What I realise above everything is that the Tote has a fantastic reputation for fairness

It was the summer of 1972. Fourteen-year-old Donny Osmond topped the charts for five weeks with Puppy Love. Naked hippies danced at the Isle of Wight with daisy chains in their hair. And love-struck 21-year-old Aberystwyth University graduate Trevor Beaumont moved to Birmingham to be close to the woman he would soon marry. But there was one small problem - for Trevor, that is. He was totally skint.

Trevor, however, was a man of action. He applied to hundreds of jobs in the Birmingham Evening Mail, including one which said 'Good with figures? Like horses? Apply here.' His degree was in maths and his family, from Suffolk, were farmers who bred shire horses, so he banged off his CV. The phone rang the next day and a gruff Scottish voice told him what to do. Within hours he found himself in his best crushed-velvet jacket and sharply ironed flares in front of gate four of the old Wolverhampton course. It was the first time in his life he'd ever been to a racetrack. Little did he know it was his first step to becoming the chief executive of the Tote.

'I was stood there with a copy of the Sporting Chronicle with long, curly hair,' laughs Trevor today. 'I must've looked like a 1970s version of King Charles. Eventually the man behind the Scottish voice came up to me. He was five foot high, bald as a coot and introduced himself as Joe McKenna. He said "Who the hell are you?! I guess you'll do okay."'

Not playing the lame game

'I started work immediately as a clerk. There was an old boy there to help me, which is just as well as I'd no idea what anybody was up to at first. After a while, I wandered over to the paddock to have a look at the horses. I told one of the other lads on Joe's pitch that one of them looked dodgy to me. I didn't know it at the time, but the horse in question was the favourite in the next race, and it pulled up lame. Word got back to Joe that I'd spotted the problem beforehand, and that I was a "bloodstock expert from a rich, country family". I hated to let him down, but I had to tell him I'd never even seen a horse under three tons before.'

But clever Trevor caught the racing bug immediately. He learned the bookmaking game from McKenna at the sharp end, where few chief executives these days have honed their teeth. He was a natural numbers man and, when McKenna sold his business to Coral after a few years, Trevor was grappling at first rung of the greasy corporate ladder. He ran a Coral's shop, then became district manager, and when Coral became a plc he joined the corporate fast-track scheme.

'That meant I ended up moving from the Midlands to Dagenham,' groans Trevor, 'which as everyone knows is an arsehole of a place. Luckily, though, they were very interesting times with some great people. I learned a lot, especially from Peter Sherlock who was chairman of the leisure division. It was his idea to joint venture with the Tote to take pool betting in our shops. I was company trading director at the time, kind of the company's bookie, if you will, and it was my first contact with the Tote.'

Coral, however, was soon up for sale. The company's directors were keen for a management buy-out, but the company were not, and in came Ladbrokes with an unconditional offer for the business. Coral employees were dismayed at the potential loss of one of the industry's biggest names. Trevor was unsure the deal would ever come off, he even had a bet on it, and in the end was proved right. Ladbrokes' purchase ran into a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry and they were soon forced to sell to venture capitalists Morgan Grenfell.

After 27 years, Trevor left Coral and worked for a spell at the British Horseracing Board (BHB) as racing director, then managing director of the gaming division of AIM-listed UK Betting plc. He then took a two-month sabbatical, and while on holiday in France spotted the Tote's chief exec job in the paper.

'I wouldn't have come back to work on a normal betting job, but this one was different,' explains Beaumont. 'Of all the betting companies, the Tote was changing the most because it's headed for a privatisation. I'd done a masters degree in the Eighties in the management of change and was fascinated by the potential.

'For most people, the Tote is the long-standing government body which runs pool betting,' he continues. 'Actually, that isn't quite true. We are a quasi-governmental organisation founded 76 years ago, but as the government has never actually put any money into us, there's a legal argument to say all it did was to give us a licence. "Racing", meanwhile, - a nebulous term if ever there was one - has always seen the Tote as its own.

'In reality, we've always reinvested the profits from our £2 billion turnover - including 457 shops and a new online casino - and given a percentage to racing. There's actually no legal obligation for us to do this; it's just something we have always done, and which we will continue to do.'

Brussels cooking up a stink

The transition of the Tote from quasi-governmental organisation to private company is set to be a tricky one though. The first step was taken by the Horserace Betting, Olympic and Lotteries Bill of 2004, which officially transferred the Tote to state ownership. It will then be sold at 50% of its value to a racing trust, which consists of stakeholders like the BHB.

But there are two fences to jump before the winning post. First, getting parties to agree on a fair valuation for the organisation will be tricky. And then there's the Becher's Brook of Brussels. 'Brussels is the sticky bit,' agrees Beaumont. 'The deal needs clearance from the EU and they may well see the sale as tantamount to state aid. The important thing, however, is we drive the business as a whole forward and keep everything together.

'Other bookmakers are viewing privatisation as an opportunity to try and split the Tote up so they can buy our high street shops, but that is never going to happen. When privatised, we are totally happy to lose our licence in perpetuity for pool betting - we will pitch for the business after seven years just like any other private company - but there is no way we will be broken up.'

Now, Trevor is a mild enough man, but when it comes to business, it's fair to say that he doesn't mess about. Just like the hawk we spot as we visit Wigan Warriors' 25,000- seater stadium for a photo shoot (the Tote sponsors Wigan), he's got his eye on the job in hand, ready to dive in... and he's got claws. First, he closed the Tote's Putney office, declaring that if he had to live in Wigan, so did everyone else. Then, in his first 100 days in the hot seat he picked up the Tote and shook all the dust off so he could see what it really looked like. What he found was an enthusiastic set of people with little sense of priority.

Toned and customer-facing

'When I got here, we didn't even have daily figures,' he explains. 'It wasn't that anyone was lazy or that they couldn't be delivered, it was just that no-one had really prioritised it before. Once people had seen how I dealt with that issue, they knew what I wanted. I've set a different tone, and the result will be a more productive and focused business.'

But tough as he is with he is with his own staff, Trevor is quick to realise the special relationship his organisation has with punters. He will be spending more, not less, on customer relationships.

'What I realise above everything is that the Tote has a fantastic reputation for fairness,' he explains. 'If pool betting is run properly, it has an inherent integrity associated with it - unlike the potentially welshing bookmaker - and we have benefited from that. That integrity is essential to our brand and we have invested even more to make sure the punter is looked after.

'We like to think that there is no-one fairer than us. Recently, for example, we had a complaint from a new punter who thought he had been cheated out of money. Actually, he hadn't - he had lost it because he probably didn't know what he was doing, but because he was new and the amount was small, I insisted we pay him anyway. Two months later, that punter has introduced another ten accounts to the Tote. Reputation counts for a lot in this game.'

As a blast of sunlight sweeps the Warriors' ground and as Trevor catches sight of the nesting hawk again, he breaks from telling us about horseracing and cricket punts to focus sharply back on business. One more picture, and he has to get back to his hotseat.

'The Tote is a company going places,' he concludes. 'We're the fourth biggest bookmaker in Britain and people are soon going to realise that. We may not be of great concern to the likes of Hills and Ladbrokes quite yet, but we will be very soon.

'You know, someone once told me that the Tote is a sleeping giant. That's not quite right: we're moving towards giant status and we're waking up!'