What became known as the ‘Trodmore Hoax’ was one of the greatest betting scams of all time, ingenious in its conception and almost, almost perfect in its execution. In late July, 1898, a correspondent who signed himself ‘G. Martin, St. Ives, Cornwall’ contacted ‘The Sportsman’ with comprehensive details of a forthcoming race meeting to be held by the Trodmore Hunt Club, in Trodmore, Cornwall on Bank Holiday Monday, August 1.
His correspondence, on headed notepaper and bearing a Trodmore postmark, informed the editors that further information would be supplied by the Clerk of the Course, based at the Fox and Hounds Hotel, Trodmore, in due course. Everything appeared to be in order and the full, six-race card duly appeared in the Monday edition of ‘The Sportsman’. In the absence of the regular West Country correspondent, Mr. Martin suggested that, for a small fee, he could cover the meeting, exclusively, for the newspaper and wire the results at the end of the day. That he did and they appeared in the Tuesday edition of ‘The Sportsman’.
Of particular interest to the bookmaking fraternity was the winner of the fourth race, the unheralded but evidently well-backed Reaper, who was returned at 5/1. Reaper had been subject to a flurry of cash bets in public houses across London and the following day his supporters returned to collect their winnings. The ‘exclusivity agreement’ with ‘The Sportsman’ meant that the Trodmore results did not appear in the rival sporting daily ‘The Sporting Life’; some bookmakers paid out, but others awaited confirmation in the latter publication.
Under pressure from disgruntled readers, the editors of ‘The Sporting Life’ chose not to take the ‘official’ results from Mr. Martin, but simply copied them directly from ‘The Sportsman’. However, in so doing, they misprinted the starting price of Reaper as 5/2, rather than 5/1, leading to further investigation by those bookmakers who hadn’t paid out and, more importantly, those that had. It transpired that Reaper, Trodmore Hunt Club and even Trodmore itself were all entirely fictitious and that bets on the ‘winner’ were placed by an army of accomplices of the aforementioned ‘Mr. Martin’ – later dubbed the ‘Trodmore Syndicate’ – much to the embarrasment of the newspapers and bookmakers involved. The enormity of the hoax was lessened, to some extent, by a simple printing error, but still cost bookmakers an estimated £100,000, or over £13 million by modern standards.