Lord Steinberg: bookmaker

Lady Luck smiled, however, and Piggott, then a relatively young and unknown, rode the first of his nine Derby winners on a 33-1 shot called Never Say Die. In beating horses favoured by his schoolboy clients, Piggott’s performance also meant that Steinberg pocketed good profits.

If the results had gone the other way, the Steinberg story might have been somewhat more prosaic. “I’d been placing the odd bet or two since I was 16,” he recalled. “Then one day in the sixth form some lads asked me to take their stakes to the bookmakers.”

The bets, which Steinberg took in partnership with another friend, covered nine of the 20 horses entered. “I remember how excited we were when we went along to the betting shop to listen to the outcome of that race. We had more than £3 in bets in our pockets — a fortune to us in those days.” Only one of the nine horses ran sufficiently well to earn his clients a payout, and Steinberg and his partner shared £2 profit. “Actually, we’d been rather naive and wouldn’t have had the money to pay out if it had all gone wrong,” he added.

Steinberg’s father introduced him to bookmaking as he had run an illicit betting shop alongside an eclectic family business that also included a milk bar and an optician. The son had intended to study to become a more conventional breed of accountant, but his father’s death at a relatively young age death cut short that education and obliged the teenager to start earning to support his mother and siblings.

By the 1970s Steinberg was running a chain of shops across Belfast, his native city, and had expanded in the Isle of Man and other parts of the British Isles. He was also attracting the unwelcome attention of paramilitaries. “At that time there was no great difference between the IRA and the extremists on the Protestant side,” he recalled. “They were all at the protection racket. We refused to pay.”

Refusals to comply with the racketeers put shops and staff in danger and also caused Steinberg to be the target of an IRA shooting incident on the doorstep of his home in Belfast. In 1979 Steinberg moved the company across the Irish Sea to Liverpool. Mostly using money earned in the shops to buy small chains of other family-owned bookmakers, Steinberg ensured that he retained a sizeable stake in the Stanley Leisure business. Though the company owned shops across the country, it was better represented in the North West of England, where its roots lay.

With 117 outlets to its name the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1986, initially valued at £10 million. It grew relatively rapidly, earning profits of £1.6 million in that year and six times that ten years later, though the nature of bookmaking meant that Stanley was occasionally knocked back. Indeed, just as Piggott had set Steinberg up in 1954, another champion jockey, Frankie Dettori, set him back in 1996 by riding winners of all seven races in a single afternoon at Ascot. Dettori’s success cost Stanley Leisure £2 million.

In 1999 Stanley boosted its growing casino business by buying Capital Corporation, the London-based owner of Crockfords. In 2003, after Stanley announced annual revenues of more than £1 billion for the first time, Stainberg relinquished his executive responsibilities, becoming non-executive chairman of the company. Then, in 2005, the bookmaking side was sold to William Hill for £500 million, and a year later the casinos were bought by Genting, a Malaysian group, for nearly £650 million. Steinberg took a personal fortune of more than £100 million from the deals.

As well as building a business for himself, Steinberg campaigned with determination to have the legislation surrounding betting, and the tax regime, relaxed. Eventually he was regarded as something of an industry grandee. He spoke in support of liberalising advertising and making it easier for betting shops to operate slot machines with larger prizes.

Steinberg was a prime mover in the foundation of an academic discipline for the industry to which he dedicated so much of his life. The Centre for Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Salford was established in 1994, and as well as completing research related to the gambling industry, has provided teaching for people interested in a career within it and has worked to increase understanding by the wider public.

As a peer from 2004, Steinberg was a Conservative. He was described by David Cameron, the leader, as a good friend of the party who offered sage advice. He did not speak in a shadow ministerial capacity but donated large sums to the party and, as deputy treasurer, helped to raise funds from others. He was also a keen supporter of causes that assisted Jewish interests. He described himself as a “Conservative with a big ‘C’ ” but interviewed after being given a life peerage he said: “I am in some respects devoted to three things: I am Jewish, Northern Irish and an Ulster Unionist. I hope that doesn’t cause confusion.”

Writing in 1992, after a general election result that embarrassed many of the nation’s opinion pollsters, Steinberg combined his betting and political interests to suggest that bookmakers’ odds were more accurate.

“On the morning of the election, most bookmakers had the Conservatives as slight favourites, which was a good indication and so much more accurate than either the opinion polls or the exit polls,” he said.

Steinberg liked cricket, serving as president of Lancashire County Cricket Club from 2007, having been a member since 1978. He also enjoyed music, art and stamp collecting.

He is survived by his wife, Beryl, and two children.

Lord Steinberg, bookmaker, was born on August 1, 1936. He died suddenly on November 2, 2009, aged 73