the thirty minutes leading up to ‘off-time’ Curley was able to keep the starting price of his horse Yellow Sam at 20-1. It was audacious. It was a proper gamble as previous to this race Yellow Sam had never troubled the judge. Curley troubled the bookmakers that day, though, and to the tune of 300,000 Irish pounds. The equivalent of £2.5 million or close to it in today’s money.
He won a heap more in 2010, an operation conducted with military precision, with three out of four horses winning around the country, with no individual bet laid of more than £50.
Curley being Curley, though, decided to walk away from racing and landing monster gambles to concentrate on his charity Direct Aid For Africa (DAFA), his great hope for getting into heaven, to paraphrase his own words. That’s the thing about Curley, you categorise him as nothing more than a gambler, then you read not one, not two, but a host of testimonials from people who trust him 100%, who will not say a word that is ill about him. Frankie Dettori claims Curley took him to one side and told him in no uncertain terms that he risked throwing away his career if he continued to live the high-life of clubs, drink and associating with people who might not exactly be his friends. Tom Queally, Jamie Spencer, Dennis O’Regan, Declan Murphy and others all have Barney Curley to thank for his support and fatherly guidance.
I don’t know if any bookmakers will find their way into heaven but I expect St. Peter will put in a good word for Barney Curley, a darkly lit individual with a heart aglow with good deeds.