Career
His spelling out of Keynsham, a town in western England where he operated, made it famous. Batchelor sponsored programmes on Radio Luxembourg to promote his "Famous Infra-Draw Method", a system that he claimed increased the chances of winning large sums on the football pools. Listeners were asked to submit their stakes to Batchelor, who then determined how the stake was placed.
Infra-draw was thus not dependent on his predictive talent for its financial success.
Radio Luxembourg was a music station broadcasting to Britain from Luxembourg as a way to circumvent the British Broadcasting Corporation"s national monopoly and the policy in the United Kingdom of no broadcast advertising. The station played popular music promoted by record companies.
The advertisers were allowed to buy air time in units of 15 minutes. Batchelor"s programme usually featured the Deep River Boys, a gospel/barbershop group seemingly performing live.
He voiced his own advertisements, inviting listeners to write for details of his "Famous Infra-Draw Method for the Treble Chance" that he promised was able to predict the drawn games on which winnings depended.
The address was always read as "Horace Batchelor, Department One, Keynsham, spelt K-East-Y-North-South-H-A-M, Keynsham, Bristol". Batchelor needed to carefully spell Keynsham out loud for his listeners (and prospective clients), as the town"s name is pronounced CANE-sham, and its spelling is not obvious from the way that it is pronounced. Batchelor"s slow, very deliberate spelling and repeated mentions of Keynsham on his programme led to the town"s name becoming something of an in-joke for British people, and was why the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band named an album Keynsham.
An Audience with Horace Batchelor by playwright Kevin Cattell and starring Roland Oliver played at Tobacco Factory Theatres in July/August 2013, and was revived for the Salisbury house in April 2014.
