Laurie's an odds-on cert to lay you a bet

First out is the tripod, purchased by Mr Dolan when he took up this precarious line of work. Onto this he hooks the hod - a leather bag of the sort an old fashioned doctor might carry. Above that he fixes the bookmaker's joint, a metal sheet displaying his name and onto which the odds are scribbled.

Now Mr Dolan is ready to take your money.

He travels light because his business's real assets are invisible - the experience and canniness of Mr Dolan himself.

It was fascinating to watch him at work on the first day of this York race meeting. He has a sixth sense, instantly sensing movement in the betting market. The ears pick up a call from one of the two dozen other bookies on either side of him in the clock tower enclosure.

The eyes take in the gesticulations of the tick-tack man in the Tattersalls stand opposite. Then one hand wipes away the old odds before the other scrawls in the new.

And all the while he is talking to me. "It's a great life. It's fantastic," he says, as he takes one horse out from 7-2 to 5-1.

Mr Dolan stands on a basic wooden box, known as a stool, to take the bets. At his elbow is his clerk, recording the details in a giant book. The relationship between bookmaker and clerk is founded on mutual trust and understanding; Laurie's daughter, Collette, therefore, is the perfect choice as clerk.

She took up the job three years ago. "At first it was frightening," she admitted, "because I thought I wouldn't be able to do this sort of work. But it's an easy job to get into."

The pressure, however, can be considerable when punters are lining up to place their bets. Mr Dolan takes the money, issues a ticket and calls out something like: "Night City 24 pound to three ticket four." This means a gambler has placed £3 to win on Night City and, if it's victorious, will collect £24. His ticket number is four.

Collette barely has time to make a note before the next instruction. Any mistake could cost the business dearly. But she would not choose to do anything else, even though it is patently still a man's world. "I love it, I really do," she grinned.

Bookmaking is a trade that operates on wits. And Mr Dolan is not short of those. He displays lightning mental arithmetic: the moment he takes a large bet, he quickly offsets some of the risks by placing his own bet with a colleague. And he knows his racing inside out, at one stage predicting a stewards' inquiry into the result of the second race a full five minutes before it was announced.

Watching him, you imagine he has been doing it forever. But bookmaking has consumed only the second half of Mr Dolan's sporting life. The first was taken up by the game of rugby league.

He was born into a sporting family in Apollo Street, York, 72 years ago. His father, a Corporation labourer, played for York Rugby League Club, and Laurie, along with both his younger brothers, Terry and Peter, had inherited this talent. Laurie initially played rugby for the INL Club before being selected to play for Yorkshire and England as an amateur.

When he joined York RL, at the age of 22 in 1948, he earned £4 a win, £2 10s a lose. That was in addition to his weekly wage from the carriageworks.

He remembers his days as a second row forward with great fondness. "We had some good matches. We won our fair share. I played with some of the best players when I played for York."

The crowds were bigger then - when York entertained Wigan he played in front of 10,500 people. "They were more or less on top of you," he said, recalling the electric atmosphere at Clarence Street.

Brother Terry played alongside him at York, prompting a good-natured sibling rivalry that lasts to this day - Terry, also now a bookmaker, was two pitches down from Laurie at York races this week. Their late brother Peter, meanwhile, turned out for Castleford RL.

The last three years of Laurie Dolan's distinguished rugby career were spent at Dewsbury. In 1956, a serious knee injury forced him out of the game.

It was then that he turned his lifelong love of racing into his profession. "I had always been interested in racing from a punter's point of view - which wasn't very successful.

"While I was playing at Dewsbury, one of my fellow players said this bookmaker was selling his racing outfit. I said I would buy it, which I did.

"I applied to the Northern Bookmakers Protection Association. They granted the authority to go on to the course."

He soon discovered that bookmakers look after their own. "I was surrounded by the elderly bookmaking fraternity. They were a right good crew."

When he first worked at York Racecourse he was in the outside ring. "It was called the free course because you didn't have to pay - where the helicopter pad is now, and beside it. Some bookmakers on Ebor Day used to have their pitches on the bend as you came down the street."

These were hard days. "We were living from week to week. I had two children who were very young. One of them wasn't born when I first started."

His wife June, whom he married in 1954, recalled that she would not ask him how his day had been. "I used to look at his face as he arrived home. We knew if he had had a really bad day."

Many years of effort later, Mr Dolan is now comfortably off. But he still works hard, attending 200 races a year, including meetings at Ayr and Cheltenham, and the Grand National.

A day's work used to begin with a perusal of The Sporting Life - that changed after Tuesday, when the paper was published for the last time. Mr Dolan usually arrives at a course a couple of hours before the first race.

As a Northern BPA director he is in charge of allocating the pitches to fellow bookies in the cheap ring at York. The more senior they are, the better the pitch.

Mr Dolan would not advise a youngster to follow his footsteps. This is one business where veterans positively flourish. With 42 years' experience, Mr Dolan is only the second most senior bookmaker in his ring, and the twelfth most senior on the course.

The family of racing, therefore, is close-knit. Mr Dolan was constantly acknowledging Knavesmire characters with unlikely nicknames like "Little Aubrey" and "the Spaghetti Kid". Meanwhile, some punters were so familiar to him they didn't even need a ticket to record their bet.

Mr Dolan plans to continue making the book into his 80s. The only fly in the ointment is a Jockey Club plan to do away with the traditional bookies' pitch and force them into "Punch and Judy" booths complete with computers.

As Mr Dolan pointed out, no computer could beat him and Collette for operating speed. The booths would not work in the extremes of weather that they do. And to remove their joints, hods and tripods would be to discard a much-loved part of racing tradition.

A micro-processor could never hope to replace Mr Dolan. Nor would we ever wish it to.

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Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.