by Bill Barich
I told Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler that at American tracks the class divisions are made vertically. You rise to the top, but the masses are always around you, so that you can’t forget your humble origins. The American grandstand represents a society in flux, with certain dreams of upward mobility intact. In Britain, the division in grandstands is horizontal. There is no chance that a Member will ever be reduced to the Silver Ring, and no chance that a Silver Ringer will ever arrive at Member status. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler said that that was all very well, but she was getting hungry, and she was going to eat her sandwich and hard-boiled egg at the parade ring—the paddock.
I hadn’t carried my lunch with me, so I went to the Winners’ Bar, on the ground level of Tattersall’s, and ordered a light ale and a pork pie. The pork pie was very heavy. It was only two or three inches in diameter, but I had trouble lifting it to my mouth. This was a pork pie that could have been flung from a catapult at the Visigoths. It tasted all right, though, and I preferred it to the cellophane-wrapped cheese rolls available at another bar, upstairs. You could buy a hamburger upstairs, too. It came in a Styrofoam container, just like the burgers at McDonald’s, but you had to chew it for a long time before it disassembled. At Newbury once, I’d bought a fine pre-race meal from a fishmonger who sold cockles, mussels, whelks, and jellied eels from a cart. He served his delicate offerings in fluted paper cups, and you ate them with a splash of hot sauce, sucking in the essence of the sea.
After I’d eaten, I joined Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler at the parade ring. It’s a fenced-in oval behind the grandstand, with a path on its periphery, over which horses are walked in preparation for a race. Just outside the fence, there are seats of a sort—round, padded cushions covered with black vinyl, each of which is attached to a thin metal leg driven into the ground. The seats are so small that an average-size haunch necessarily overlaps into space, but they afford you a fine proximity to the animals. We could almost reach out and touch Musso when he passed by. The sardine effect that can make American paddock-going so hazardous rarely comes about at Kempton Park, even when six or seven thousand people—a big crowd for jumping—are in attendance. The extreme courtesy that prevails everywhere in Britain is evident at the parade ring. Nobody pushes, nobody shoves, nobody threatens to use your ear as an ashtray. You can watch the horses at your leisure, thinking your usual deep and revelatory thoughts.
“There’s John Francome,” Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler said, nodding in the direction of a sinewy-looking jockey who had come into the parade ring and now stood next to Musso. I had seen Francome ride before. He has an uncanny ability to get the most out of his mounts, combining strength with gentleness. Sometimes he seems to lift faltering animals over fences; sometimes he seems to bind them together when their legs go wobbly after a jump. Currently, he is a leading rider in jumping races, and everybody thinks that he is good enough to earn himself a place in the history of the sport.
The first great jump jockey was one Captain Becher, a commissioned officer in the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry early in the nineteenth century. As a child, Becher had been forbidden by his father to ride donkeys, on the assumption that such low animals would spoil any talent he might have for handling horses. Becher’s chief patron was Thomas Coleman, a steeplechase entrepreneur who had bought the Chequers Tavern in St. Albans and turned it into the Turf Hotel. Becher lived at the hotel, and for a time he rode only Coleman’s stock, but by 1829, he was traveling all over England to accept mounts. He was known for his riding skills, and also for parlor tricks he performed at post-race social gatherings. Becher could run around a room on the wainscoting without ever touching the floor. He could kick the ceiling. He could imitate the noises made by chickens, goats, ducks, and cows. It was Becher who rode Grimaldi in that fateful St. Albans steeplechase. He was so fond of Grimaldi that he obtained one of the horse’s forelegs as a souvenir. He liked to show it off to friends. He had his last public ride at Doncaster in 1847. Later, he was given a sinecure as Inspector of Sacks on the Great Northern Railway in Lincolnshire. He died in 1864, at the age of sixty-seven, and his possessions were sold at auction—lathe, tool chest, fish can, grindstone, scarlet hunting coat, velvet caps, driving whips, racing saddle, and seven silk jackets. “These seven,” said the auctioneer, “have seen many a flourishing day.”
Dick Francis, whose thrillers often have a racing background, was a professional jump jockey for almost ten years, and he has recounted his adventures in an autobiography, The Sport of Queens. They give some indication of the vagaries of a jump jockey’s life. Early in Francis’s career, at a small rural meeting, he rode a horse that unseated him, then bolted from the track, galloped into a stream, and swam away. Francis rode a doped horse once. The animal was so cranked up that it ran right through the first hurdle, throwing Francis, and veered off into the woods nearby, where it was finally captured hours later. In 1956, Francis rode Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse, in steeplechasing’s most famous event—the Grand National, at Ain-tree. Devon Loch jumped all thirty fences with ease, and he was far ahead going into the stretch, and then suddenly and mysteriously went spread-eagled fifty yards before the winning post. “That’s racing, I suppose,” the Queen Mother later said. The youngest Francis, a three-year-old, invented a new game to play around the house. “I’m Devon Loch!” the boy would cry, falling to the floor. “Down I go, bump!”
Francis enjoyed the freedom of being a jump jockey. He had to commute to courses throughout the country, often in treacherous weather, but he claims not to have minded. He understands how fortunate he was to be successful; only one in forty jump jockeys makes the job pay. Francis’s attitude toward accidents is cavalier: “The number of bones each jockey may expect to break varies a great deal, because some men have strong bones, and others brittle.” Francis cracked a leg or two every season. He broke his collarbone twelve times, but he was not as fragile as Jack Dowdeswell, a rider whose collarbone shattered as readily as crystal. Dowdeswell’s collarbone was ultimately removed and replaced by an artificial one. Francis never severed his spinal cord, like Lionel Vick, or broke his back, like Fred Winter. Francis says that a jump jockey has about one chance in five hundred of being killed, and that this is a death rate very much lower than the rate for window cleaners. “If any window cleaners’ wives are reading this,” Francis writes, “I sincerely apologise for passing on this unwelcome piece of news.”
Other jockeys had joined Francome in the parade ring. They were busy checking their tack—adjusting stirrups and tightening girths—while making the obligatory small talk with owners. They had a cocky assurance about them. There were no foreigners among them, so the racial tension that sometimes exists among jockeys in the States was absent. Unlike the abnormally diminutive riders who work the flats, they had not been forced into their profession by any freak of nature. Some of them had simply grown too heavy for flat racing—jumping horses carry an enormous amount of weight compared to sprinters—and some of them had never wanted to be anything but jump jockeys. They stood between five feet six and five feet ten, and they weighed between a hundred and forty and a hundred and sixty pounds. They had wiry builds, complemented by strong backs and shoulders, which they’d developed while holding on to rogue horses who pulled hard at the reins. The torsos of older riders—men in their forties—seemed as stretched as taffy. They prided themselves on their horsemanship, but they were often criticized by experts for not knowing how to ride a race. Tactical brilliance is something best learned on the flat, where the pace of the race is fast, and the margin for error is slim.
Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler had circled John Francome’s name on her race card. She had underlined Musso’s name. She had put an asterisk next to the horse’s number.
“There,” she said, almost with a sigh. “I think I’m ready to make my bet.”
The first person to make a book is said to have been a Lancashire man named Ogden, who stood up at the Newmarket races in about 1795 and quoted odds for all the horses running. Odgen was ridiculed a
nd shouted down, but his idea took hold, and before long bookies were a fixture at every race meeting. At Kempton Park, about sixty of them set up shop on the macadam that separates Tattersall’s and the Silver Ring from the racecourse proper. They are not permitted into the Members’ enclosure. Members must transgress class lines to bet—with Bennie Edwards or George Fletcher, say, who are themselves members of an exclusive club, the Bookmakers’ Association of Wales. The bookies pay a fee to the racecourse for their daily permit, but their spots, or pitches, are allocated internally on a strict seniority basis. A good pitch—close to the grandstand, easily accessible to punters—is handed down from father to son. Only the guttering out of a bookmaking dynasty will make a choice position available.
As much as is humanly possible, the bookies conform to a physical type. It is difficult to find a young bookie, for instance, or a thin bookie. Bookies seem to arrive at the racecourse in full-blown middle age, with solid, well-fed figures protected from the winter chill by raincoats or topcoats. They wear ties, of course, and also hats. The bookies have ruddy faces, splotched here and there by exposure to inclement weather and the alcohol necessary to withstand it. Most of them don’t drink during working hours, for fear of muddling their accounts, but short-tempered, hung-over bookies are not unusual and can be identified by the nastiness with which they conduct their business.
Punters who find the bookies intimidating go inside the grandstand and bet with the Tote. Established in 1928 by an Act of Parliament, the Tote is a government-run concession, supervised by the Horse Race Totalisator Board. It has pari-mutuel windows at every major racecourse. Much of the Tote’s daily take is ultimately returned to the people who own racecourses in the form of subsidies and purse monies. Like other government operations, the Tote has suffered from mismanagement, including some creative accounting practices, which erupted in a “Totegate” scandal.
Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler never bets with the Tote. “I don’t like all that machinery,” she told me as we wandered among the bookies. This was a novel objection. Most punters dislike the Tote because its odds fluctuate—like the odds at American tracks—depending on the amount of money bet on each horse. If you bet with a bookie, the odds of the wager are fixed, no matter what happens in the future. But Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler was more interested in the quality of the exchange than in whatever edge it might bring her. She was looking not for the best price available on Musso—the prices offered ranged from six to four to two to one—but for Eddie Martin, her favorite bookie. “It’s a bit like a street market, don’t you think?” she asked. I agreed. The bookies could have been selling shoes or sealing wax. They chanted their odds in rich, raw voices, forming a cockney choir.
While Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler went off in search of Martin, I watched a bookie named Fred Binns work. Binns cuts a flamboyant figure, with the look of the aging aviator about him. In fact, during the war, he was a pilot. Like the other bookies, he stood on a small wooden platform that allowed him to see over the heads of the crowd. The platform also gave him a quite literal elevated status that caused waffling bettors to tremble a little. Next to Binns was a tripod from which a slate was hung. A sheet of tissue-thin paper printed with a list of the horses entered in the first race covered three-quarters of the slate, leaving a column at the left unobscured. In the column, Binns chalked the odds he was offering. The prices changed often, depending on the sway of the action, and Binns kept wiping out numbers and making corrections. When he accepted a bet, he tossed the money into a leather bag hanging from the tripod, then shouted the terms of the wager to his clerk, who stood behind the tripod and recorded the transaction in a ledger. There was something of Scrooge and Cratchit in the byplay. “Eight-eight-two,” Binns might say as he handed a bettor a ticket bearing that number. “Five pounds on Musso at seven to four.” The ticket was the bettor’s receipt: a white cardboard rectangle with orange stripes, busy and post-modern in design, that was embellished with Binns’s name, his credentials, some mysterious letters, and a code word—“Miss Binki.” The bookies had new tickets printed every few days, always with a new code word, to protect themselves from counterfeiters. Jack Cohen’s code word that day was “Officer Kelly”; Steve Dee’s was “Tom Horn.”
I had been doing surprisingly well at the jumping races. I thought they were easier to handicap than the flat races back home, in spite of the lack of statistics. Usually, there are only two or three serious contenders in any race—except for major events, when all the best eligible horses show up. You have another advantage in that the jumping game is dominated by a handful of trainers. Whenever they run a horse, you know that the horse is fit and has a shot at winning. The problem is that other punters have the same information, so it’s hard to find a reasonable price on most favorites. The favorite wins in forty-one per cent of all steeplechases and in thirty-nine per cent of all hurdles, and this means that you are often forced to take very short odds on the horse you like. I took Musso at six to four from Sol Parker, a bulldog-faced man with a snappish demeanor. “’E’s not in a bad mood,” said a cockney gent who was hanging around Parker’s pitch. “It’s just ‘is nature.”
The Kempton Park circuit is roughly triangular and about thirteen furlongs long. It has three courses, of natural turf, laid out side by side: the steeplechase course; the hurdles course; and an unimpeded course, used for flat racing, in season. The infield has a pond and an old-fashioned, nonelectronic tote-board. Musso’s race would cover about two-and-a-half miles, over hurdles. The horses would go around the course about one-and-a-half times, and would make ten jumps. I watched the race with Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler. The only seats in the grandstand are on the top level, so we stood with other punters on its concrete steps, which provide the main viewing area. The horses were milling about in the distance, way out on the backstretch, waiting for the starter to release them. There is no starting gate in jumping races. The riders position their mounts where they want them and take off at a modest gallop when they get the signal. The action sneaks up on you—no bells, no yammering announcer. Since the pace is slow, you are drawn in rather gradually. The stimulation is cerebral, without the sudden charge of adrenaline you feel when a six-furlong flat race begins.
Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler had binoculars, and she gave me a commentary on the running. “That chestnut colt is going well,” she said, referring to Another Generation, who had the lead. Another Generation, being a colt, was a rarity. Most jumping horses are geldings, because the obstacles they must jump pose a constant threat to the genitalia. Gelding makes them worthless at stud, of course, but it has a wonderful effect on the sport, since owners keep their horses performing instead of retiring them early. When the horses passed the grandstand for the first time, I was impressed by how easily they seemed to take to the turf. They had been trained on farms, and the grass probably had a pleasing familiarity to them.
The horses continued around, into their second circuit. Several of them were beginning to tire, and it showed in their jumping: more often than not, they brushed the hurdles with their bellies as they went over them. As the horses approached the stretch—called the run-in—it became clear that Musso and Another Generation would battle each other to the wire. They drew away from the others by five or six lengths. Such a large gap is not unusual in jumping races, because the races are a test of endurance more than anything else. Francome applied some of his special urging, and Musso responded by pulling ahead and taking the race by a neck.
Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler was very happy. She squeezed my arm. She’d bet a pound with Eddie Martin, and now that pound was two. Sol Parker would have to make my three pounds worth almost seven. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler and I were handicapping geniuses. We congratulated each other. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler suggested, rather tentatively, that we pool our winnings and go for broke on the next race. Then she said no, that wasn’t fair, because I’d won more than she had. I said that I didn’t care, since I was an American, and Americans were supposed to be reckless with their money. She told me that
she’d had an American friend who gave her cigarettes during the Second World War. I told her that every person I’d met in England had had a friend like that.
We went to the parade ring and agreed to play Fire Drill, another favorite. Fire Drill was to be ridden by Steve Smith-Eccles. I thought this was a good sign, because Smith-Eccles had two last names, like Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler. I passed four pounds to Les Nicholls, accepting odds of seven to four. Fire Drill ran well for a while, but then he hit a steeplechase fence and fell. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler was devastated. She felt that she’d led me astray. I told her that that wasn’t possible—I’d strayed long before.
I convinced her that we should try again. We put two pounds apiece on Sweeping Along, a big, strapping horse who had run a good second at Newbury last time out. The race was the longest of the day—a steeplechase of about three miles. The horses had to make almost two complete circuits, jumping each obstacle on the course—with the exception of one puddle about twelve feet wide—twice. This added up to fourteen plain fences and four fences with six-foot-wide open ditches behind them. The usual time of a three-mile chase is about six minutes, so your mind tends to wander a bit, just as it does in Hardy novels when Hardy suspends his plot to offer a disquisition on Wessex. Characters are set in motion, but the landscape dominates them. I was watching mallards on the infield pond when I felt Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler squeezing my arm again. Sweeping Along had been trailing the field, but now he was in overdrive, jumping fences with aplomb. He was fully in command when he reached the last one, and he jumped it as if he had wings.
We celebrated our victory by retiring to the Winners’ Bar and ordering bottles of Guinness. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler insisted that we sit at the back of the room, far away from the food counter, where a tempting steak-and-kidney pie was resting on a sideboard. She was on a diet, she said. She had been on the diet since 1978, and she didn’t think she’d ever get off it. I asked her if she was planning to go to Ascot later that week. She said that she wanted to, but that, really, going to the jump races was an expensive proposition, and she had to exercise some control.
