And he's off! Popular bookie retires after lifetime taking bets

Dunshaughlin bookmaker Jim Nugent couldn't understand how half of the village had the winner of the 1956 Aintree Grand National, ESB, backed. Even those who have only a passing interest in horseracing will surely be familiar with the tale of the 1956 race. Dick Francis, later a bestselling novelist, was riding the Queen Mother's horse, Devon Loch, to certain victory. All of a sudden, the horse, nowhere near a fence, made a sudden jump-like movement and fell. ESB sailed past him and the mystery of what happened the royal horse has been debated ever since. "In those days, there was a postal delivery on a Saturday morning in Dunshaughlin," Jim recalls. "And everyone had received their ESB bills that day. They obviously decided it was an omen - and backed the horse!" Jim Nugent was just two years in the business in Dunshaughlin then, and has just retired after a remarkable 55 years as a turf accountant. In 1953, his late father, Tommy, who lived near Ross Cross, opened the bookie's shop in Dunshaughlin. Tommy had been an amateur jockey, riding over 400 horses in his career, taking the championship title on two occasions. He worked with Tom Dreaper and enjoyed success with Prince Regent in a bumper in the Phoenix Park in the early '40s. Tommy's wife, Marjorie, was a member of the Maher family of Skryne, and the Taaffe family of racing fame were cousins. Jim recalls his father opening the shop at the same time that Mount Everest was scaled by Edmund Hillary. It was the same year Gordon Richards had his one and only Derby winner. Jim himself had no idea at the time what a bet was or how to write one, and his father gave him several columns of figures to tot up, making him do them again if he made a mistake. He worked with his father for the summer holidays of 1953, and after doing his Leaving Certificate in 1954, decided to get into the betting game. "My father wanted me to be a vet, and my mother wanted me to be a doctor, but there was one problem - I couldn't stand the sight of blood," he laughs. In November 1954, he joined his father in the small office on Main Street, Dunshaughlin, opposite Madden's. "It was very strict then - you could only have one page from a paper up on the wall with the entries. No radio. Someone backing a horse would need to know what they were backing in advance and just check it on the page," Jim explains. "And when you did find out, or if I found out your horse had won, you couldn't pick up your winnings until the next day." And finding out if the horse had won was another job. There were no results coming into local shops, only into big towns like Waterford, Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Drogheda or Mullingar. In those days of manual operators at the telephone exchanges, you would have to go through four or five operators before getting through to the 'Exchange Telegraph' results company. And the bookie was only allowed call about three times a day, taking down results with a lot of other callers. "When the Dunshaughlin exchange went automatic, it got cheaper," Jim recalls. Two or three times a week, he would get sheets of all the entries for a race maybe five days in advance of a race, but only a handful of these horses would actually end up running. Then, he had a brainwave. He got a second phone into the shop, and acquired an amplification system where he would put down the receiver beside a speaker and relay the results and some commentaries into the shop for the customers. It was a simple idea ahead of its time and had bookmakers from Navan and further afield coming to view it. On one occasion in the 1970s, Jim was responsible for the nation receiving the Irish Grand National results from Fairyhouse. The line between the Ratoath track and the exchange in Dublin had come down in a storm on Easter Sunday night, but there was a line available between Ratoath and Dunshaughlin, from where Jim was asked by the Exchange Telegraph to send on the results to Dublin for broadcast. All bets had to be entered in a tax book and totted, and there were regular visits from the Revenue carrying out inspections. If you hadn't your returns in the Customs House by a Tuesday, they would be calling you to let you know. In those days, gambling was frowned upon in society and a lot of bookies, particularly in larger towns, were on side streets. Laws were very strict, and Jim recalls a garda in Dunshaughlin, as late as the 1970s, asking him to turn off a radio he was listening to on his own in the shop one day to get results of some local horses running. "It was all horseracing. Some lads might like a bet on a Leinster Final, or an FA Cup Final. Bookies only became interested in dog racing in the late '70s," Jim recalls. The advent of more sporting channels on television saw a growth in betting on sports such as football, golf and tennis, with golf very big in betting, as well as betting on numbers games such as Lotto numbers. "And the number of women betting has dramatically increased," he believes, adding that the modernisation of facilities in the 1990s contributed to this. This was brought about by the entry of many of the big British chains into the marketplace. About 20 years ago, Bambury Bookmakers, run by Jimmy Finlay and his wife, Barbara Bambury, whose family was in the bookmaking business in the south, came on board with Jim and a new premises was opened in Dunshaughlin, rivalling any of the bigger chains. The television screens and technology were a far cry from the old telephone exchanges of the 1950s. Jim continued to work with Bamburys for another 20 years, and remains on hand to give a dig out whenever needed, and has trained a new generation of Finlays and staff into the business. Looking back, he says that if a horse called Coneyborough, owned by the Osbornes in Kildare, had won the National back in the early days, they wouldn't have survived their first year in business, such was the support it had from customers. A good year was the famous Foinavon win in the 1967 Aintree renewal, at 100/1. "Nobody had it," Jim says. He remembers the former parish priest of Dunshaughlin backing Ayala, National winner in 1963, and coming down to collect his winnings. "He wouldn't get out of the car," recalls Jim. "And he said he picked the horse because he was following the tennis, and the horse was named after a Chilean player." The most money he ever held for a horse, when converted to present day values, was for Lord Fingall's Roddy Owen when it was running in the King George in 1958. Lucky for him, it didn't win then, but it did win the Cheltenham Gold Cup the following year. He recalled one local man backing every horse in a flat race, so he could boast he backed the winner in the pub, and another character who would come into the shop with his rosary beads while selecting a horse. Jim's own biggest pull, from a Dublin bookie, was a £5 each way bet on Last Suspect in the 1985 Aintree National, a horse that came out of the Dreaper stable but was trained in England by Tim Forster. He wasn't going to back it but his father kept hinting at it. It won at 50/1. And one of his favourite customers was a man who, on moving to the Dunshaughlin area from the west of Ireland in the 1950s, came into his office to order peat turf for the fire. This particular man soon discovered what a turf accountant was and became a regular customer up to the time of his death!