ABSTRACT
In 1955, when I was 12 years old, I realised that I did not want a job like my dad’s when I grew up. Most evenings he would come home and express his frustration to our mother. He knew his job better than anyone, but his bosses often made him do it their way, usually for the worse. Moreover, promotion was unfair. The surest route to advancement was to tell the bosses what they wanted to hear. My father told it how it was and this did him no favours. As the oldest of four children and with a father disabled by a war injury, he had left school when he was 14 to work in a factory. By attending night school until he was 21, he acquired the equivalent of a degree in electrical engineering from Manchester ‘Tech’ (now the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and joined the telephones branch of the General Post Office. But 20 years later he remained stuck in the manual grades. He eventually won promotion to the managerial grades and retired from a relatively senior post in British Telecom during the early 1970s. But none of that seemed likely when I decided to take up betting.
