'Racing’s most celebrated and successful punter' - Howard Wright tells the story of Timeform founder Phil Bull

In this article first published in the Racing Post on September 1, 2011, Howard Wright profiles Timeform founder Phil Bull

• Racing Post founding news editor Howard Wright dies at the age of 79 

When Bull the Biography was published in September 1995, a promotional flyer distributed by the publishers Timeform described the account of the life and loves of its late founder Phil Bull as “the long-awaited story of racing’s most celebrated and successful punter, the man who won over £4.5 million.”

Had the book, which remains available through all good literary websites, been published this September, the tagline would have been updated to “the man who won over £7.4 million.”

That is the measure of the rate at which inflation has straddled Britain over the last 16 years.

It is also the measure by which the Yorkshire miner’s son, who gave up teaching pre-teenage schoolchildren in London to produce racing information for his and the public’s benefit as punters, can be judged.

As a schoolboy Bull bet in shillings, today’s fivepences. In his prime, from 1943-1952, he made successive net annual profits that if replicated now would total more than £6.3m, with in excess of £2.06m coming in a two-year purple patch immediately after the war.

Even before then, shortly after Bull quit teaching, he won enough money from backing the 1940 Derby winner Pont L’Eveque to move from a Victorian, brick, terraced house in Balham to a five-bedroomed, double-fronted detached house, built of London stone with a large rear garden, in a sought-after residential area of Putney.

Bull, a devout atheist and latterly champagne socialist, was not afraid to invest his money, and he used betting to finance both a business and the lifestyle to which he grew accustomed on his return to Yorkshire in 1944.

“I’m not a gambler,” he was to say in notes prepared in 1969 for a never-to-be-published autobiography. “Betting as such doesn’t interest me; I couldn’t be interested in bingo or roulette, they are pure gambling.

“Racing is different. It’s a continuing play, with a fresh set of individual characters every year. Not a who done it, but a who’ll do it.

“There’s a challenge to solve, and success or failure is reflected in one’s bank balance. A fascinating challenge to one’s skills.”

Bull’s fascination can be traced to his early childhood. ““My mother was a schoolmistress,” he told a bookmakers’ annual dinner in Liverpool in 1964. “Very early she taught me to count correctly – one, 5-4, 6-4, 7-4, two.

“While other boys learned that a double was a large whisky, a treble was a boy chorister and an accumulator was a device for storing electricity, my mother was at pains to explain the true meaning of these words.”

Apocryphal? Maybe, but Bull’s mathematical skills in relation to racing began to be honed in the process of gaining a modest degree at Leeds University, where became interested in the statistical analysis of race times.

“The time a race takes to run a certain distance depends on many things: the conformation of the track, the state of the going, wind strength and direction, and the pace at which the race is run. Unless all these things are taken into account, the bare time itself is meaningless,” he wrote later.

Bull’s 1969 autobiographical briefing, written in the third person, added: “He developed a technique of evaluating the real value of the time performance of a horse. It was very successful, and Phil Bull bet on his conclusions with considerable profit.

“He then began a mail order Time Test service, selling the information to the public. This too was very successful, so he gave up teaching.”

Produced originally under the name of William K Temple, since Bull’s status as a teacher precluded using his own, the Time Test was responsible for both his first substantial bet and his first winnings of over £10,000.

Landing the gambles

Bull marked down Dante as “a brilliant two-year-old” in Best Horses of 1944, the third of the now familiar annuals that turned into Racehorses, and argued there was sufficient evidence to suggest he would stay well enough to get the Derby distance.

He had a “serious bet” on Dante in the 2,000 Guineas, and having decided that defeat by Court Martial was for want of “further distance,” he had £1,000 each-way at 5-1 within an hour of his Newmarket defeat.

“The following day he was advertised at 10-1,” he recalled in an interview with Geoffrey Hamlyn. “So I went in again and altogether backed him to win about £14,000.”

Dante started 100-30 favourite for the Derby, and won by two lengths. Bull collected today’s equivalent of £456,000 towards an annual profit that would now be worth nearly £1.2m.

The following year Bull’s again substantial winnings went towards buying his final home, The Hollins on the outskirts of Halifax – later described as “the nearest thing to a castle in Calderdale” – for £8,750.

In 1949, when Bull won today’s equivalent of £830,000, he used the proceeds from backing one of selling-plate king Bob Ward’s specials – Hello Spring in a two-year-old race at Doncaster – to set up his mistress Nell Oxley and their two children for life, with a house, car and annuity.

In absolute terms, though, Bull’s best year was 1952, when he netted £37,892, according to the betting records he kept meticulously from 1943-74.

By then his inability to produce the Best Horses annual on time had led to his abandoning time figures and taking up form ratings compiled by Dick Whitford, who worked for Bull from 1945-49 but never received proper recognition for his contribution to the new publication, Timeform, from his boss.

When Whitford left, after Bull refused him a cut of the profits, compiling ratings continued in other hands, and Bull prospered, notably backing a recommendation in Racehorses of 1951 for Zabara’s 1,000 Guineas chances. Bull’s eight individual bets added up to £1,700; her half-length win collected him £10,500, more than £240,000 in today’s money.

Later in 1952 Bull backed the Coventry Stakes runner-up Nearula for the Middle Park, despite a four-month absence, and won £8,000, or close to £185,000 today, in five bets.

Bull, who was not afraid to bet odds on, would stand by his judgement, long-time assistant and later Timeform managing director and chairman Reg Griffin recalled during the preparation of Bull the Biography.

“If he was right, fine; if he was not, fine again,” Griffin said. “It didn’t make any difference to his outlook. He dealt with everything with great equanimity.

“I did once ask him when he would start worrying about his losses, and he said it would probably be when he was £20,000 down.”

Bull found himself that much below the water just before the 1963 Ebor, but having taken to his bath, where he loved lying for hours, he came up with Partholon.

“On Tuesday morning Phil had £20,000 to £1,000 about Partholon,” Griffin recalled, “and on the Wednesday he won by a head. At a stroke Phil was back level for the season, purely as a result of his study of the form book.”

'The idea of laying horses would be right up his street'

Gradually, however, forces greater than the form book were to take a hand, and from the beginning of 1965 Bull gradually drew back from his involvement.

Increasingly expensive stallion nomination prices meant he could no longer afford to maintain a band of mares, and his horses in training shrunk in numbers. He largely left the running of Timeform to others.

As for his betting, the death knell tolled with the introduction of general betting duty of two and a half per cent in October 1966. Bull’s average net return of about eight per cent was suddenly hit hard.

Coincidence or not, 1967, the first year of betting tax, was the worst in Bull’s experience. He lost £25,500, or £350,000 in today’s terms.

This was also the year of the Philoctetes betting coup, an episode that was planned with military precision to back a three-year-old Yarmouth maiden in 1,230 betting shops in 42 towns and cities throughout Britain, but ended in Carry On fashion, with defeat for a colt who had not been given enough work but in the following three years won a string of top staying handicaps.

Bull did not back Philoctetes every time, but he still emerged £11,365 to the good by following him over the three years after Yarmouth. Yet betting tax was taking its effect.

In 1971, to a correspondent who inquired about becoming a professional gambler, Bull wrote: “Will it help your ego if I told you that two years ago I made about £20,000 profit from my betting and paid, via the bookmakers, about £24,000 tax, leaving me with a net loss of £4,000 after what would have been for me, in the old days, a damn good year?

“Take my word for it: there’s no percentage in trying to back horses for profit these days. Bet for fun, yes! But it’s tough and hazardous, make no mistake about that.”

Two years later, after recording a particularly heavy loss in 1972, Bull referred to his bloodstock in a letter to the Levy Board chairman Lord Wigg: “I expect I’ll be selling the more saleable commodities to keep my head above water! I can no longer rely on betting profit.

“The tax destroys the prospect. It’s tough for us capitalists, you know, to keep ourselves in the affluence to which we are accustomed.”

By 1974 Bull’s serious betting days were over.

He continued to be seen on the racecourse, a short figure with familiar white beard tinged from the proximity of a cigar clamped between gums that had had their teeth removed in 1952. But his betting was almost always carried out strictly for fun, and he no longer stuck rigidly to applying his once unbridled principles of skill and logic.

With betting tax gone long enough to make a difference, how would Bull fare in today’s betting world or internet and exchanges.

Jim McGrath, who missed Bull at his best but followed the Timeform ethos as Reg Griffin’s eventual successor as MD, is in no doubt.

“Phil would have been in his element,” McGrath says. “A lot more people have the same information that he’d have, but the idea of laying horses would be right up his street.”

Phil Bull

Dates: born April 9, 1910; died June 10, 1989

Modus operandi: Began using assessment of horse’s ability through time figures, before developing with Dick Whitford a unique form system by which each horse’s inherent merit was expressed as a rating in pounds. 

Best of times: 1943-53, with 11 straight winning years, producing net earnings that today would be worth £6.3m, and especially 1944-45, when total net winnings would be worth £2.06m.

Worst of times: 1960-72, with seven losing years out of 13, which more than wiped out individual total gains equivalent to £757,000 today in six winning years.

What he said: “There will always be a body of opinion which holds that all forms of gambling are no more than a waste of people’s time and resources. To me this is a mistaken, not to say self-righteous point of view. Gambling is clearly enjoyed as an entertainment and relaxation, and one is entitled to take one’s entertainment in whatever form it pleases one, provided that no-one else suffers in the process.” In a review of Dr Otto Newman’s Gambling: Hazard and Reward, Books and Bookmen, April 1973.

What they said about him: “For more than 20 years Phil Bull has been an outstanding character on the British Turf. Successful publisher of racing books and periodicals; a breeder of international repute, for many years leading owner in the north of England, and commentator on racing matters, Phil Bull has probably done more for racing than anyone else in the last two decades.” Richard Baerlein, Observer, November 1964, though the words were written for the author by Bull himself.

Other notable achievements: Founded Timeform in 1948. Campaigned for fundamental changes in racing, including adding 1m race for two-year-olds to Pattern (now Racing Post Trophy), overnight declarations and starting stalls, but when made inaugural Horseracing Advisory Council chairmanship, he walked away after four months. Leading northern owner-breeder, own winners included Lady Electra (Lincoln), Pheidippides (Gimcrack), Orgoglio (Champagne), Sostenuto (Ebor), and bred Eudaemon (Gimcrack) and Romulus (Sussex and Queen Elizabeth II).

Howard Wright:

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