Racing Culture: the Racecourse and Racecourse Life
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5 Racing culture: the racecourse and racecourse life hile people could not avoid having views on racing only a minority Wactually attended race-meetings, and it is to the cultural and social life of the racegoing public that we now turn. The anticipatory thrill of travel was important, and a first section deals briefly with changes in travel over the period. A following more substantial section deals with social relationships, behaviour and attendance in relation to social class and gender. Changes and continuities in the comfort and facilities of the course, and in the ancillary activities such as sideshows, food and drink provision, tipsters or bookmakers are next explored, before the chapter concludes with an assessment of the ‘moral panic’ associated with the racecourse crime of the early 1920s. Transport Travel to the races was important to the racing experience. Changes in the domi- nant mode of transport, with their implications for conspicuous display, social interaction, and patterns of accommodation use in the racing towns, form a peripheral but important theme in the social history of racing. As a sport with its roots in rural horse-owning life, racing, and especially steeplechase and point-to- point meetings, still attracted rural dwellers travelling on horseback in the early 1920s, as entrance figures show, although motor enclosures were raising more than twice as much revenue by the later 1920s. Carriages became rare, although the larger four-in-hand coach was to be found occasionally at Epsom for the Derby, at Ascot, or at more prestigious point-to-points. Their continued appeal was partly sentimental. At Aintree in 1922 a colonel’s coach party was seen as lending ‘a pic- turesque touch to the traffic’.1 Carriages were also excellent portable grandstands. The railways still dominated travel to race meetings in 1914, but the delay and discomfort of the war years, and the artificially high rail fares of the Mike Huggins - 9781526120632 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 10:26:56AM via free access The racecourse and racecourse life 127 post-war transition, saw the beginnings of their decline, although they con- tinued to be central for core race attenders like the bookmakers, their assistants and others. They were a reliable source of income to rail companies, who often put on special trains between meetings. Race-day excursions were also poten- tially profitable. From York in the 1920s there were cheap race-day excursions to each of the most easily accessible northern courses. The top races attracted special trains from all over the country, supplementing usual services, although they could be slow, uncomfortable and overcrowded. In 1930, for example, Aintree had forty-three special trains on Grand National Day, including nine special trains from London, plus further trains from Manchester (four), Birmingham, Gloucester, Scotland and South Wales, Northumberland, East Anglia and the South. By 1935 it had over sixty long-distance specials. The journey, its fun and food were part of the experience, and catering on the £5 Pullmans was a major operation, with 2,500 lb. of fish alone.2 At Doncaster, despite the growth of motor coach and car traffic, the railways alone still carried 100,000 to the St Leger meeting in 1929.3 York’s Ebor Stakes attracted ‘specials’ from Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, Newcastle and the North-east, Nottingham, Lincoln and Chesterfield, and Birmingham. Trains were still the main way racehorses got to meetings, although small trainers occasionally walked horses from training stables to meetings in the 1920s, as did others during the rail strikes. The London and North-Eastern Railway gained revenue through the provision of special trains, with two or three horseboxes per car- riage, from Newmarket to and from all the major meetings, and was well known as being ‘most obliging, patient and anxious to be of assistance’.4 The interwar rise in the status symbolism of car ownership, mostly but not entirely amongst the middle classes, saw major increases in petrol-driven traffic at meetings. Even by the mid-1920s the volume of traffic for the Derby had forced the police into using air balloons, patrol vehicles with wireless communi- cation, motorcyclists, and traffic points linked by telephone. First the charabanc and then the coach became a mainstay of the more working-class attendance at more popular meetings, and a new form of racecourse revenue. Over two hun- dred buses were applying for parking facilities for the Epsom Derby in the early 1920s.5 Although charges at some courses could be as low as 1s, York charged 2s 6d for cars and 6s for coaches for most of the period, and at Goodwood charges ranged from 2s to £1.6 In the North of England working-men’s clubs often organised race excursions, hiring a charabanc, and carrying cases of beer and sometimes parcels of food. Although statistical data are lacking, contemporary correspondents believed that road transport was growing. At York the local Mike Huggins - 9781526120632 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 10:26:56AM via free access 128 Horseracing and the British, 1919–39 paper felt that in 1929 road traffic was ‘of greater volume even than last year or any preceding year’, and even in the depressed year of 1931 the volume was ‘per- haps never greater’.7 Some innovative trainers were using the motor horse van, based on the design of the railway box, to transport horses to meetings more comfortably and with less injury, by the early 1920s. These soon rapidly increased in numbers and popularity.8 For the even wealthier, Doncaster began planning a racecourse landing strip in 1928, since some owners possessed private planes, and a forty-two-seater air- craft carried racegoers paying £8 each from Croydon to Speke Airport near Aintree in 1930.9 Air travel proved convenient for top jockeys and trainers, although the jockey Gordon Richards had a miraculous escape when an aero- plane taking trainers, jockeys and friends back to London from Doncaster in 1933 crashed, killing the pilot. In 1933 one trainer flew from Beckhampton to Chepstow, saddled the winner of the first race, and was at Lewes for the last race.10 By 1935 there was a regular air service for the Newmarket meetings from London, and a landing ground was constructed at Goodwood in 1936. Even so, only five air taxis (from Heston, Bristol and Newcastle) landed at York munic- ipal Aerodrome for the 1936 Ebor, while when less than a month later the Aga Khan’s plane was one of some twenty planes arriving for Doncaster, it was his first flight.11 Social relationships,behaviour and attendance While support for racing could be found at all levels of society, the nature of support varied with wealth, status and social class. The ardours and discomforts of the race-day journeys formed part of the occasion, and even before the races, the large crowds at a big meeting like Doncaster had plenty to entertain them, from the morning gallops or the tipsters in the marketplace, to the arrival of valuable horses at the railway station or the yearling sales. The crowds around town were also extremely peaceable. Indeed, so orderly were the crowds and traffic that owners had no hesitation in walking horses worth several thousand pounds through the main streets.12 The most visible form of racing support was actual attendance, and here the press constantly emphasised the socially-mixed nature of crowds. Racing func- tioned as a cross-class leisure activity, as The Times recognition of the way that at Ascot in 1925 ‘all sorts of people are happily behaving as if amusement were a legitimate human function’ showed.13 Many of the top races had ‘a tremendous fascination for all classes of people’, and were events where parties would come Mike Huggins - 9781526120632 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 10:26:56AM via free access The racecourse and racecourse life 129 from nearby villages and towns, and noblemen would ‘rub shoulders with workers enjoying the greatest sport of the Englishman’.14 The different social groups enjoyed the meeting in a complex mixture of similar and different ways. For the upper classes, horse-racing was a major ele- ment of sociability and leisure, exhibiting conspicuous consumption patterns, while allowing opportunities for exclusivity and the reinforcing of social superi- ority, more ambivalent social mixing, or for heavy, light or no gambling according to choice. Going to those elite races that were part of the London ‘season’ demonstrated display of wealth, while allowing sociability and the rein- forcement of ‘traditional’ status and authority. The Royal Enclosure at Ascot, with entrance only by invitation, for example, was highly select. Even clothing signalled this, with the men in tailored dark suits, stiff-collared shirts and high top hats. Even more select was the Royal Box, a feature at other prestigious meetings. In the Enclosure one could see and be seen, and for favoured individ- uals the queen might sometimes send an equerry with a specially-worded invita- tion to join her. The Private Stand at Newmarket, where members of the Jockey Club had to sign and countersign guests, was also highly select. The royal family stood at the apex of the upper class, sharing much of the landed aristocracy’s tastes and lifestyle. King George V had a good knowledge of thoroughbred breeding and racing.15 He enjoyed going to the races, especially at Newmarket, where he would stay at the Jockey Club rooms, and attended elite courses with the queen, prince of Wales, duke of York, Prince Henry and other members of the royal household. He regularly watched the Grand National, often from Lord Derby’s private stand near the Canal Turn.