Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  Newmarket was the only holdout. The Jockey Club disapproved of the type of people travelling on the excursion trains, and considered that preserving Newmarket’s socially exclusive air was essential for the course’s continued pre-eminence. Unlike other racecourses, which were enthusiastically negotiating with the railways for links to major stations, and the scheduling of more and more excursion trains, the Jockey Club scorned the railways. When the Great Eastern Railway scheduled excursion trains to a station near Newmarket, the Club arranged the races to begin and end miles apart, so that the only spectators who could watch the entire race were those who rode or drove along the course beside the horses, in eighteenth-century fashion. This attitude did not last for long, however. The Club was forced to change its stance not because it suddenly welcomed the proletarian masses, but because the cash benefits brought by the transport of horses outweighed the social demerits of working-class attendance. If Newmarket wanted to remain the country’s most prestigious racecourse, it needed to have the best horses entered for its races, and the owners had already begun to withdraw their horses from any meetings that were unreachable by train. By 1847 the Club was actively supporting the creation of a rail link to its once sacrosanct grounds.33

  As the railways became an important part of racegoing, the carnival element of the race meetings began to fade away. Spectators could now come by train, spend a day watching the races, and go home again. They no longer needed to be entertained over a two- or three-day period. The socially eminent also arrived for the racing alone, which meant that the theatres, concerts and assemblies that had been laid on to amuse them in the past were no longer as important. The money was vanishing from the social events, but it was not vanishing from racing. As the extraneous elements began to wither away, the number of race meetings and the number of days per meeting were both increasing. In the 1850s there were 62 new events in the calendar; in the 1860s another 99; then 54 more appeared between 1870 and 1875 alone. In 1848 there had been 13 courses that held more than one meeting a year; by 1870 there were 32.34 The major requirement for a successful meet was a large population that could be reached by rail. Thus the courses that were accessible by train from London - Lingfield, Sandown, Windsor, Kempton Park and Hurst Park - each had five flat meetings a year, and more under National Hunt rules (over jumps). Only Newmarket staged more days of racing at a single course. And these race meets were, for the most part, held on weekends: Hurst Park’s meetings were on Whit Monday and the August Bank Holiday - the two ‘people’s holidays’ - which made it abundantly clear where they thought their income was coming from.35

  The railways brought prosperity, and the lack of railways could quickly destroy a racecourse. The Blandford racecourse that was discussed above, pp. 428-9, had held race meetings since the 1660s. Then in 1840 the South Western Railway routed its new line through Salisbury, twenty miles away, bypassing Blandford. Within two years, the Blandford meeting had entirely vanished from the racing calendar. Instead, the South Western Railway was sponsoring its own, new, meetings in towns along its line, offering prizes in the ‘Railway Stakes’.36

  By this date there were 202,137 guineas available to be won as prize money annually.37 This does not take into account the money spent on gambling on the sport, which was a separate matter. Yet gambling too was changing because of technology. Bookmakers’ lists with odds were as readily available for working-class gamblers away from the racecourses as they were for those betting in the more rarefied atmosphere of Tattersall’s: by the 1850s there were 150 betting shops in London alone. While betting by the working classes was frowned on, betting had become a modern, efficient, commercial enterprise, driven to increasing expansion by the use of the telegraph and the press. The telegraph disseminated an almost instantaneous knowledge of the race results to the public, and, linked with new sporting newspapers, so created a widening public interest in the sport.

  In 1851 the Racing Times had begun to appear, following in the steps of the earlier 6d. papers such as Bell’s Life. It was in 1859 that the penny press entered the racing world, and found a ready market: the Sporting Life (1859), the Sporting Telegraph (1860), the Sporting Gazette (1862), Sporting Opinion (1864), the Sportsman and (known universally as the ‘Pink ‘Un’) the Sporting Times (both in 1865). Sporting Life, published twice a week, was selling 150,000 copies in its first year, and 300,000 copies in the 1880s.38 All these sporting papers relied on the telegraph for their content, their air of omniscience, their crucial ‘insider’ status: they supplied hot gossip from the stables, betting advice and starting prices, and then, finally, the results. In 1868 the telegraph companies sent news to 144 towns and to 173 newspapers; by 1870 the Post Office (which had taken over as the sole administrator of the telegraph system) was sending news to 365 towns and 467 newspapers, and charging each one less for doing so. Racecourses themselves increasingly saw the value of the telegraph: Newmarket had sent 30,168 messages in 1870; five years later that number had more than doubled, to 71,716. Other courses increased their usage even more sharply, indicating a rising arc of professionalism: Epsom went from 5,600 telegrams a year in 1870 to 17,081 in 1875, Ascot moved from 3,700 to 12,812, while Goodwood went from a very modest 2,632 to even more than Ascot, at 14,432.39 And it was not simply the racecourses, the sporting papers or even the spectators who benefited. The Post Office itself found racing a very steady earner. By the end of the century the racecourses were valuable enough to the Post Office that it was worth setting up a department dedicated to ‘turf telegraphists’; in 1901 the St Leger alone required the services of eighty-two telegraph operators.40

  In 1875 the next development in race meetings took place: the enclosed racecourse. The first grandstands had appeared over a century before. These early structures had enabled paying spectators to sit in comfort, to obtain a better view, or more select company, but most racegoers had attended without expecting - or being expected - to pay. The course owners were happy enough with the money visitors spent on incidentals and betting. But now Sandown Park was designed from the first to be a course that was completely enclosed by its grandstands, and suddenly an entirely new source of income had appeared. At Sandown, no one could watch a race without paying.

  As was so frequently the case, this novelty actually had a long and varied history. Some smaller courses had earlier charged all their visitors, but these were racecourses that were owned and run by the upper classes, and the purpose of the admission fee was to keep a certain class out, not to make money from the gate: if spectators were content to watch at a distance, from the neighbouring fields, they were perfectly at liberty to do so. Haigh Park, in Leeds, had attempted to charge in 1823, and managed to survive for about a decade, but there were never enough admissions to be able to increase the prize money as was hoped, let alone make any profits. In 1837 the Hippodrome in central London was enclosed, but it too failed, and rapidly. From 1847 a racecourse near Manchester had charged a 1d. admission. In 1868 it became the first racecourse to attempt to stop the non-paying spectator from seeing any part of the race: its new course included a four-metre ditch and a stockade to block the view of those outside.41 But it was Sandown, completely enclosed, that showed the way forward.

  Sandown, Kempton Park and Lingfield Park were created by newly formed companies which had bought land, enclosed it, laid out the courses and built grandstands to surround each course completely.

  Sandown further ushered in the ‘club’ system, whereby a members’ enclosure was set aside for those who had been proposed and seconded along club lines, creating a secure social environment for women - and doubling the prospective audience at a stroke. There was not a single racecourse that failed to copy Sandown’s extraordinarily successful example if it was at all financially possible. The companies that had formed some of these new racecourses had had to raise huge sums - £34,000 in the case of Haydock Park, ultimately £80,000 for Newbury in 190642 - but the returns were equally huge, and the older courses were forced to imitate. J
ust as Newmarket had been forced to accept the railways, because owners would not otherwise enter their horses, so now owners showed a preference for the enclosed racecourses, which offered more prize money, funded as it was by the takings at the gate. To survive, therefore, enclosure became virtually compulsory. Sandown had started in 1875 with two meetings a year; within two years, it held four, by 1880 it was five. Others rushed to copy this formula, and, aside from the London-circuit racecourses, in the Midlands alone Derby enclosed in 1880, Leicester in 1884 and Colwick Park (Nottingham) in 1892; in the north, Gosforth Park and Haydock Park in the 1890s both joined in. In Scotland, Hamilton Park in Glasgow was the only enclosed course before the turn of the century. It had opened as a fully enclosed course in 1887, but as it drew a mere 12,000 spectators for its biggest day, from a population of over 1 million, it was unsurprising that few others followed for some time.43 The only courses that managed to survive without enclosure were those that were important for social reasons - Ascot, Epsom, Doncaster and York - or were owned by a single individual, like Goodwood.44

  With enclosure, with limited liability companies owning racecourses, with increased prize money, many courses were also simultaneously entering into financial arrangements with the railways. No longer were the railway companies simply sponsoring Railway Stakes at courses along their lines. Instead they were building lines that decanted passengers just outside the gate of the racecourse (or, sometimes, a racecourse was built beside an already existing line; the result was the same). From the 1880s, falling real prices and rising wages brought an increase in prosperity to the working classes, and the racecourses worked on ways of luring spectators by improving their facilities: railways with better links, or stations that were closer to the course, or, at the course itself, better clubhouses. Some stations even built covered passageways to take their passengers directly from the station to inside the enclosure.45 The money that was washing about the sport was no longer in doubt: jockeys earned up to £1,000 a year (the salary of a distinguished surgeon), champion stallions were charged at 600 guineas per cover.46 Up to 70,000 or 80,000 people were expected at the larger races near the big metropolitan centres. In 1896 the income earned by the racecourse at Doncaster was as follows:

  Grandstand tickets: £9,415 10s.

  Stand and second-class stand tickets: £1,195

  Private stand: £55

  Lincolnshire stand: £400

  County stand: £868

  Private boxes: £220 10s.

  Paddock: £1,939

  Tattersall’s enclosure: £1,160

  Carriage stands: £577 7s. 6d.

  Publican’s booths: £414 6s.

  Temporary booths, tents, carts, wagons: £1,612 18s. 6d.

  Refreshment rooms: £800

  Race cards: £325

  Fruit stalls: £2547

  This came to nearly £20,000 - and the income from the rental of the refreshment booths alone was more than the total earned by most meetings just fifty years earlier.

  The enclosed racecourses exacerbated what had been, for the working classes, a growing problem throughout the nineteenth century. Increasing industrialization and urbanization meant that open spaces were at a premium, as the continuing enclosure of public spaces removed what was left from common use. George Offer, a London magistrate, testified to the 1833 Select Committee on Public Walks that he ‘often regretted [that] the places, when I was a boy, where I used to play and amuse myself, are now entirely shut up, and devoted either to buildings or to places of promenade for the higher classes’.48 That a select committee was looking into the problem at all was an indication of how acute the situation had become. The committee was, at the end of its hearings, ‘convinced that some Open Places reserved for the amusement (under due regulations to preserve order) of the humbler classes, would assist to wean them from low and debasing pleasures. Great complaint is made of drinking-houses, dog fights, and boxing matches, yet, unless some opportunity for other recreation is afforded to workmen, they are driven to such pursuits.’ Public provision of free leisure spaces might stop the trespassing on private property (which, the committee pointed out hopefully, would also mean a drop in the costs of policing), and would improve the general health of the workers, stop them from drinking, and more generally ‘promot[e] Civilisation, and excit[e] Industry’.49

  Momentum to prevent common ground from being enclosed picked up. The General Enclosure Act of 1836 forbade enclosure of common land near big urban centres; in 1837 it was agreed that ‘in all Inclosure Bills provision [should] be made for leaving an open space sufficient for the purposes of exercise and recreation of the neighbouring population.’ Yet, as is the way with all governments, at the same time as these steps were being taken to provide more free leisure ground, the General Enclosure Act of 1845 produced the exact opposite result, making it easier to alter the designated usage of land from public to private by holding local inquiries rather than parliamentary ones. Communities could ask for a different piece of land to be allocated to common use for ‘Exercise and Recreation’, but no one was obliged to take their wishes into consideration. In fact, between 1845 and 1869, nearly 250,000 hectares of common land were enclosed, while only 1,600 hectares were set aside for the general public, and of those 1,600, only 705 were specifically designated for recreation. (The rest were given over to allotments.)50

  This did not mean that the idea of fully accessible open spaces for the masses had entirely vanished. London led the way by setting aside money to purchase lands for public parks: the land for Primrose Hill park was bought from its ground landlords, Eton College, for £20,236 in 1846; Victoria Park was laid out in east London in 1849; Battersea Park was purchased for more than £100,000 in the 1850s. But little happened outside London at first. In 1844, Preston was the one town in Lancashire to have a public park. Though in 1840, £10,000 had been set aside in a general fund for the provision of public parks, nearly twenty years later, only Manchester and Bradford had come forward, Manchester requesting £3,000, and Bradford £1,500.51 Instead, many parks outside London were bought and laid out by charitable institutions or private philanthropists: the Duke of Norfolk gave Sheffield its first park in 1847; Sir Titus Salt created a park in Saltaire; both Hull and Halifax had parks donated by private benefactors; Middlesbrough’s Albert Park was funded by a local ironworks.52 Although the creation of public parks was a slow change, and for the most part funded by private enterprise, still by the second half of the century it was accepted that some public land must be kept for the working classes’ use. There had been riots when Epping Forest was threatened with enclosure and deforestation in 1849, and when in 1882 it was finally opened to the public it was Queen Victoria herself who performed the opening ceremony.53

  Many of these parks, however, were for families, for decorous walks, for listening to the music played in the bandstands, for socializing in general. They were not for games-playing. Games instead still tended to be played on land owned by pubs, as had been the case from the sixteenth century. Publicans and innkeepers arranged the matches and held both the prize money the gambling stakes for a variety of games: skittles, bowls, wrestling, cricket, pedestrianism (foot races). Football was not originally a pub sport.

  The origins of football are wreathed in myth - partly because ‘football’ was a generic term for various sorts of throwing, carrying and kicking ball games. One kind of football, and possibly the earliest, took the form of one of those ritual games that were played in each locality by a certain group of people (for football it was the young men of the community) at a certain time, usually Shrove Tuesday. This was not absolute - in Devonshire the annual football game was on Good Friday, in parts of Nottinghamshire it was on Easter Tuesday, in Kirkham, Lancashire, on Christmas Day54 - but in general village football was a Shrovetide game. Some parishes played the game over an entire village - between the east and west districts of a parish, perhaps; some played ten or fifteen a side; some restricted the players to parish residents, others wel
comed anyone who wanted to join in. Derby can provide one example of the form the annual village game could take. The Derby match was, in theory, played between two parishes, St Peter’s and All Saints, but in practice anyone in the area could take part, and many travelled to Derby every year just to play. The match started at two o’clock on Shrove Tuesday in the town marketplace, with, by the very early nineteenth century, between 500 and 1,000 a side, such was its fame. The aim was to get the ball to a goal a mile outside the town - to the gate of a field on one side, and to the wheel of a watermill on the other. The side that was aiming for the field found it helpful to head for the River Derwent and then swam with the ball if they could manage it: there was a good landing place fairly near the goal. Their rivals, on the other hand, tried to start up the watermill to prevent a goal being scored. A frequent tactic by both teams, if they saw no way through their rivals’ defence, was to hide the ball until dusk, or remove its stuffing and smuggle it out under someone’s shirt.55

  Yet while this type of game certainly existed - and today continues to be played at Shrovetide in a few communities, such as Ashbourne, in Derbyshire - it was not the direct ancestor of football as the sport is known today. This type of football most likely developed out of a more impromptu game, a kickabout, that was played on rough ground, or during fairs and on market days. This football had none of the ritual elements of the annual game, and was played in an informal manner by anyone who wanted to in the villages, and, later, when enclosure and industrialization put common land at a premium, in the same pub grounds as other sports. By the 1830s and 1840s pub football teams were issuing challenges in Bell’s Life, just as other pub teams did. There were announcements made by football teams from the Grapes and the White Lion pubs near Dudley, the Bee Hive in Rugby, the Hole in the Wall in Blackburn, the Horns in Penistone, the Blue Ball at Thurslestone - and many more.56 In 1865 the local postal directory for Sheffield listed thirteen clubs, of which eleven had their addresses at pubs. Other pub teams included Newton Heath, based at the Three Crowns, Oldham Road, Manchester (later it changed its name to Manchester United). Everton was based in its early days at the Queen’s Head pub, in Everton village; West Bromwich Albion in 1879 used the White Hart inn and the Roebuck for changing. As late as 1894 three professional clubs - Gainsborough Trinity, Nottingham Forest and Manchester City - were still using pubs as changing areas, and then walking to their grounds.57