Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (66 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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By this date there were 202,137 guineas available to be won as prize money annually.
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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 6
d.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 1
d.
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.
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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 1906
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- but the returns were equally huge, and the older courses were forced to imitate. Just 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 10
s.
Stand and second-class stand tickets: £1,195
Private stand: £55
Lincolnshire stand: £400
County stand: £868
Private boxes: £220 10
s.
Paddock: £1,939
Tattersall’s enclosure: £1,160
Carriage stands: £577 7
s.
6
d.
Publican’s booths: £414 6
s.
Temporary booths, tents, carts, wagons: £1,612 18
s.
6
d.
Refreshment rooms: £800
Race cards: £325
Fruit stalls: £25
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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’.
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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’.
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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.)
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