Bookmaker's clerk

I have spent the past several days building and analysing a bunch of interrelated spreadsheets. I won't bore you with the details and they're not important. The point is that whenever I work on spreadsheets I always think of my father. As well as his responsible day job Dad worked as a bookmaker's clerk on the racecourse on Friday nights, Saturdays and Saturday nights. He did so so that he and Mum could buy and eventually pay off their own home and to educate my brother and me.

So what did bookmakers' clerks do? These were precomputer days so, in their heads, they constantly recalculated the betting odds on each horse as the bets came for a race. The aim of the game was to make sure that their betting odds were competitive with the other bookmakers and that the bookmaker had the greatest chance of winning money. It was very complex and required quite extraordinary mental acuity. They use computers these days.

A good bookmaker's clerk was highly sought after and Dad was never out of a job on the racecourse. He was a fantastic arithmetician. Even though my first professional role was as a secondary Maths teacher I was never as quick as he was. If only he had had the opportunity to pursue further education but World War II got in the way. Dad thought calculators were used by lazy people. I wonder what he would think of spreadsheets.

The photo is of a couple of my father's Bookmaker's Clerk's licenses. They had to be renewed each year. Dad worked on the racecourse for about 40 years.