The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  I mention to Roy my recent visit to the Lloyd Arms match in Manchester. ‘The Lloyd Hotel,’ he corrects gently. ‘I play for Sale Excelsior. The Lloyds are our deadly rivals,’ he informs, with a hint of steely sangfroid beneath the soft Lancashire burr.

  It’s not the sport, though, but the betting that is the real revelation. I went to Chorlton to watch them bowl. I’ve come here to watch them bet. If you become a member of the Professional Crown Green Bowling Association, you are entitled to place bets here, the only place left in Britain where you can wager by the side of the green on a game of bowls. I, being naive, had come expecting official bookmakers, tic-tac-toe men and chalkboards of odds. The truth is odder and much more complex. Everyone here is betting with everyone else. They watch the play, make snap decisions and wagers, lay their bets off against each other in an ad hoc way. To the uninitiated, maybe even to the initiated, it is dizzyingly complicated. In full earshot of the players, the spectators offer odds to each other. ‘Burrows to win, lay you 5 to 4’, ‘I’ll take 5 to 4’, ‘I’ll go two tenners’, ‘I’m offering fives’.

  It’s bamboozling and mightily impressive. Shouts are coming from all corners of the green and the gallery, but only once do I hear the query, ‘Who said that?’ It goes without saying that I do not understand a word of it. In the middle of it all, the bowlers seem unfazed, even though as well as the bewildering chorus of arithmetic and odds, comments are offered about the game and their own performance. ‘That’s miles off, Noel’, ‘No, Chris, you’ll have to do better than that’.

  The lure of being able to have a bet is still strong, although clearly the numbers are in decline. ‘It’s the internet. If it’s a cold day, some people are tempted to gamble online.’ But the hardcore still come for the thrill of the flutter and the social element. One regular called Stan Stafford died last week. He was 92 and had been coming to this unprepossessing spot for 70 years.

  No one’s writing anything down, I say to Roy. ‘No, they do it all on trust. If you’re new, they will ask if anyone knows you and if they can vouch for you. If not, they will put you down as “Glasses” or “Pipe” or “Yellow Hat” or, if it’s a woman, “Lady”.’ (I get the impression this last doesn’t happen very often.)

  Then, at the end, they settle up. They mingle, Soho art gallery opening style, except instead of bearing canapés and plastic glasses of fizz, they bear rolled bunches of fivers, tens and twenties, which pass between them quickly and unshowily. Even if I was a member, or could be vouched for, I would no more have risked a bet than I would have got on the green and bowled a few ends myself, so confusing and arcane was it, and done at such speed with such fluency. At the side of me, as they count their winnings, two men are having a hugely entertaining conversation about spouses and holidays (which in the original was a lot more colourful, believe me).

  ‘My wife’s Thai, I didn’t meet her in Thailand. I met her in Hull. We went to Dubai last year – 6k for two weeks. Outrageous. One night in the restaurant we had this sweet chili prawn starter … four shrimps on a piece o’ lettuce on a plate this big.’ (Indicates with hands, an object the size and shape of a manhole cover.) ‘She had two glasses o’ beer. I had a glass of the house red. We both had fillet steak and chips. Guess how much? Guess how much? 172 pound!! 172 pound!! My house red were 32 quid, and it were Asda shit!’

  In Dubai, I doubt this to be honest but say nothing. Dusk falls, the sky darkens and a few flakes of snow begin to float across the green. There’s a rumour that there’s been a big smash on the motorway, ‘the 62’, and in ones and twos, the crowd, which has never really been much of a crowd, begin to slip away. As the punters drift away like the snow, the two bowlers continue to criss-cross the green in the fading light, and Jackie, his fiver (and a little more) pocketed, bids me goodnight.

  Westhoughton is ur-north, uber-north, the north in excelsis. But the north can sometimes seem a moveable feast, a matter more of mood than latitude. The Black Country lies a little south of Cheshire, but Dudley and Tipton feel grittier than Wilmslow and Prestbury and from my experience the people there think of themselves as vaguely northern and certainly not Brummies, which they are often lazily conflated with.

  The sprawl of the Midlands, once lit by flickering foundries and ringing to the sound of jackhammers, was the model for Tolkien’s Mordor. It has a distinctly northern industrial cast. But it was more than that that sent me there on my next gambling excursion. I knew that people will bet on the fall of coins and risk the wrath of the law for it, as my own family had ‘form’ in the matter. I’d discovered that even the supposedly sedate world of the manicured green and the rolling jack can tempt men into parting with their wages. But for the working man and woman, it is generally other living things that they normally pin their money to.

  Horse sense, said W C Fields, is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. If you want to spoil the joke, you could say that it’s that plus lack of sentience, opposable thumbs, language, bank accounts and the rest. But the point of W C’s remark is that betting on races between horses is mad really, and should have no part in a sensible society. Yet it has, and has for millennia. There are horse races between the gods in Norse mythology and across the ancient world from North Africa to the Steppes. Thanks to Charlton Heston, we all know the chariot races of Rome.

  During Henry VIII’s reign, stables specifically for the training of racehorses were established and the world’s oldest horse race as we know it. The Kiplingcotes Derby took place in Yorkshire in 1509. Racing declined under Elizabeth I but then when out with his hawk, James I chanced upon a village called Newmarket and decided it was the perfect place to race horses. He became so keen that parliament rebuked him for neglecting his kingly duties. From the seventeenth century onwards, English aristocrats crossbred native mares with Arab and Barb stallions, to create ‘thoroughbreds’ of great speed and stamina ability in order to race them for wagers. Thus did horse racing become known as the Sport of Kings. This, though, can seem a strange and inappropriate name if you’ve ever been in a grimy William Hills in a winter dusk surrounded by sallow defeated men throwing down their pencils at the end of last race from Uttoxeter or Thirsk.

  I grew up with neither a fear nor a fever for the horses. I never saw men in my family come home skint and murderous after a bad session, nor laden with flowers and champagne and buoyed by a rare success. In this I guess we were pretty typical. We were the once a year gamblers, beloved of the bookies, who each year would follow the same Grand National ritual. Daily Mirror on the big Saturday morning. Nana and me and mum picking horses whose names we liked, to the despair of Dad and Uncle Brian who would tell us to study the form and that there was no point going each way on a 3–1 favourite. In the similar way that we are the only country in the world where, once a year, children can demand money in the street to buy explosives with which to commemorate a failed political assassination, the Grand National is still the only occasion where kids are not just allowed, but encouraged, to gamble with money, as we saw with my friend Lydia.

  The names of all the gee-gees who earned me a few childhood bob are still there: Red Alligator, Highland Wedding, L’Escargot, Rag Trade, the legendary Red Rum, who was trained by pounding the beaches at Ainsdale where we would sometimes go for a drive out on a summer Sunday. I spent the occasional few bob I made on them on a Corgi Thunderbird 4 or James Bond Aston Martin, which of course would now be worth a fortune had I kept them in their box and looked at them admiringly rather than throw them off the roof during heated re-enactments.

  But it was the early nineties before I ever actually went to the races.

  Granada TV, with whom I’d done some work, invited me to Ladies Day at Aintree – the day before the Grand National when the well-heeled and fun-loving ladies (and their squires) would teeter down to the course in miraculous gravity defying fascinators and astonishing dresses to have a flutter and get blissfully hammered. That day it poured down all morning and the course was a quag
mire but spirits were undampened. I took my place in a special box of invitees who included snooker ace and Question of Sport stalwart John Parrott and scouse scriptwriting legend Jimmy McGovern.

  I had decided that I would allow myself a £10 bet on each race of the nine-race meeting. So at the very worst I’d be less than a hundred quid out of pocket. But that would be at the very worst, and I was sure to do better than that. Wasn’t I? In fact, I wasn’t. Whatever luck or sixth sense I’d had as the child tipster who’d cleaned up on Highland Wedding and bought a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle with my winnings had deserted me. Rain fell pitilessly from a leaden sky, the fascinators drooped, and I lost and lost and lost. To make matters worse, quietly and unshowily McGovern and Parrott were both on winning streaks. They knew what they were doing, and after every race I would watch them secrete another plump wad of notes into their inside pocket while I was drinking (on tick) in the last chance saloon. Just before the final race, I stood up (itself something of a feat by this time) and addressed my fellow gamblers, telling them that I thought it only fair of me to say which horse I was going to put my money on so that they might avoid it. Everyone laughed and Jimmy slapped me on the back. Then we settled down to watch the final race of the day. I lost.

  So I went to my second race with no great expectation of riches but in anticipation of all the fun of not a day but a night at the races. This is something you have not been able to say for very long. Wolverhampton Racecourse hosted the first floodlit regular nighttime horseracing meetings in Britain and is still the most famous, one of four all-weather tracks in the UK, and a good pace to wrap up warm on a cold winter night and watch the gee-gees. The course is reached, unusually, through the entrance to a Holiday Inn that would seem largely for the benefit of race-goers judging by the large statue of a horse in the lobby. By this token, it occurs to me, every Travelodge in Britain should have a statue of three girls in tiny skirts drinking from a bottle of Sambuca in reception.

  I’m ushered upstairs into a large, well-lit room, full of dining tables and floor to ceiling windows. It is nothing like the scene I imagined, which was of men standing on orange boxes shouting and making incomprehensible gestures, bookies’ runners smoking roll-ups, looking hunted and furtive, and burly men in sheepskin jackets barking orders at homunculi in garish pantaloons. No, this is more like, well, the restaurant of a midrange Midlands hotel that happens to overlook a race track. Quite a view, too, the bright sodium white of the floodlights illuminating the sandy ochre carpet of the all-weather track. I order a glass of something nice and red and take in my surroundings.

  Each table has a little TV terminal. I am childishly impressed, even though the technology to do such a thing has been with us decades. It offers different screens worth of betting info, coverage of this and other meetings, and so on. Instantly, I manage to switch it off and can’t switch it back on again, and several young members of the waiting staff have to come and help me in the way you might help your aged grannie to send her first tweet. Gratifyingly they are no better at it than me, and we resort to pushing every button in every available permutation and hitting it with a soup spoon until it flickers back into life.

  The young male waiter is conscientious and eager but seems a little nervous in his work. Perhaps he is new. He defers, sensibly, to his colleague Rosie who is just ace, a sweet Black Country girl with a touch of Emo Goth. I admit that I am baffled by the racecard and she smiles sheepishly, ‘You really don’t want to ask me. I know all about the menu but I know nothing about racing. They have free racing for the staff in January and I lost so much this year that I had to work every day in February to make my money up.’

  There’s a mildly raucous, curiously cosmopolitan gang on the next table. Half of them look like typical Brit office workers on a boozy, ‘spendy’ night out; a very British mixture of ‘bling’ and gauche. One is dressed in a beautiful charcoal Armani suit but he staggers out of the gents hoicking up the trousers as if they were trackie bottoms. The other half of the party look more tanned, more chic, less loud. A small dark man wears a pale blue cashmere sweater loosely knotted around his shoulders. I form the scenario that a Black Country precision engineering firm have been bought by a large Italian concern and these Latin types are from the head office in Turin. This is an impression reinforced when one, a small pneumatic lady with vibrant green eye make-up and lustrous black hair, starts to tell the table in her glorious accent about her favourite wine which is ‘made in a leetel village just outside Montepulciano’. There is a moment’s thoughtful silence before the fellow with the troublesome trousers offers, ‘Steve loves a Malbec, din’t ya, Steve?’

  A race is imminent. Out of nowhere, one horse bounds away out on his own and starts to gallop around the track. I decide that this poor creature is frisky and unreliable and make a note of his name the better to avoid him: Desert Ranger. The brochure for the evening begins promisingly: ‘Whether you’re a first time visitor or a seasoned racing enthusiast, we hope that you have an enjoyable experience today…’ – but rapidly becomes unfathomable to this first time visitor. This is entirely my fault. I don’t seem to be able to get past the horses’ names and trying to work out their rationale. Is Doo Wah Diddy Diddy owned by a former member of Manfred Mann? Has Madonna got shares in Like A Prayer? What on earth is Shiftin Bobbins all about? Also, many of the races are sponsored, which thus lumbers them with the most dreadful and stupid titles. Even I, no ‘seasoned racing enthusiast’, can see the allure and romance of the Oaks, the St Ledger or the Two Thousand Guineas. I doubt that anyone’s heart would beat faster at the thought of the ‘Download The Free App At Bookies Dot Com Handicap’.

  As the race begins and the horses thunder away from me in the chill night, I realise that I have completely misunderstood the arcane symbolism of the formbook and that the horse I have bet on, Chester Aristocrat, is the rank outsider. It comes in last. With hilarious inevitability, the unhinged Desert Ranger wins. After this inauspicious start, though, I hit a rich vein of form and get placed – or rather my chosen horses do – in the next three races. One of these is, astonishingly, a 33–1 shot with a little beauty called Bittern. The on-course commentator emphasises the ‘tern’ bit of his name so for a little while it doesn’t dawn on me that I’ve had a bloody good win. When it does, my elation is tempered by the fact that I have lost my ticket. Seeing my discomfiture, Rosie and her young assistant waiter come to my aid. We all start to go through the many bins in the restaurant. After ten minutes of excavations through half-eaten bread rolls, corks and bottles of Stevie’s Malbec, I find it in my pocket.

  Before the next race, as the horses and riders assemble at the gate, it becomes apparent that one particular steed, Steel River, really doesn’t want to go in there. Several men and a host of small boys – they could, I suppose, be jockeys – seem to be employed about his flanks and hindquarters, shoving the recalcitrant beast into the pen. ‘One more heave and he’ll be in,’ says the commentator. I think this shows a reluctance to race and decide to avoid it. Naturally, it wins. My horse ‘pulls up’, which is horse for ‘sod this for a lark’.

  There is consolation in the form of the food. I overhear a crackling intercom message telling the staff that there are only two twice-baked vanilla cheescakes left and the meal become a race against time. But then, pausing midway through my duck rillette, gnocchi and minted pea puree, I begin to think I may not be getting the authentic tang of a winter race meeting and decide I should go ‘trackside’.

  The people thronging about out here are a colourful mixed bag. There are lots of girls in Hunter wellies and jodhpurs with broad Black Country accents. Four middle-aged ladies are huddled intently around a couple of Racing Posts (racing has its own dedicated national daily newspaper. Beat that, Premier League and F1). I fall into conversation with them as we both make a few bob on Delightful Sleep, runner up in the 8.30 race, the relatively soberly named Betting Tips Galore Handicap Stakes. ‘Did you have a swinger on that?’ one asks me, to which I
can only shrug. They clearly know their stuff and chuckle at me a little pityingly.

  The paddock area is quite bizarre. It is rather like a little fashion parade where the horses are led around by awkward looking stable hands. (Stable ‘lads’, by the way, can be any age.) People crowd around the rails, studying the horses intently. Up close the horses are beautiful creatures, glossy and chestnut with glistening flanks and noble heads, wreathed in their steaming breath. One is of particular interest to a bossy looking woman by me in tweeds with a notebook. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asks, weirdly. ‘It was a boy last time I looked,’ returns the hand, a mischievous girl in a ponytail.

  There is some mildly pervy sounding chit chat about Tongue Straps and Blinkers, but I am more mesmerised by the jockeys. They really are funny little guys. If any jockeys are reading this, I should say that this is not meant offensively. I’m genuinely fascinated. Not like children at all, or young boys, as I’d sometimes wrongly thought. But adult men sort of scaled down. A little light googling showed that I was not alone in my curiosity.

  ‘Jockeys – What The Fuck Are They?’ was one of the first sites I came across. Here’s a typical post:

  … men weighing under 50 kgs are extremely uncommon, also horseriding isn’t accessible to everyone, it’s fairly exclusive really. Yet the horse racing industry always manages to have tiny athletes who’ve grown up riding horses. You couldn’t even tell if a kid was going to grow into a tiny man, so could they really be scouting kids and prepping them? No. How many men as small as jockeys have you seen in other proffessions [sic]? It would be striking to see a jockey-sized man changing the oil in your car. You’d be alarmed I think.