My best Chinaman bookie story .Billy Kilpatrick /Billy Arkle had a shop on O connell Bridge .China man comes into the shop has a grand on a Peter Walwan first timer @7/1 running in one of the first evening meetings to be held .In them early days there was no live coverage of the races you got the results on BBc radio 5 after the ten O clock news .The horse won and Billy went around the pubs looking for his board marker a fella called Billy .When he found him they went back to the shop about midnight .They use to have marker sheets with the name of every horse for each race printed on them and the boardman would write up the prices that came every race over the tanoy .These sheets often were delivered with a blank sheet of paper similar in size to the actual race sheets.You would hold on to them for writing up special offers .You always had a few thrown on top of the telly .Billy didint want to pay the chinaman probably hadent got the money so what he did was to get one of these smoke staines pieces of paper that looked like it had been around for a long time and he got the boardman to write down the betting rules and limits for the shop .Hidden in the newly written rules was the following .Limit payout on races not covered live by extel is £1000 so when the Chinaman Came in to collect his 8K Billy offered him his £1000 back and told him the limit for night racing was £1000 and to make things even worse and to guarentee Bill could call the Gards for backup he kept the chinamans £100 tax telling him it was up to him to know the Rules.
As I remember that lad was later chopped up in Abbey Street when the Triads had a small falling out .
