Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Page 53

  All this was worthwhile, as the gentry and their friends descended on the town for the week. There were balls, dinners, breakfasts, assemblies - many taking place in the towns’ inns - while theatres frequently had their only regular performances scheduled for these weeks. In 1732 York race week included daily concerts given by visiting musicians, as well as other concerts performed by the city waits; ‘private’ dinners and breakfasts at the local inns; and grand public assemblies, with up to 300 subscribers for each.12 Mrs Lybbe Powys was a good representative of the type of people the towns hoped to draw. In 1757 she went to Chesterfield, Derbyshire, for race week. On the first day, she and her friends attended the races and got home about eight in the evening, then ‘about ten we went to the Assembly Room, where the Duke of Devonshire always presided as master of the ceremonies, and after the ball gave an elegant cold supper…We got home about five. The next evening were at the concert…and on the third day again went to the [race]course…That evening’s ball was equally brilliant as the first night, and both gave us as strangers a high idea of these annual assemblies at Chesterfield.’13 In the 1770s at the Ludlow races she was told that ‘ ‘tis the custom of the place’ for everyone to attend theatre in race week, and then for the men to lunch ‘at the ordinary’ while the ladies were given a lunch by a local ‘gentleman of large fortune’, finishing off the day with more racing and an assembly.14 The hopes of the towns’ merchants were that the gentry would come for the week itself, and then the delights of the town would keep the spending public there for a longer season. York scheduled Friday concerts for the winter season from mid-October to mid-March, and when the new racecourse was planned (the old being too near the Ouse, and prone to flooding) it seemed sensible that new assembly rooms should be built at the same time: the new course created a need for new places of entertainment. The course itself was a fully professional affair, laid out by a landscape designer, John Telford, and when it opened in 1754 the stands for the spectators were among the earliest permanent structures erected for the convenience of the public: ‘The form of the race being like a horseshoe, the company in the midst and on the scaffolds, can never lose sight of the horses,’ wrote Francis Drake, an eighteenth-century historian of the city of York.15

  In the 1730s, the intermingling of classes caused a certain amount of hand-wringing, not only with reference to the races themselves, but concerning all leisure activities. A number of pieces of legislation were passed that, in retrospect, can be interpreted as sharing a common purpose: that of keeping some leisure activities exclusively the province of the more prosperous. In no cases were these activities banned: they were just hedged about with enough restrictions to make it difficult for the common people to be present. The 1737 Licensing Act restricted some types of theatre performance; there was another act in 1739 which attempted to ban some popular card and dice games, and to segregate gamblers into certain (upper-class) locations. In 1740 it was the turn of racing. The sport was overhauled, and races with prize money under £50 were banned entirely. This completely wiped out smaller, more localized, and less elite race meets. An unintended result was that when the more working-class meets vanished, instead of not going to the races, the working-class spectators simply began to attend race meetings that had previously been the exclusive province of the upper classes. To reduce this ‘promiscuous’ mixing of the classes that the law had inadvertently brought about, grandstands were created at several courses - places where the upper classes could pay to be separated from the people. As well as York’s new racecourse, Doncaster (1751), York (again, in 1754), Manchester and Newmarket (early 1760s), Stamford (1766) and Beverley (1767) all built stands.16

  The 1740 legislation caused a sudden, precipitous decline in the number of racecourses, and also in the number of days given over to racing, the number of prizes and the amount of money that was up for grabs. In 1739 there had been 138 courses, with 406 prizes and a total of £13,496 in prize money; only a year later there were 84 courses, 227 prizes, and the prize money was a mere £9,279. Yet, while this was obviously a step backwards for those with financial interests in the sport, there were other developments that were more encouraging, showing, at least in retrospect, the beginning of a commercial underpinning to racing. In 1726 John Cheny of Arundel had announced his seven-year plan to list retrospectively all the races that had been run in the country. The following year his first volume, An Historical list of all Horse-Matches Run, And of all Plates and Prizes Run for in England (of the value of Ten Pounds or upwards) appeared.17 In the same year the Racing Calendar began publication, listing the dates of future meetings. This notification increased the numbers of entries into a race, and also the numbers of spectators who attended, and it survived to be replaced in 1751 by a fortnightly Sporting Kalendar, which in turn was superseded in 1761 by a new Racing Calendar. Newspapers soon joined in. By 1731 Read’s Weekly Journal was carrying a ‘List of the Horse Matches to be run at Newmarket in March, April and May’; other papers also listed races, with the names of the horses, the owners, the weights, the number of miles to be run, the wagers laid and the forfeits offered, as well as, later, the results.18 All this greatly increased the number of people interested in racing.

  In 1752 the Jockey Club was formed. There is little information about the early intentions of the Club, although its location was originally London, not Newmarket, and it was most probably a straightforward social club for owners. That year an advertisement in the Sporting Kalendar announced that ‘A Contribution Free Plate [will be held, to be run] by Horses the Property of the Noblemen and Gentlemen belonging to the JOCKEY CLUB at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, one heat on the Round Course, weight eight Stone, seven Pound’ would be run. Even while based in London, the connection with Newmarket was paramount: in that same year the Kalendar published the Club’s ‘Newmarket Rules’ - half of which set down conditions for racing, half for betting - and in the following year the Club seems to have migrated to Newmarket.

  By 1757 it had already begun its expansion from a social group into a group that systematized and regularized the sport outside its Newmarket home. That year a dispute at the Curragh racecourse in Ireland was referred to the Jockey Club for resolution, and the next year the club gave its first ‘general order’, setting out how much weight could be carried. Soon the Club had set down rules for what to do if a horse was entered for two races, and how the weight-age allowances were to be determined. Within the next five years, nineteen owners had registered their colours, which had previously been altered at will, with the Jockey Club, and a list of owners and their colours was published, formalizing the system - and by extension the Club’s rights to supervise it.19 By 1770 it was generally accepted that this was the body that could permit, or forbid, access to any racecourse in the country. That year the Racing Calendar published the following notice, without feeling any need to state on what authority it was made: ‘Chester Races. In order to save Mr Quick, Mr Castle, or any of the Ascott [sic] confederacy the trouble and expense of training, they are desired to take notice that none of their horses will be allowed to run for any of the above plates, neither will they be suffered to run for any of the plates at Conway, Nantwich, or Holywell; nor will Thomas Dunn be permitted to ride.’ The Club shortly took on the further responsibility of resolving disputes on any racecourse in the country.20

  Yet, while the socially exclusive Jockey Club represented the face of the great to the world, many of the changes that occurred in racing were actually planned and executed not by these aristocrat owners and their friends at Newmarket, but by the middle-class administrators at the courses across the country. In 1770, 70 per cent of all races were held in market towns, being organized and attended by the local middle classes. Even at Newmarket, things were changing. James Weatherby was the son of a solicitor in Newcastle. In 1771 he was named Keeper of the Matchbook, Stakeholder and Secretary to the Jockey Club, and from 1773 he began to issue a Racing Calendar that quickly became the standard publication,
superseding the various rival journals that had been appearing from John Cheny’s onward. Weatherby’s Calendar set out the Jockey Club rules, and listed the results of races throughout Britain, as well as the ‘Colours worn by the Riders of the following Noblemen and Gentlemen’. By choosing which race meets to include in his Calendar, Weatherby gave status and authority to those selected. He also was the conduit for permission to enter horses to race at Newmarket, Epsom and other elite courses. His position as both Keeper of the Matchbook and publisher of the Racing Calendar was later inherited by his nephew, also named James Weatherby, and then in succession by a series of descendants who, through the nineteenth century, came to control the structure and development of racing as a commercial enterprise, via their long-term professional training, whatever the amateur and more informal members of the Jockey Club may have thought.

  In 1791 James Weatherby II produced An Introduction to the General Stud Book, followed in 1793 by The General Stud Book, which laid out the pedigree of every recognized thoroughbred in Britain.* The Stud was updated five times over the next half-century, and then began to appear regularly every four years. Inclusion (or exclusion) from the Stud meant the possibility or prohibition of running a horse in any given race. As well as giving formal access to the races, the Stud was the written expression of the changes that had been taking place in husbandry for much of the century. In the early part of the century, horse breeds in Britain had been improved by the introduction of Arabian bloodstock, in particular via the Darley Arabian, which was brought from Syria to Thomas Darley, in Yorkshire, and the Godolphin Arabian, which was sold by Louis XV and eventually ended up in Britain.* But the changes in selective breeding were not developing from horse racing; instead, horse racing was picking up on innovations first explored among farm animals, and which can be epitomized by Robert Bakewell, a Leicestershire stockbreeder.

  Previously, environment had been considered to have as much effect on animal breeding as inheritance; diet and weather were thought to be as crucial as any genetic contribution (to use an anachronistic term). The quality of a farm animal was judged solely on the quantity of offspring it produced, rather than on the quality of those offspring. Bakewell, however, concentrated on selective breeding of his sheep, and, instead of trying just to increase the number of offspring born to each animal, he was more interested in how reliable the offspring were as breeders in their turn. In 1760 Bakewell began to supply his animals for stud to other farmers, and that year he charged 17s. 6d. per animal per season; by 1784 he was asking £100 per animal per season, and by 1789 his rates had gone up to £400 - a more than 450-fold increase over three decades. This indicates that there was something going on beyond the quality of Bakewell’s animals. There had also been a perceptual shift by the purchasers: they were looking at what they were buying in a different way. Nothing else can explain this extraordinary rise. The quantity of offspring cannot have increased 450-fold. Therefore the buyers must have understood that they were purchasing, at great price, an extremely valuable intangible. They were buying potential: the potential inherent in Bakewell’s breeding animals, the potential that these animals had to improve the quality of the future flock.21 There is an obvious connection between this and The General Stud Book, which promised ‘to correct the…increasing evil of false and inaccurate Pedigrees’. By the 1760s, in the racing community the money to be made in breeding and stud fees was equal to - and a good deal more certain than - the prize money to be won. In 1768 the great racehorse Eclipse, a great-grandson of the Darley Arabian, was sold for 1,750 guineas, and was claimed to have earned £25,000 in stud fees.22 Similarly, in 1779 Richard Tattersall bought Highflyer, Lord Bolingbroke’s unbeaten racehorse, descended from the Godolphin Arabian, for £2,500, and comfortably saw a good return on that initial outlay from stud fees and the sale of Highflyer’s offspring (which included twelve champions).23 The Tattersalls were another family, like the Weatherbys, which infused professional entrepreneurial skills into a sport that preferred to portray itself as run entirely by and for gilded amateurs. Richard Tattersall (c. 1725-95) was the son of a farmer. In his youth he had been apprenticed to a wool-stapler, but he soon found his way into the horse world, and by 1756 he had already done well enough that he was able to marry a granddaughter of the Earl of Somerville.24 By 1766 he had enough money to open an auctioneer’s room for horseflesh at Hyde Park Corner. Cleverly, he set aside a private room (and a cook) for the members of the Jockey Club: by providing for their creature comforts, he guaranteed that the Club members would also bring their horses to him for sale. Tattersall’s quickly became the leading saleroom for horses of all types: racehorses, hunters, hacks, and coach and carriage horses. Previously sales had been private arrangements between social equals; under Tattersall, selling a horse became an impersonal business transaction, where the market price ruled. His professionalization of the saleroom changed horse racing permanently.

  Soon Tattersall’s had cornered and likewise professionalized a large part of the betting market. In the 1790s the London saleroom boasted a Subscription Room, where members met to make and pay gambling debts. Membership was talked of as though Tattersall’s were a socially select club, but it was in fact open to anyone who paid an annual subscription. Soon owners and gamblers knew that this was where bookmakers, horse dealers and jockeys were all to be found. Now betting, like the sales, was market-driven rather than a social arrangement. Tattersall had managed to create an impersonal betting mechanism, a business, open to every class and type. By 1843 Tattersall’s Rules and Regulations were accepted for all matters pertaining to gambling on the course. The Rules said that they were ‘under the sanction of the stewards of the Jockey Club’, but it was Tattersall’s that was producing the odds for bookmakers. It became known as the Turf Exchange, the Lloyd’s of gambling.25

  Thus, despite the setback after the 1740 legislation, racing was quickly back to where it had been in 1739, and, further, through the winnowing out of the minor - and therefore more amateur - meetings, the sport in general had become even larger, better organized and more lucrative for everyone involved. The racing world had been rationalized, and commercialized, by its enforced diminution. A sample comparison of meetings in Blandford, in Dorset, in 1737 and in 1773 is instructive. In 1737 the race meet was held over three days in May, with one race a day (plus preliminary heats), for purses of 30, 20 and 10 guineas. On the first day, racehorses ran; on the second day the race was for ponies, on the third day for hunters. In 1773 the meeting took place over three days in July, when an average of six racehorses competed in each race (a good field for the time), for three purses of £40 each, one sweepstake of 110 guineas, and two matches (head to heads) for wagers of 100 and 200 guineas.* Furthermore, the meeting was scheduled right after the Winchester races, and just before the Stockbridge and Exeter meetings, all of which were within striking distance for both the horses and the spectators.26

  That the towns were relatively proximate and the meetings one after the other was essential, for a simple reason that is rarely considered today: before the railways, the horses had to be walked from one race to the next. For the most part, either horses raced on small local circuits or their energy was saved for the few big races of national importance. The arrival of the turnpike roads increased the size of each of the circuits. Many of the important races began to be established only after the development of the turnpikes: the St Leger in 1776; the Oaks in 1779; the Derby in 1780; the 2,000 Guineas in 1809.

  With the arrival of the railways, horses could more easily be entered for more races across the country. But this was not the only change. With rail transport, the age at which horses could be raced was substantially reduced. Previously a horse had had to be at least four years old to have the stamina to race, then walk to the next meeting, then race again. Goodwood to Epsom was a four-day walk; on to Newmarket was another seven days; while to Doncaster took two solid weeks.27 Now, with a heavy schedule of races, but no intervals of long-distance walk
ing, two-year-olds were strong enough to race. This made a great difference to the owners and trainers, who saw financial returns on their animals much sooner and, perhaps as importantly, could stop investing in horses that were evidently not going to pay off. As the horses grew younger, the races got shorter to accommodate their lesser stamina. The administrators and racecourse managements liked this reduction: more races could be scheduled each day, and the more races there were, the longer the crowds stayed, spending their money.

  The advent of the railways had also changed the type and frequency of the crowds. Before railways, most race meetings were attended by locals and by the wealthy, who could ride or drive to the meetings and could afford to pay for accommodation. A few of the big races drew crowds from further away - for the St Leger, working-class spectators from Sheffield walked the eighteen miles to Doncaster, and then walked home again the next day.28 But it was the opportunities created by the railways that propelled racing into a new league, creating the possibility of ever-larger crowds. These opportunities were recognized from the very first days of passenger trains. In 1831, the year after it opened, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried racegoers to Newton-le-Willows and Liverpool.29 Sir John Easthope, the chairman of the London and Southampton Railway, was a keen follower of horses, and within a week of the opening of the line from London to Kingston, in 1833, the company had scheduled eight special trains to take spectators to the Derby. At Kingston, there was a long walk from the station to the racecourse, but such was the enthusiasm that, after the seventh train had left Nine Elms station in south London, 5,000 would-be spectators were still waiting to board the final train. (When they realized that most of them were not going to reach Kingston, they staged a riot.) Undeterred, a few weeks later the company ran excursion trains to Ascot, and by 1841 the mainline railways were regularly carrying racegoers to Surbiton for Epsom and both Woking and Slough for Ascot.30 In 1840 more than 25,000 passengers were transported by train to a race meeting in Paisley.31 After the Great Northern Railway began to carry passengers, employers hundreds of miles outside Doncaster learned to accept that the day of the St Leger was a de-facto local holiday. Ultimately the Great Northern had to remove all freight trains from its schedules on the day of the race, and clear its sidings for excursion trains to wait for their return passengers. In 1888 nearly 100,000 racegoers travelled to the St Leger by train.32