CHAPTER XIX

THE TURF

NOW that steam has superseded horse-power, and Eclipse himself would cut a poor figure alongside the electric telegraph, it becomes a question whether country races are not more productive of evil than of good. They foster an enormous amount of knavery and idleness, to which the noblest animal is made subservient, and only put money into the pockets of those for whom the public generally have little taste, feeling, or community of interest. Racing is at best, too, but an idle lounging pursuit, producing none of the healthful invigorating enjoyment attendant upon sports in which all can take a part.

First little gentlemen in jackets and leathers are in convulsions: now Aunt Sally is in the ascendant: next drums and clanging cymbals disturb the serenity of the scene, and hollow-cheeked jaded mountebanks dance and shout and pretend to be joyful in all the daylight exposure of paint, tawdry tinsel, and glazed calico.

Though the race-horse is a beautiful animal to look at, in all its pride of silken-coated glory, the spurring emulation of the race course is not to be compared to the generous enjoyment of the hunter, who, equally with his rider, partakes of the enthusiasm of the scene. There is another distinction between the two—you are always cautioned to keep out of the reach of the racer’s insidious lash out with one leg, which can break a limb quite as effectually as two, while it is well known that a hunter will never hurt a man if he can help it. See how they roll to get clear of a rider when down.

Whatever support the public-house interest may require in other places, in order to keep the landlords’ gigs a-going, and their wives in hoops and feathers, Roseberry Rocks certainly has no need of any extraneous aid, for she is a fine legitimate attraction of herself, and an infusion of gamblers, blacklegs, and pickpockets adds neither to the purity nor the respectability of the place. Yet races they have, and announcements are made with great sport anticipated, and stewards are victimised, and money screwed out of everybody and from every available source. And for what? To encourage our noble breed of horses? To promote the pastime of the people? Not a bit of it! They would be quite as much amused with a donkey race. But in order that the gamblers may have a field day and rig the betting lists from one end of the kingdom to the other. As to the interest the people take in a race on account of the owners of the horses, that is a long exploded fallacy, for half the horses run in false names, and no one knows but Captain Plantagenet Gascoine’s brown horse Lord Clyde may belong to Bitterbeer the sporting publican in Bermondsey, or Mr. Mainwaring Jackson’s pretty bay mare Sweet Violet to Mr. Arsenic the advertising quack doctor—the “honourable secrecy” gentleman who pollutes the country with his pestilent bills. Then the railways, which have done so much in be-winging the world, have lent a hand to racing rascality, for whereas in the olden days of road travelling, a horse could not go out of a certain track, off a certain circuit as it were; now they can be put into a truck and whisked from one end of the kingdom to the other, and alight whenever there is a chance of picking up money, either by winning or losing, for one is oftentimes quite as profitable as the other. And that fact alone is enough to destroy the interest in a race, for as there is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse, so though the little gentleman in black and yellow may work and flourish and appear emulous to win, there is no saying but his orders may be exactly the reverse, and at the proper time he will give the gentle pull that enables red and white on the grey to slip in half a head before him. Then black and yellow will dismount and jump frantically about—just like the decoy at the thimble-rig table when he finds the real countryman losing. Dash it! how disappointed he is!

It is singular how the adage, that ill-gotten money never prospers, often seems to hold good with regard to turf matters. Take Robberfield, for instance, where half the people think to live for the whole year upon what they can screw out of visitors for one week, and where everything is charged a guinea—a guinea for a bed, a guinea for a dinner, a guinea for the rooms, a guinea for the stand, until a poor victimised foreigner once declared it ought to be called the guinea meeting. Well, nobody is ever any the better for it; the money seems to go as fast as it comes; and instead of the upper classes staying and entertaining their friends as formerly, they fly the place as they would an infected city.

Then come the lords of the creation, as they think themselves—fellows from the gaming-houses, the saloons, and the stews, riotous in jewellery—who call themselves by the conveniently indefinite title of the “London gents,” and who go swaggering about denouncing the natives, and declaring there is nothing good enough for them in the place—sort of Brummagem O’Diceys. In fact, Robber-field may be looked upon as the grand mart or climax of rascality, where touting and hocussing, and lameing and lying, all the misadventures that poor horseflesh is liable to, are carried on upon the grandest and most scientific scale—the whole place seeming to be polluted; whereas at the majority of country meetings the impure stream only permeates the otherwise healthy population and marks its course as it goes.

Twenty, or five-and-twenty years have made a wonderful change in racing affairs, the wave of the turf apparently having broken, burying all the gentlemen and bringing the mud of the sea to the surface. Formerly the real professional book-making betting-men were few and far between, who operated largely on their own accounts; now there is a perfect myriad of middle-men who advertise their infallible winning “secrets” with as much ingenuity and pertinacity as Rowland used to advertise his “Incomparable Oil Macassar.” Why, if these men really know what they profess, do they not go into the market and make their own fortunes instead of offering to help other people to make theirs? Betting, where parties are sure to win, requires no capital, nothing but a metallic-pencilled pocket-book and the usual stock of easy impudence with which these gentlemen are generally sufficiently endowed. Indeed, with the exception of small horse-dealers, fellows who will haggle for a month before they will give twenty pounds for a horse, and yet who think on the strength of being horse-dealers they may stare and stop any gentleman and ask “what he will take for his ’oss,” there are few people less diffident than the small legs, who by confusing the term sportsmen with sporting men (alias gamblers) think there is a sort of freemasonry of equality that entitles them to button-hole and “how are ye, old boy?” anybody. Were the exertions of these worthies confined to victimising each other, no one would take any notice of their existence, but they are a growing and a dangerous evil, and one that completely baffles the efforts of the legislature to suppress them.

So soon as the hydra-headed monster seems extinguished in one shape, it arises as fresh and formidable as ever in another. The Commission men—“the sporting facts and golden fancies,” The back the jockey and not the horse, “the golden secret gratis,” &c. advertisers—exercise just the same pernicious influence upon the lower orders throughout the country generally, that the silver and copper Hells used to exercise upon those of the metropolis. Every person is enabled and encouraged to what they call “speculate,” that is te say, gamble; and when things go wrong, which they always do sooner or later, we all know what is the consequence. The master’s plate goes, the mistress’s jewels, or anybody’s money that happens to be handy. We see the result at the police offices every day. Now it can never be said that all this arises from an Englishman’s innate love for a horse, for ninety-nine out of a hundred of these parties never see the horses at all; still less can it be from any interest attaching to their owners, for, as we said before, half of them are running in false names; so it must just be a spirit of gambling and want of excitement that cannot be suppressed, breaking out now in betting shops, now in Bride Lane, and which doubtless, if necessary, would be pursued up in a balloon. It is worthy the consideration of a bran new Parliament, whether the tastes of the people might not be turned to account by the re-establishment of the good old lotteries, when “Bish and Carrol ! ! !” with their thirty-thousand-pound prizes, contended with “Day and Martin” for the hoardings of the streets and the dead walls of the suburbs. Then, at all events, if a master was robbed in order that his servant might buy a ticket, he would have the satisfaction of knowing that the rogue had contributed something to the service of the state.

We suspect that gentlemen were formerly much more scrupulous about their sporting associates than they are now, and that whatever wagering went on was among themselves, and not just with anybody that they thought would pay. Though there was not a tithe of the betting that there is now, it took a wider and more varied range, including carriage matches, riding matches, leaping matches, time matches, and even the apparently intractable subject of a fox hunt, was occasionally brought into account. In the records of that land of sporting, Yorkshire, we read an account how Colonel Thornton received a piece of plate from Sir Harry Featherstone, and Sir John Ramsden, Barts., as a compromise to a bet made in honour of a Hambleton fox. Colonel Thornton, by his original bet, engaged, it seems, for three hundred guineas, p. p., to find a fox at Hunt’s Whin, or in the Easingwold country, that after Christmas, 1779, should run twenty miles, the day to be fixed and the morning approved by Colonel Thornton, and to be determined by Sir John Ramsden or Sir Harry Feather-stone, or the company. It seems that the Colonel was as good as his word, for a certificate, signed by five gentlemen, states, that on the appointed day a fox broke off in view of the hounds and company, which fox was killed after a continued burst (there not being one check), by the different watches, for two hours and thirty-eight minutes; and the certificate states that the fox ran at least twenty-eight miles! Two hours and thirty-eight minutes! Hear that, ye Leicestershire swells, with your thirty-eight minutes!

But that is nothing compared to a run that took place at the Boroughbridge Meeting on the 13th of March, 1783, on the occasion of a match between the Earl of Effingham and Colonel Thornton’s hounds. Fourteen gentlemen sign a certificate saying, “that the hounds found at twenty-seven minutes past nine, and, except the space of near half an hour taken in bolting the fox from a rabbit hole, had a continued run until five o’clock, when they had an entopé; and after repeated views they killed him, at fourteen minutes past five, by the different watches.” A “+” adds, “It was supposed that a greater number of horses died in the field than was ever known on such an occasion.” No wonder, say we, considering the length of the chase and the hasty-pudding condition of the horses in those days. But if those horses were soft, the foxes were strong; and with the open country of former days before them, would often tell a tale fatal to the steed. That, however, is getting into the pleasures of the chase, instead of the impurities of the turf, to which let us now return.

People who look upon race-meetings like showers-of-rain sort of things, that come of themselves, natural phenomenons of nature as it were, know little of the craft, subtlety, and anxiety requisite for getting them up. The canvassing of victims for stewards, the speculations as to who will draw the most company, the taking of nominations, and the probable destination of the same, to say nothing of the speechifying soft-sawdering abilities requisite for the ordinary and the more active abilities of the ball-room at meetings where balls are still attempted. All these and a host of other considerations require infinite care and consideration on the parts of the selectors of stewards, who are oftentimes third-rate publicans over their potations. Nor are the stewards’ cares confined to their own years of office, for they are expected to perform acts of husbandry for the incoming tenants, by canvassing for subscriptions, and also to contribute handsomely themselves, the amount being seldom specified until it is too late to retract. They are also expected to exert themselves to draw others into the stewardship snare.

In this, the decoy-duck department, we are sorry to say, they sometimes enlist the assistance of the fair, and elegant high-bred beauties will go smiling and simpering about, led by noble lords, soliciting contributions from the very scum and scourings of society. And as no one can take flight at the approach of a lady, so the gallant men are obliged to stand their ground, and give their names with the best grace they can, each thinking the lady smiles more sweetly upon him than upon any one else. “Five pounds, only five pounds,” lisps the beauty, and as the thing does not come off till next year, when the legs are sure to be rich, they give their noble names accordingly. It is wonderful what that little word “only” has to answer for, especially when backed by the enchantment of distance. “Money down” has a wonderful effect in curbing both extravagance and spurious liberality. With these preliminary observations, let us proceed to our particular rendezvous.