Barry Dennis, flamboyant bookmaker who tipped losers as ‘Barry’s Bismarcks’ on Channel 4

A great Turf character, ‘the Romford foghorn’ was celebrated for his rudeness and at Royal Ascot had a policy of ‘NO WOMEN, NO DRUNKS’

Barry Dennis, who has died aged 83, was Britain’s most recognisable on-course bookmaker in the 1990s and 2000s, when he was a fixture on Channel 4’s Saturday breakfast racing show, The Morning Line, alongside John McCririck.
Most memorably he would announce that week’s “Barry’s Bismarck”, the overpriced favourite he expected to be “sunk” and thus, as a bookie, was his lay of the day.
Known variously as “the Romford foghorn”, “the mouth of the Thames” or – by McCririck – “the Essex oaf”, Dennis developed his lungs as a schoolboy in Romford market, where he ran errands and scavenged waste paper to sell during the postwar shortage.
He needed the money to pay back his schoolfriends after laying Lester Pigott on Never Say Die in the 1954 Derby, who then disappointingly romped home at 33-1. The other boys assumed Dennis had done a runner, but after a two-week truancy he returned to school in triumph to make good his debts. Later he would say: “If I don’t have 25 grand in readies on me for possible big pay-outs, I feel undressed.”
In the betting ring he dressed to startle, whether in eye-wateringly bright shirts or leopard-skin stetson and movie-mogul tinted glasses. At the Derby he stationed topless Essex girls at his pitch.
As a back-row bookie, his turnover depended on luring punters away from the front-row pitches, and he was prepared to be louder – and ruder – than the rest. As Trevor Clements, racing editor of The Sun, once put it: “I want Barry Dennis snarling ‘mug’ when I put a bet on. It gives you the right to feel pompous on the rare occasions you collect.”
His mathematical brain could hold the evolving book in his head without any help from his clerk. When decimalisation threatened to become mandatory, he was heard bellowing in the Ascot ring: “3.333 recurring bar one.”
His 100-mile-an-hour patter turned waspish when punters dawdled, constricting his take. “Does your mum know you’re out?” he would bawl. He found Royal Ascot particularly trying, as ladies fumbled with their purses to put £2 each way on “the little chap”, to which he would testily reply: “They’re all little, ma’am.”
In 1993, needing to take £4,000 a race just to break even at Royal Ascot but lumbered with a book of just £294, he put up a sign saying “NO WOMEN, NO DRUNKS”. Claude Duval published it in The Sun, and by 1997 Dennis was tipping losers on Channel 4. In 1999 he became the subject of a BBC Two documentary, Bookies Never Lose. Later he had his own weekly Sun column.
His Bismarcks occasionally got him into trouble if a favourite was pulled up short and the aggrieved owners cried foul, but Dennis pointed out that he had tipped hundreds of Bismarcks, with a hit rate of 81 per cent: “They can’t have all been nobbled.”
Unlike professional gamblers, he never studied form. “Form is for mugs and they all come up with the same answer – usually wrong!” He claimed that he just picked the even-money favourite as his Bismarck.
He drove 50,000 miles a year – typically at top speed, leaning on the horn – to make as many meetings as possible, doing an evening shift at Romford dogs on his way home. By 11pm, he explained, his wife knew to have ready “a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of lemonade, a big jug of ice, a pound of steak, two fried eggs, pounds and pounds of chips and six slices of bread and butter”.
In December 1998, when the “dead man’s shoes” system was finally abolished that had allowed bookies to keep front-row pitches within a family, Dennis bought his way out of the back row with a £250,000 loan from the jumps owner David Johnson. His turnover leapt from £2 million a year to £15 million, and for a few years he shuttled his staff between meetings in helicopters.
But before long the rise of betting exchanges such as Betfair in the early 2000s strangled the on-course atmosphere. In 2014 Dennis wrote in The Sun: “We now have light boards automatically linked to the exchanges so that when a horse’s price contracts, our boards automatically follow suit. So there is little point in punters fishing for the best value: the prices are almost certainly identical throughout the ring… If that is bookmaking then I am a Chinaman.”
Barrie Dennis Middleton was born on January 24 1941 to Joseph Middleton, a carpenter who died when he was six, and Joyce, who worked in a bank.
Young Barry started cleaning the car, then manning the phone, for Leslie Carey, who took bets in his front room. When betting shops became legal in 1961, Carey soon had his own chain (later bought by Coral) and employed him as a manager.
Bankrolled by Carey, Dennis took part in the 1964 Dagenham Dog Coup, when a gang of 100 blocked the Tote windows at the greyhound track, placing so many thousands of tiny bids on two no-hoper dogs in the 4.05 that the primitive “Totalisator” computer lengthened the odds on the other four dogs – who were then backed in various combinations by a team of punters stationed in betting shops across the country.
Just before the race the phone lines at the stadium were blocked by dozens of callers, so that the off-course odds could not be fed in to the track’s Tote to correct the distortion. By that time, the track odds on the two fancied dogs – who went on to win – had lengthened from 9-2 to 9,217-1.
The take was reported to be £600,000 but the betting shops did not pay out, despite a protracted High Court battle, and Dennis had to do without the “wedding present” he was hoping to give Marian, whom he had married earlier in 1964, and who survives him with their daughter and three sons.
Barry Dennis, born January 24 1941, died October 15 2024