Ron Pollard, pioneer in the betting industry in Britain, dies at 89

By Bruce Weber, New York Times News Service

Wednesday, July 8, 2015 | 8:51 a.m.

You might not want to wager that the Loch Ness monster, which has made appearances either for real or in imaginations for centuries, was going to show itself indisputably any time soon. But as Ron Pollard understood, a fair number of people would make that bet.

Pollard, a British oddsmaker who recognized a human craving to gamble on anything and everything and extended the bookmaking business, legal in England, far beyond its traditional fields of horse and dog racing to politics, beauty contests and Elvis sightings, started taking bets on Nessie’s existence in 1977. A decade later, he had set the odds that she would remain mysterious for at least another year at 200-to-1.

Why such a long shot? Well, the first reported sighting was in 1452, he explained in an interview in The New York Times.

“If there was only one, it would be dead long ago,” Pollard said. “If there was more than one, they would have bred and there’d be hundreds of the buggers by now.”

Pollard, whose name was nearly synonymous with bookmaking in England, died on June 10. He was 89. Ladbrokes PLC, the London company where he worked for almost three decades, confirmed the death without stating the cause or where he died.

A gentleman bookie who entered the business as a teenager in the early 1940s, Pollard is widely credited with introducing betting on politics in Britain in the fall of 1963. This was in the wake of the Profumo affair, a tabloid sex scandal involving a teenage model and the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, a married man.

The widespread tut-tutting tainted the Conservative Party and the government of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who resigned in October 1963, citing ill health. Intense politicking, both public and behind the scenes, by three potential successors ensued, and Pollard made book on the contest. The winner, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was the dark horse, whose odds Pollard had established at 16-to-1.

While the “Tory Leadership Stakes,” as the effort was known, had only modest returns, Ladbrokes opened a book on elections the following year - straight bets on either a Labour or a Conservative victory (Labour’s Harold Wilson became prime minister) - and election betting proved to be immensely profitable. By the mid-1980s, Pollard, who prided himself on the research that went into his oddsmaking, was taking action not simply on elections all over the world (including U.S. presidential contests) but on sports, including darts, snooker, bowling and tennis; events like the America’s Cup, the Super Bowl and the Masters golf tournament; and, well, just about anything anyone wanted action on. He set odds on the Miss World contest, checking out the candidates himself - “The sexy ones never win,” he concluded - and reportedly won thousands of dollars betting himself on Mariasela Álvarez, Miss Dominican Republic, in 1982.

Pollard read parts of nominated books for the Man Booker Prize in order to set the odds. He took bets on whether aliens would land on Earth before a particular date.

A letter from a man in Surrey, England, that was framed in his office, asked: “Would you please accept the following bet: That Elvis Presley will descend to Earth in a flying saucer and re-enter the human form that he left? It is to happen by the end of 1981.” As a matter of fact, everyone who bet on Elvis’ return - and there were many, Pollard acknowledged - lost.

Ronald James Joseph Pollard was born in London on June 6, 1926. His father was an accountant. He played soccer and cricket in school and in 1943 got his first job in bookmaking as a clerk at the William Hill firm, including handling illegal bets and, in one reported instance confirmed by Ladbrokes, paying off a jockey who had thrown a race. He entered the British army at the very end of World War II, and when his service was complete in 1947, he returned to William Hill, where he eventually became manager of the accounts department.

He joined Ladbrokes, then known for catering to Britain’s upper crust (including the royal family) in 1962. He became a company director and ran its public relations arm, retiring in 1989.

Though Pollard was a legend, he didn’t always win; Ladbrokes offered 100-to-1 odds against a man walking on the moon in the 1960s.

His survivors include his wife, Patricia, and three children.

Known as an amusing storyteller and amiable company who enjoyed the attention of the media, Pollard looked upon his business as popular entertainment. He frowned on the gaming strictures in the United States - “If you sweep betting under the carpet, it gets dirty,” he said to The Times in 1987 - and looked upon his profession as a service business in the entertainment sector.

“It was abundantly clear,” he once said, “that the public would gamble on absolutely anything. If it moved, if it was on TV, if it caused an argument in a pub, they wanted to bet on it.”

Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting from London.