Published: 9 February, 2012
by PETER GRUNER

He’s a former Highbury Grove schoolboy who became a millionaire bookie and then lost it all in one ghastly day at the races.

Gary Wiltshire, 54, is the BBC TV horseracing pundit known as the “belly on the telly” due to his roly-poly 20-stone girth.

He has written a fascinating and thoughtful autobiography, Winning It Back, which is a perfect read for these debt-ridden times.

Whether you’re interested in gambling or not, you are bound to be won over by Wiltshire’s dramatic story of rags to riches, and then back to rags again.

He lost a million pounds to various big bookmaker organisations and punters all in one day at Ascot – September 28, 1996.

In an event virtually unprecedented in the history of horse racing, regarded as the bookmaker’s nightmare, jockey Frankie Dettori won all his seven races.

Unable to pay out all those with whom he had done business, Wiltshire at first was paralysed by fear and despair over his losses of more than £1million, representing everything he had worked so hard for.

It was then that he decided to take inspiration from his much-loved working-class parents.

They lived at Copenhagen Street, Barnsbury, and were stallholders at Leather Lane and Chapel Market. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, they said, but you always pay back what you owe.

He would, he decided, over a five to six-year period attempt to pay back every penny he owed.

With two young children and another on the way, Wiltshire, and his wife Sue, who stood by him throughout the ordeal, sold their large house in the country, trading down to a smaller property.

They sold their racehorses, expensive jewellery and the great symbols of Wiltshire’s extraordinary financial success – two Mercedes cars.

Then he went back to being a market trader, something he’d done with his parents as a young boy, to earn cash.

Posh meals at Italian restaurants were replaced by the occasional takeaway fish and chips.

It was a tough time, but everyone eventually was paid what he or she was owed.

The book is as much about growing up in Islington in the 1960s and 1970s as it is about being a bookie.

Wiltshire’s first school was Goswell Road primary, which he describes as grim and like a concrete prison.

Later, at Highbury Grove, he remembers being caned by the legendary headmaster, Dr Rhodes Boyson, who went on to become a Conservative MP.

Wiltshire and his friends had been spotted by teachers hanging about outside bookies in Upper Street, trying to get adults to place bets for them, when they should have been at school.

“We were paraded in front of the school assembly,” he writes, “then made to line up, hold out our non-writing hand, wait for Boyson to raise his long cane, then Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! for as many times as he fancied.”

As a young man, betting took such a hold that Wiltshire decided to join Gamblers Anonymous in an effort to kick the habit.

The group met at a church in Old Street, but it didn’t work out.

Wiltshire couldn’t keep away from bookie shops and race meetings.

In the days before credit cards, hard-up families would take valuables to the pawn shop in Seven Sisters Road to get extra cash.

“Say you needed £50, you might take a ring worth £100 into the pawn shop, and they would lend you the £50 in cash against,” writes Wiltshire.

“When you were back in funds, you’d go and redeem it, for the £50 plus interest.”

Speaking this week, Wiltshire admitted that Dettori’s “magnificent seven” was a great learning experience from which he ultimately benefited.

“The publicity surrounding my losses attracted television bosses,” he said. “I had done some work with Sky TV and now I was being offered a pundit slot on the BBC TV horseracing programme. I have also written this book, which has given me a wonderful opportunity to talk about my life and the business.

“There is also talk of a film. Who do I want to play me? Cockney actor Ray Winstone, of course. I’m still a bookie and I’ve won all my money back. But these days my feet are more firmly on the ground.”

• Winning It Back: The autobiography of Britain’s biggest gambler. By Gary Wiltshire. Racing Post Books, £18.99.