Dearest Jane... Page 15
Later that month, my father observed to me:
‘More about the Mortimers in “The Sporting Life” today: Mr Dalrymple makes us out to be plutocrats living in a rambling, Gone-with-the Wind style mansion, the walls of which are covered with costly paintings! Can you beat it?’
Ten years later he neatly encapsulated a journalist’s interviewing strategy:
‘I had to go to London yesterday to be interviewed by a trendy young gentleman who wishes to write an article about me. He was very agreeable but interviewers always are; the poison only becomes apparent when the finished article appears.’
My father’s articles, hot off the press, fresh and ready for anyone to pick up and read, lay in the wooden newspaper rack in the sitting room of my parents’ home.
‘Oh your father – he writes so brilliantly!’ his children would be told by others. We would smile shyly with pride. Our father must be brilliant, we thought, if he made his living from writing. But not one of us read a published word he wrote.
Roger thrived on the gossip of the press room as much as the exchanges he was party to in grander milieus. He particularly enjoyed his excursions to both Newmarket town and its race meetings. It is the capital of flat racing and the home of the governing body of racing, the Jockey Club.
‘Asylum View
Much Twittering
Notts
10 July 10 [early 1970s]
Dearest Jane,
I have just returned from Newmarket, City of My Dreams. I left at 5.30 a.m. and arrived at 8 a.m. just in time for a plate of excellent local sausages at the Rutland Arms. I stayed at the Jockey Club Rooms; slightly Edwardian comfort – ancient valets with names like Drawbridge and Hayrick – large bedrooms with huge po cupboards – loos with mahogany wall-to-wall seats and pull-up plugs. A rather too formal garden with an unimaginative herbaceous border 200 yards long. Most of the planting must have been done by a retired drill sergeant with a passion for straight lines. Although the Jockey Club is men only, one has to change for dinner. However, when the temperature is in the top eighties, which it was, the more daring and trendy inmates wear white coats.
Love
xx D’
Roger respected the formality which was expected in the smart social enclosures of flat racing meetings. He was of a class and generation who delighted in making the following sort of observation, in The Times, 26 July 1975:
Until the last war, Ascot and Goodwood, two of the finest racecourses in this country, were each used only on four days in the entire year. At Ascot, racing was restricted to the royal meeting in June; at Goodwood to the immensely popular fixture at the end of July, an event which then marked the close of the London ‘season’. For a young officer to be seen in London during the two months following Goodwood was deemed as worthy of censure as if he had been caught dining north of the Park or hunting south of the Thames.
When newly married in 1971 and living in north London, I invited my father to dinner in the late summer at our home in Highgate, which he had not yet seen. ‘My Dear Child,’ he said, ‘a man of my sort cannot possibly be seen in north London in August.’ He came, of course.
As for appearances, humans were as interesting as horses. Sartorial aspects of Ascot always got a line or two in his articles, such as in the Sunday Times, 16 June 1974:
A lot of men seem perfectly happy to encase themselves in clothes that are laughably unsuitable for summer racing. Middle-aged ladies from SW3 strain their eyeballs to cracking point endeavouring to read the names on other people’s Royal Enclosure badges. There are even on view a few examples of that rapidly disappearing species, the debutante. For low comedy it is safe to rely on the usual exhibitionists in bizarre costumes indulging in their relentless pursuit of Press photographers. The racing, for those who care about it, is excellent.
By the late 1980s, Roger’s view of the patrons at Royal Ascot was less than glowing:
Of course there are people who object strongly to the traditional mixture of royal pageantry and sartorial formality that form the background to Ascot. Year after year they compose letters to the sporting press about it, complaining about the clothes they feel obliged to wear and the inordinate amount of space taken up by patrons of the meeting who have come not so much to look at the horses as to gawp at the royals.
Only at Royal Ascot is a high degree of formality obligatory in certain enclosures. Most people who go to the meeting take it all in their stride but some emphatically do not. Why they continue to turn up year after year in a state of disgruntlement I cannot imagine. After all racing is not compulsory and if you don’t like it and stay away, no one is going to shoot you. Some of those who grumble most about Royal Ascot are journalists. This seems a shade ungenerous as they see some of the best racing of the year free.
The Classic flat race that my father adored, and whose story he nearly made his own, was the Derby at Epsom. In the rich cast of characters in Roger’s History of the Derby Stakes the most celebrated and infamous is Lester Piggott. My father was to make many an unprintable comment on Lester. Nonetheless, with a record of nine Derby winners ultimately, this flawed genius of a jockey merited over thirty pages in the book.
At eighteen years old, Lester was the youngest jockey to win the Derby in the twentieth century. My father provided a telling profile:
Lester Piggott rode his first winner at the age of thirteen. Precociously brilliant as a boy, he managed to survive more or less unscathed by a period of rather nauseating adulation by the popular Press, but sometimes his fearlessness, coupled with sheer determination to win, degenerated into recklessness and brought him into conflict with the Stewards. A few weeks after his Derby victory he was suspended for the remainder of the season because of an incident at Ascot.
Piggott’s brushes with authority never affected adversely his nerve or his confidence, nor did they diminish his great popularity with the racing public, who readily forgave his indiscretions, partly on account of his youth, but chiefly because his sins were the result of his burning determination to win whatever the cost.
Roger’s overall view was that Piggott was a highly talented scoundrel. In 1987, the year when Lester was convicted of tax fraud, my father shared a little personal memory in a letter:
‘I think it is 38 years since I went bathing with Lester P who was staying at the Royal Crescent on his own and of course at that age (19) had no car so was glad of a lift to the races. He told me some weird things about his childhood!’
For popular appeal, the greatest racing spectacle is the Grand National, which promises thrills and spills to millions, including many who rarely if ever set foot on a racecourse. Many spectators’ hearts are in their mouths, especially at key moments of risk when the horses approach the course’s most challenging obstacles, like Becher’s Brook. Roger slipped the background history to that notorious jump into a Sunday Times article in the 1970s:
For many years military men played an important part in steeplechasing. Captain Mark Becher’s Army career was of a somewhat nebulous character, but he is believed to have served in the supply department at the time of Waterloo. Leading the field in the very first Grand National in 1839 when he was pitched headfirst into the Aintree brook which bears his name, he emerged to declare that he had forgotten how very nasty water tasted without brandy.
My father rarely had a bet. ‘And if I did,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I wouldn’t tell any of you. You would only ask me for more money!’ If he ever sounds like a skinflint – he wasn’t. He was simply prudent. In magnanimous mood after a cocktail or two, he might treat one of us to a punt and we were always receiving clutches of raffle tickets in the post. Whilst I can’t recall winning so much as a chocolate biscuit by this means, I did once benefit from a paternal bet to the tune of £100 towards a holiday – a lot in the 1960s.
My father was amused by the bawdy, competitive calls of the bookies as they touted for trade from their rackety racecourse stalls. In print, Roger was forever castigating them for t
heir greed, low cunning and absence of obligation to contribute anything back into the industry from which they made their dosh. He was a dedicated advocate of the Tote – the government-owned the Horserace Totalisator Board, effectively a state-run bookie – and indeed acted as its publicity officer in 1959–68. Of course, Roger had plenty of gambling tales to recount, including this one in the Sunday Times, 18 March 1973.
I remember years ago when a young officer in the Scots Guards who owed his bookmaker something like £50, a sum he was then not in a position to pay. To resolve this little difficulty he went down to Gatwick and laid a £1,000 to £60 on a horse called The Sage who looked the complete racing certainty in a minor flat race with only three runners. The Sage was trotting up lengths ahead of his opponents and the face of the plucky punter was wreathed in self-satisfied smiles when suddenly there was a noise like a pistol shot and The Sage staggered to a halt a few yards from the winning post with a broken leg.
Soon afterwards the officer in question departed for a lengthy spell of service in darkest Africa. At least he was able to board his ship with dignity unlike another officer who, to thwart a distinctly menacing army of creditors, left for India curled up inside a big drum.
A gambling joke which always makes me laugh bounced up in a 1970s letter to me:
‘The Old Draughthouse
Much Shiverings
Berks
A man took an Irish friend to see a film about racing. When the big race in the film started he said to the Irishman “I bet you a quid the jockey on the grey falls off.” The Irishman took the bet and sure enough the jockey on the grey did fall off. The Irishman was paying up the quid when his friend said “I won’t take your money as I’ve seen the film twice already.” “So have I,” said the Irishman, “but I didn’t think he’d be such a berk as to fall off the third time.”
xx D’
Betting practice changed over Roger’s working life, as he recalled in the Sunday Times in 1974 when reforms had been instituted.
Betting after the war, partly due the vast amount of black market money in circulation, was on a gigantic scale and on the racecourse wagers were struck that would have made most modern bookmakers, timid creatures that they are, faint clean away in horror. Without a levy or a betting tax to harass them, and being under no obligation to put any of their profits back into racing, bookmakers enjoyed a golden age.
A character called Lord Wigg was charged with the task of instigating reform of the betting industry. As Paymaster General in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, he had actually spent many of his working hours in the role of Spymaster General, probing into the sexual peccadilloes of opposition politicians, and he provided key information in the Profumo Affair in 1962. He was later described, posthumously, in the Spectator as: ‘A consummate dirty trickster who thrived on vendettas, forever straining his outsize ears for any gossip.’
He was not short of enemies, but his love of horse-racing was genuine and he achieved much for its benefit. His reputation was further sullied when he was accused of driving round Marble Arch at midnight to proposition prostitutes. The court case against him was dropped when witness evidence proved that he was merely waiting to buy the early editions of the day’s newspapers.
Wigg was a consistent bête noir to my father. He was at the centre of an anecdote in a letter in the early 1970s:
‘Budds Farm
8 April
I had a fairly agreeable journey to Liverpool by train despite finding myself at a table with Lord Wigg, who has persecution mania and is convinced I am plotting his downfall; and his assistant, a very creepy reformed drunk who is a macabre mixture of Uriah Jeep and Dracula. However, the situation was rendered less tense by a smart and merry old doll who turned out to be something rather high-powered from the Home Office. We had a number of very refreshing drinks together and eventually old Wigg could not keep his sulk up any longer and dipped his long red nose into a double Hennessy too. On the way home I was in a mild coma when a glorious blonde with a skirt that ended two inches below her Adam’s apple kissed me on both cheeks and told me I had won a little prize in the train sweepstake. Without further ado she handed me an envelope containing £32.7.10. I promptly ordered a bottle and got to work on the blonde, but rather lost enthusiasm when I found she lived in Wembley with a bobbed-haired husband who played the guitar; surely an impermissible combination of totally undesirable factors.
Love to all,
xx D’
Aspects of Lord Wigg’s character can be discerned in my father’s Sunday Times column in 1972, where he wrote with some irony:
It would be nice to write that Lord Wigg’s term of office as chairman of the Levy Board is drawing peacefully towards its close, but the old warrior, bellicose to the last, is not only engaged in bitter controversy with the Jockey Club, but has succeeded in making unwise statements in uniting owners, trainers, jockeys and officials in angry opposition against him.
Individuals who tread the corridors of power are often surprisingly sensitive to opposition and criticism, but the extent to which Lord Wigg, normally a most likeable and entertaining character, over-reacts, is astonishing.
Racing journalists who have the audacity to express views contrary to those of Lord Wigg know just what to expect by way of telephone calls, letters to themselves and letters to their employers as well.
Wigg again loomed up in my youth when he harassed my father for expressing views that did not concur with his own. My father wrote to me in the 1970s from yet another of his ‘addresses’.
‘c/o Clarkson’s Winter Sunshine Cruises
Runcorn Wharf
Manchester Ship Canal
Lancs
Lord Wigg is very mad at present and is threatening to sue me. Foolish old gentleman; or more accurately, evil tempered old megalomaniac sod.’
I can remember Lord Wigg and Roger ‘talking’ on the telephone and hearing my father through his closed, study door, his voice raised in anger. To hear my father shouting was unusual – he had a very attractive voice with an even tone.
Similar blasts were sometimes issued to another racing character, a friend and sparring partner, Jean Hislop. Statuesque Jean was married to a smaller and quieter husband, John, a highly intelligent and accomplished racing writer, a former champion amateur jockey and a racehorse breeder. Jean was a very tough old bird whom my father was wont to carve up from time to time, when he felt she was pecking too fiercely. Following Ascot one year, he wrote to me:
‘La Domicile Geriatrique
Burghclere
[1970s]
Mrs Hislop was slightly pissed (surprise) and accused me of sending information about her to “Private Eye”. On the telephone she had terminated a long and tedious harangue by calling me a useless, stupid old man that had absolutely “had it”, a sentiment with which your dear mother would doubtless agree at times.’
Although rendered shy by the reserve of John Hislop and intimidated by the formidable nature of his wife, Lupin and I, as teenagers, were amongst fortunate guests at the Hislops’ Boxing Day parties. Whatever else, this couple were the most generous of hosts.
What has ensured John and Jean Hislop a gilded slot in racing history is their joint ownership and breeding of one of the greatest racehorses of the late twentieth century, Brigadier Gerard. He won seventeen of the eighteen key races in his career. The Hislops commissioned a handsome lifesize statue in bronze of their magic horse. It stood proudly on their lawn and it was said that John Hislop made a habit of sitting on his statue’s back for a minute each day.
Jean Hislop confirmed to my mother that women in racing were a tough species, and Cynthia’s opinion eventually expanded to include men in racing as well. ‘I go for the horses,’ she would declare, ‘not all those racing people.’ A 1971 article in the Newbury Weekly News confirmed ‘Mr Mortimer’s wife hunts with the Garth and South Berks but she does not follow her husband’s love of racing.’ She did love racing – but on her terms.
At one point my parents were part of a syndicate, sharing ownership of a racehorse or two. Hopes had initially been high for one horse called Weaver’s Loom, trained by their good friend Nick Gaslee at Lambourn. It soon became known as ‘Deepest Gloom’ for its signal lack of success on the course. My father would have been thrilled to know that another horse trained by Nick, Party Politics, won the Grand National in 1992.
Berkshire is a county green with racehorse gallops and gold with wealthy racehorse owners. Lambourn, a village of idyllic conditions for racehorses, boasts over fifty trainers’ yards and can have as many as 2,000 horses in training at any one time. It was not far from my parents’ Burghclere home. The district was well populated by racing alumni. The Hislops were just down the road at East Woodhay. Minutes away were Highclere Castle and Lord Carnarvon with his stud farm. The gentleman himself was also reputed to consider himself to be something of a stud – a trait noted in my father’s letters. His son, Lord Porchester, was appointed Racing Manager to the Queen. Highclere Castle is now well known as the location for Downton Abbey.
Nearby Kingsclere was the training ground for a national gem of a racehorse: Mill Reef, one of the best ever Derby winners, trained by Ian Balding. Aged almost two, Ian’s daughter Clare – who later would also capture the nation’s heart as a television and radio presenter – was photographed sitting confidently and without support on the precious bare back of Mill Reef. Roger’s piece in the Sunday Times, January 1973, commends this horse’s sweet nature.
When I went to Kingsclere it was Mill Reef’s last night in his old home before leaving for the National Stud. When walking he was rather like some gouty old colonel but happily his temper did not offer a similar comparison.
He is, in fact, a horse of angelic disposition. At his party on Sunday when several hundred local people came to say goodbye to him, he only once displayed even the faintest hint of resentment at being treated like dear old Pongo, the family dog who has never been known to growl. What other great racehorse would have stood there so patiently while small children literally crawled underneath him and every sort of friendly liberty was taken?