"Fearless Freddie" Williams 1943-2008

[from alt.obituaries]


Freddie Williams. who died on Saturday aged 65, earned the nickname
"Fearless Freddie" for his willingness as a bookmaker to take on any
gamble, no matter how big, and for his ability to remain calm as
fortunes were won or lost.

A miner's son from Scotland, Williams was especially celebrated for
his appearances at the Cheltenham Festival, where he was famous for
taking huge wagers that the high street chains would not touch -
especially on horses owned by JP McManus. Williams's rules included
"Go with your own instincts, not the Form Book - particularly at
Cheltenham" and "There's never a last race".

Williams once won £420,000 in a single day. But his instincts
sometimes let him down. One day in 2006 he famously lost almost £1
million to McManus; then, to add insult to injury, he was ambushed by
thugs wielding crowbars as he drove away from the racecourse, beaten
up and relieved of a further £70,000.

The day, he admitted, had not been the best of his life, but: "I'm
always the same, up, or down, it makes no difference. You have to be
able to take the rough with the smooth, or you wouldn't have any
friends, or family. And you've got to be hungry for it." Less than a
week after the attack Williams was back at the racetrack, welcoming
all comers. "He was as happy taking £100,000 bets at Cheltenham as he
was taking £2 off wee Shuggie at the dogs in Glasgow," a friend
recalled.

Frederick Williams was born on October 28 1942 at Cumnock, Ayrshire.
His father and grandfather had gone down the pits, but at 14 Freddie
failed the medical, having in his
childhood contracted polio, which left him with one leg shorter than
the other.

Barely able to read or write due to his interrupted schooling,
Williams found a job sweeping floors in a soft drinks factory at
Auchinleck, where he rose to be manager.

Meanwhile, he was showing a talent for mathematics and calculating
odds. "There was nothing to do then but work and gamble," he recalled.
"There were no televisions, so we would bet on pitch 'n' toss, when
you throw two pennies up in the air. We were at it from dusk till
dawn." He started as a bookie's runner, hiking from the pits to the
railway station and back, then began in a small way offering fixed
odds football coupons to punters in the mining community. He opened
his first book at Auchinleck greyhound track in the late 1960s.

Later he moved on to horse racing, establishing a pitch at Ayr in 1974
and subsequently at Musselburgh, Hamilton and Perth, and opening a
chain of seven betting shops.

He began to establish a reputation for daredevilry when he accepted a
wager of £40,000, handed over in used notes in a Tesco bag at a
Glasgow greyhound track. Williams was so successful that when the soft
drinks factory went bust he led a management buy-out. In 1991 he sold
his share in the factory, which made him a millionaire, and he
invested the cash in his own venture, a bottled water company called
Caledonian Clear. His business interests grew to include an
up-market Glasgow restaurant

His ambition was always to have a pitch at Cheltenham. For more than
20 years he languished on the waiting list until, in the late 1990s,
the course decided to auction pitches; he paid £90,000 for the No 2
position. Four weeks previously Williams had undergone a quadruple
heart bypass, but as he recalled: "I got loads of get-well cards after
I bought the pitch, not the operation. I think they thought I had
finally cracked, I'd lost it, but there's no place on earth like
Cheltenham and that's where I wanted to be."

At the 1999 January meeting he had the first of many nail-biting
encounters with McManus, who placed a fortune on a horse called
Buckside in a bid, Williams guessed, to test his mettle.

The horse was leading until the last fence, but was caught near the
line, and Williams recouped the £90,000 he had paid for the pitch in
one go.

At the subsequent Cheltenham Festival he took a £100,000 each-way bet
from McManus at 7/1 on his horse Shannon Gale in the Pertemps Hurdle
Final. Shannon Gale finished fourth and McManus collected £175,000
from the each-way part of his wager; had the horse won, Williams would
have been on the wrong end of a payout of some £900,000.

Despite their annual tussles, he and McManus were good friends, their
relationship characterised by a striking degree of mutual respect. "I
work hard and study form, watch the racing, and then watch the big
backers in the ring, and see what they know, against what I know,"
Williams
explained. "It's a pitching of wits, yours against theirs. That's what
I love."

In addition to Cheltenham, Williams also had pitches at Newbury and
York. He had horses in training with Jonjo O'Neill, Nicky Richards and
Emma Lavelle.

Freddie Williams had two daughters with his ex-wife, Sheila.

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