Exactly. I said that racing is a delightful pastime to those who go to
watch good horses gallop; the miserable thing to me is seeing the
wretches who do not care for racing at all, but only care for gambling
on names and numbers. Let Lord Hartington, Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr.
Chaplin, Mr. Corlett, Mr. Rothschild, Lord Rosebery, and the rest, go
and see the lovely horses shooting over the turf; by all means let them
watch their own colts and fillies come flying home. But the poor
creatures who muddle away brains, energy, and money on what _they_ are
pleased to term sport, do not know a horse from a mule; they gamble, as
I have said, on names; the splendid racers give them no enjoyment such
as the true sportsman derives, for they would not know Ormonde from a
Clydesdale. To these forlorn beings only the ignoble side of racing is
known; it is sacrilege to call them sportsmen; they are rotting their
very souls and destroying the remnants of their manhood over a game
which they play blindfold. It is pitiful--most pitiful. No good-natured
man will begrudge occasional holiday-makers their chance of seeing a
good race. Rural and industrial Yorkshire are represented by thousands
at Doncaster, on the St. Ledger day, and the tourists get no particular
harm; they are horsey to the backbone, and they come to see the running.
They criticize the animals and gain topics for months of conversation,
and, if they bet an odd half-crown and never go beyond it, perhaps no
one is much the worse. When the Duke of Portland allowed his tenantry to
see St. Simon gallop five years ago at Newcastle, the pitmen and
artisans thronged to look at the horse. There was no betting whatever,
because no conceivable odds could have measured the difference between
St. Simon and his opponent, yet when Archer let the multitude see how
fast a horse _could_ travel, and the great thoroughbred swept along like
a flash, the excitement and enthusiasm rose to fever-pitch. Those men
had an unaffected pleasure in observing the beauty and symmetry and
speed of a noble creature, and they were unharmed by the little treat
which the good-natured magnate provided for them. It is quite otherwise
with the mob of stay-at-home gamblers; they do not care a rush for the
horses; they long, with all the crazy greed of true dupes, to gain money
without working for it, and that is where the mischief comes in.
Cupidity, mean anxieties, unwholesome excitements, gradually sap the
morality of really sturdy fellows--the last shred of manliness is torn
away, and the ordinary human intelligence is replaced by repulsive
vulpine cunning. If you can look at a little group of the stay-at-homes
while they are discussing the prospects of a race, you will see
something that Hogarth would have enjoyed in his large, lusty fashion.
The fair human soul no longer shines through those shifty, deceitful
eyes; the men have, somehow, sunk from the level of their race, and they
make you think that Swift may-have been right after all. From long
experience I am certain that if a cultured gentleman, accustomed to high
thinking, were suddenly compelled to live among these dismal beings, he
would be attacked by a species of intellectual paralysis. The affairs of
the country are nothing to them; poetry, art, and all beautiful things
are contemptible in their eyes; they dwell in an obscure twilight of the
mind, and their relaxation, when the serious business of betting is put
aside for awhile, mostly lies in the direction of sheer bawdry and
abomination. It is curious to see the oblique effect which general
degradation has upon the vocabulary of these people; quiet words, or
words that express a plain meaning, are repugnant to them; even the
old-fashioned full-mouthed oaths of our fathers are tame to their fancy,
for they must have something strongly spiced, and thus they have by
degrees fitted themselves up with a loathly dialect of their own which
transcends the comparatively harmless efforts of the Black Country
potter. Foul is not the word for this ultra-filthy mode of talk--it
passes into depths below foulness. I may digress for a little to
emphasize this point. The latter-day hanger-on of the Turf has
introduced a new horror to existence. Go into the Silver Ring at a
suburban meeting, and listen while two or three of the fellows work
themselves into an ecstasy of vile excitement, then you will hear
something which cannot be described or defined in any terms known to
humanity. Why it should be so I cannot tell, but the portentous symptom
of putridity is always in evidence. As is the man of the Ring, so are
the stay-at-homes. The disease of their minds is made manifest by their
manner of speech; they throw out verbal pustules which tell of the rank
corruption which has overtaken their nature, and you need some seasoning
before you can remain coolly among them without feeling symptoms of
nausea. There is one peer of this realm--a hereditary legislator and a
patron of many Church livings--who is famous for his skill in the use of
certain kinds of vocables. This man is a living exemplar of the
mysterious effect which low dodging and low distractions have on the
soul. In five minutes he can make you feel as if you had tumbled into
one of Swedenborg's loathsome hells; he can make the most eloquent of
turf thieves feel, envious, and he can make you awe-stricken as you see
how far and long God bears with man. The disease from which this
pleasing pillar of the State suffers has spread, with more or less
virulence, to the furthermost recesses of our towns, and you must know
the fringe of the Turf world before you can so much as guess what the
symptoms are like.
Here is a queer kind of a world which has suddenly arisen! Faith and
trust are banished; real honesty is unknown; purity is less than a name;
manliness means no more than a certain readiness to use the fists. Most
of the dwellers in this atmosphere are punctilious about money payments
because they durst not be otherwise, but the fine flower of real probity
does not flourish in the mephitic air. To lie, to dodge, to take mean
advantages--these are the accomplishments which an ugly percentage of
middle-class youths cultivate, and all the mischief arises from the fact
that they persist in trying to ape the manners of the most unworthy
members of an order to which they do not belong. It is bad enough when a
rich and idle man is bitten with the taste for betting, but when he is
imitated by the tailor's assistant who carries his clothes home, then we
have a still more unpleasant phenomenon to consider. For it is fatal to
a nation when any large and influential section of the populace once
begin to be confused in their notions of right and wrong. Not long ago I
was struck by noticing a significant instance of this moral dry rot. An
old racing man died, and all the sporting papers had something to say
about him and his career. Now the best of the sporting journalists are
clever and cultured gentlemen, who give refinement, to every subject
that they touch. But a certain kind of writing is done by pariahs, who
are not much of a credit to our society, and I was interested by the
style in which these scribbling vermin spoke of the dead man. Their gush
was a trifle nauseating; their mean worship of money gave one a shiver,
and the relish with which they described their hero's exploits would
have been comic were it not for the before-mentioned nausea.
It seemed that the departed turfite had been--to use blunt English--a
very skilful and successful swindler. He would buy a horse which took
his fancy, and he would run the animal again and again, until people got
tired of seeing such a useless brute taken down to the starting-point.
The handicappers finally let our schemer's horse in at a trifling
weight, and then he prepared for business. He had trustworthy agents at
Manchester, Nottingham, and Newcastle, and these men contrived, without
rousing suspicion, to "dribble" money into the market in a stealthy way,
until the whole of their commission was worked on very advantageous
terms. The arch-plotter did not show prominently in the transaction, and
he contrived once or twice to throw dust in the eyes of the very
cleverest men. One or two neatly arranged strokes secured our acute
gentleman a handsome fortune. He missed £70,000 once, by a short head,
but this was the only instance in which his plans seriously failed; and
he was looked up to as an epitome of all the virtues which are most
acceptable in racing circles. Well, had this dodger exhibited the
heroism of Gordon, the benevolence of Lord Shaftesbury, the probity of
Henry Fawcett, he could not have been more bepraised and bewailed by the
small fry of sporting literature. All he had done in life was to deceive
people by making them fancy that certain good horses were bad ones:
strictly speaking, he made money by false pretences, and yet, such is
the twist given by association with genuine gamblers, that educated men
wrote of him as if he had been a saint of the most admirable order. This
disposition is seen all through the piece: successful roguery is
glorified, and our young men admire "the Colonel," or "the Captain," or
Jack This and Tom That, merely because the Captain and the Colonel and
Jack and Tom are acute rascals who have managed to make money.
Decidedly, our national ideals are in a queer way. Just think of a
little transaction which occurred in 1887. A noble lord ordered a
miserable jockey boy to pull a horse, so that the animal might lose a
race: the exalted guide of youth was found out, and deservedly packed
off the Turf; but it was only by an accident that the Stewards were able
to catch him. That legislator had funny notions of the duty which he
owed to boyhood: he asked his poor little satellite to play the
scoundrel, and he only did what scores do who are _not_ found out.
A haze hangs about the Turf, and all the principles which should guide
human nature are blurred and distorted; the high-minded, honourable
racing men can do nothing or next to nothing, and the scum work their
will in only too many instances. Every one knows that the ground is
palpitating with corruption, but our national mental disease has so
gained ground that some regard corruption in a lazy way as
being inevitable, while others--including the stay-at-home
horse-racers--reckon it as absolutely admirable.
Some years ago, a pretty little mare was winning the St. Leger easily,
when a big horse cut into her heels and knocked her over. About two
months afterwards, the same wiry little mare was running in an important
race at Newmarket, and at the Bushes she was hauling her jockey out of
the saddle. There were not many spectators about, and only a few noticed
that, while the mare was fighting for her head, she was suddenly pulled
until she reared up, lost her place, and reached the post about seventh
in a large field. The jockey who rode the mare, and who made her exhibit
circus gambols, received a thousand pounds from the owner of the winning
horse. Now, there was no disguise about this transaction--nay, it was
rather advertised than otherwise, and a good many of the sporting prints
took it quite as a matter of course. Why? Simply because no prominent
racing man raked up the matter judicially, and because the ordinary Turf
scramblers accept suspicious proceedings as part of their environment.
Mr. Carlyle mourned over the deadly virus of lying which was emitted by
Loyola and his crew; he might mourn now over the deadly virus of
cheating which is emitted from the central ganglia of the Turf. The
upright men who love horses and love racing are nearly powerless; the
thieves leaven the country, and they have reduced what was once the
finest middle-class in the world to a condition of stark putridity.
Before we can rightly understand the degradation which has befallen us
by reason of the Turf, we must examine the position of jockeys in the
community. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his most wicked sentences, said
that the jockey is our Western substitute for the eunuch; a noble duke,
who ought to know something about the matter, lately informed the world
through the medium of a court of law with an oath that "jockeys are
thieves." Now, I know one jockey whose character is not embraced by the
duke's definition, and I have heard that there are two, but I am not
acquainted with the second man. The wonder is, considering the
harebrained, slavering folly of the public, that any of the riding
manikins are half as honest as they are; the wonder is that their poor
little horsey brains are not led astray in such fashion as to make every
race a farce. They certainly do try their best on occasion, and I
believe that there are many races which are _not_ arranged before the
start; but you cannot persuade the picked men of the rascals' corps that
any race is run fairly. When Melton and Paradox ran their tremendous
race home in the Derby, I heard quite a number of intelligent gentry
saying that Paradox should have won but for the adjectived and
participled propensities of his jockey. Nevertheless, although most
devout turfites agree with the emphatic duke, they do not idolize their
diminutive fetishes a whit the less; they worship the manikin with a
touching and droll devotion, and, when they know him to be a confirmed
scamp, they admire his cleverness, and try to find out which way the
little rogue's interest lies, so that they may follow him. So it comes
about that we have amidst us a school of skinny dwarfs whose leaders are
paid better than the greatest statesmen in Europe. The commonest
jockey-boy in this company of manikins can usually earn more than the
average scholar or professional man, and the whole set receive a good
deal more of adulation than has been bestowed on any soldier, sailor,
explorer, or scientific man of our generation. And what is the
life-history of the jockey? A tiny boy is bound apprentice, and
submitted to the discipline of a training stable; he goes through the
long routine of morning gallops, trials, and so forth, and when he
begins to show signs of aptitude he is put up to ride for his master in
public. If he is a born horseman, like Archer or Robinson, he may make
his mark long before his indentures are returned to him, and he is at
once surrounded by a horde of flatterers who do their best to spoil him.
There is no cult so distinguished by slavishness, by gush, by
lavishness, as jockey-worship, and a boy needs to have a strong head and
sound, careful advisers, if he is to escape becoming positively
insufferable. When the lad Robinson won the St. Leger, after his horse
had been left at the post, he was made recipient of the most frantic and
silly toadyism that the mind can conceive; the clever trainer to whom he
was apprenticed received £1,500 for transferring the little fellow's
services, and he is now a celebrity who probably earns a great deal more
than Professor Owen or Mr. Walter Besant. The tiny boy who won the
Cesarevitch on Don Juan received £1,000 after the race, and it must be
remembered that this child had not left school. Mr. Herbert Spencer has
not earned £1,000 by the works that have altered the course of modern
thought; the child Martin picked up the amount in a lump, after he had
scurried for less than five minutes on the back of a feather-weighted
thoroughbred. As the jockey grows older and is freed from his
apprenticeship he becomes a more and more important personage; if his
weight keeps well within limits he can ride four or five races every day
during the season; he draws five guineas for a win, and three for the
mount, and he picks up an infinite number of unconsidered trifles in the
way of presents, since the turfite, bad or good, is invariably a
cheerful giver. The popular jockey soon has his carriages, his horses,
his valet, and his sumptuous house; noblemen, millionaires, great dames,
and men and women of all degrees conspire to pamper him: for
jockey-worship, when it is once started, increases in intensity by a
sort of geometrical progression. A shrewd man of the world may smile
grimly when he hears that a popular rider was actually received with
royal honours and installed in the royal box when he went to the theatre
during his honeymoon, but there are the facts. It was so, and the best
people of the fine town in which this deplorable piece of toadyism was
perpetrated were tolerably angry at the time. If the sporting
journalists perform their work of puffery with skill and care, the
worship of the jockey reaches a pitch that borders on insanity. If
General Gordon had returned and visited such a place as Liverpool or
Doncaster during a race-meeting, he would not have been noticed by the
discriminating crowd if Archer had passed along the street. If the Prime
Minister were to visit any place of public resort while Watts or Webb
happened to be there, it is probable that his lordship would learn
something useful concerning the relative importance of Her Majesty's
subjects. I know for a fact that a cleverly executed cartoon of Archer,
Fordham, Wood, or Barrett will have at least six times as many buyers as
a similar portrait of Professor Tyndall, Mr. James Payn, M. Pasteur,
Lord Salisbury, Mr. Chamberlain, or any one in Britain excepting Mr.
Gladstone. I do not know how many times the _Vanity Fair_ cartoon of
Archer has been reprinted, but I learn on good authority that, for
years, not a single day has been known to pass on which the caricature
was not asked for. And now let us bring to mind the plain truth that
these jockeys are only uneducated and promoted stable-boys after all. Is
it not a wonder that we can pick out a single honest man from their
midst? Vast sums depend on their exertions, and they are surrounded by a
huge crowd of moneyed men who will stand at nothing if they can gain
their ends; their unbalanced, sharp little minds are always open to
temptation; they see their brethren amassing great fortunes, and they
naturally fall into line and proceed, when their turn comes, to grab as
much money as they can. Not long ago the inland revenue officials, after
minute investigation, assessed the gains of one wee creature at £9,000
per year. This pigmy is now twenty-six years of age, and he earned as
much as the Lord Chancellor, and more than any other judge, until a jury
decided his fate by giving him what the Lord Chief Justice called "a
contemptuous verdict." Another jockey paid income-tax on £10,000 a year,
and a thousand pounds is not at all an uncommon sum to be paid merely as
a retainer. Forty or fifty years ago a jockey would not have dreamed of
facing his employer otherwise than cap in hand, but the value of
stable-boys has gone up in the market, and Lear's fool might now say,
"Handy-Dandy! Who is your jockey now and who is your master?" The little
men gradually gather a kind of veneer of good manners, and some of them
can behave very much like pocket editions of gentlemen, but the scent of
the stable remains, and, whether the jockey is a rogue or passably
honest, he remains a stable-boy to the end. Half the mischief on the
Turf arises from the way in which these overpaid, spoilt menials can be
bribed, and, certes, there are plenty of bribers ready. Racing men do
not seem able to shake off the rule of their stunted tyrants. When the
gentleman who paid income-tax on nine thousand a year brought the action
which secured him the contemptuous verdict, the official handicapper to
the Jockey Club declared on oath that the jockey's character was "as bad
as bad can be." The starter and a score of other witnesses followed in
the same groove, and yet this man was freely employed. Why? We may
perhaps explain by inference presently.
With this cynically corrupt corps of jockeys and their hangers-on, it
may easily be seen that the plutocrats who manipulate the Turf wires
have an admirable time of it, while the great gaping mob of zanies who
go to races, and zanies who stay at home, are readily bled by the
fellows who have the money and the "information" and the power. The rule
of the Turf is easily formulated:--"Get the better of your neighbour.
Play the game outwardly according to fair rules. Pay like a man if your
calculations prove faulty, but take care that they shall be as seldom
faulty as possible. Never mind what you pay for information if it gives
you a point the better of other men. Keep your agents honest if you can,
but, if they happen to be dishonest under pressure of circumstances,
take care at any rate that you are not found out." In short, the Ring is
mainly made up of men who pay with scrupulous honesty when they lose,
but who take uncommonly good care to reduce the chances of losing to a
minimum. Are they in the wrong? It depends. I shall not, at the present
moment, go into details; I prefer to pause and ask what can be expected
to result from the wolfish scheme of Turf morality which I have
indicated. I do not compare it with the rules which guide our host of
commercial middlemen, because, if I did, I should say that the betting
men have rather the best of the comparison: I keep to the Turf, and I
want to know what broad consequences must emanate from a body which
organizes plans for plunder and veils them under the forms of honesty.
An old hand--the Odysseus of racing--once said to me: "No man on earth
would ever be allowed to take a hundred thousand pounds out of the Ring:
they wouldn't allow it, they wouldn't That young fool must drop all he's
got." We were speaking about a youthful madman who was just then being
plucked to the last feather, and I knew that the old turfite was right.
The Ring is a close body, and I have only known about four men who ever
managed to beat the confederacy in the long run. There is one astute,
taciturn, inscrutable organizer whom the bookmakers dread a little,
because he happens to use their own methods; he will scheme for a year
or two if necessary until he succeeds in placing a horse advantageously,
and he usually brings off his _coup_ just at the time when the Ring
least like it. "They don't yell like that when one of mine rolls home,"
he once said, while the bookmakers were clamouring with delight over the
downfall of a favourite; and indeed this wily master of deceptions has
very often made the pencillers draw long faces. But the case of the Turf
Odysseus is not by any means typical; the man stands almost alone, and
his like will not be seen again for many a day. The rule is that the
backer must come to grief in the long run, for every resource of
chicanery, bribery, and resolute keenness is against him. He is there to
be plundered; it is his mission in life to lose, or how could the
bookmakers maintain their mansions and carriages? It matters little what
the backer's capital may be at starting, he will lose it all if he is
idiot enough to go on to the end, for he is fighting against
unscrupulous legions. One well-known bookmaker coolly announced in 1888
that he had written off three hundred thousand pounds of bad debts.
Consider what a man's genuine business must be like when he can jauntily
allude to three hundred thousands as a bagatelle by the way. That same
man has means of obtaining "information" sufficient to discomfit any
poor gambler who steps into the Ring and expects to beat the bookmakers
by downright above-board dealing. As soon as he begins to lay heavily
against a horse the animal is regarded as doomed to lose by all save the
imbeciles who persist in hoping against hope. In 1889 this betting man
made a dead set at the favourite for the Two Thousand Guineas. The colt
was known to be the best of his year; he was trained in a stable which
has the best of reputations; his exercise was uninterrupted, and mere
amateurs fancied they had only to lay heavy odds _on_ him in order to
put down three pounds and pick up four. Yet the inexorable bookmaker
kept on steadily taking the odds; the more he betted, the more money was
piled on to the unbeaten horse, and yet few took warning, although they
must have seen that the audacious financier was taking on himself an
appalling risk. Well, the peerless colt was pulled out, and, on his way
to the starting post, he began to shake blood and matter from his jaws;
he could hardly move in the race, and when he was taken to his quarters
a surgeon let out yet another pint of pus from the poor beast's jaw.
Observe that the shrewdest trainer in England, a crowd of stable-boys,
the horse's special attendant, the horse-watchers at Kingsclere, and the
casual strangers who saw the favourite gallop--all these knew nothing
apparently about that monstrous abscess, and no one suspected that the
colt's jaw had been splintered. But "information"--always
information--evidently reached one quarter, and the host of outsiders
lost their money. Soon afterwards a beautiful colt that had won the
Derby was persistently backed for the City and Suburban Handicap. On
paper it seemed as if the race might be regarded as over, for only the
last year's Derby winner appeared to have a chance; but our prescient
penciller cared nothing about paper. Once more he did not trouble
himself about betting to figures; he must have laid his book five times
over before the flag fell. Then the nincompoops who refused to attend to
danger-signals saw that the beautiful colt which had spun over the same
course like a greyhound only ten months before was unable to gallop at
all. The unhappy brute tried for a time, and was then mercifully eased;
the bookmaker would have lost £100,000 if his "information" had not been
accurate, but that is just the crux--it _was_. So admirably do the
bookmakers organize their intelligence department that I hardly know
more than three instances in which they have blundered after they really
began to lay fiercely against a horse. They contrive to buy jockeys,
stablemen, veterinary surgeons--indeed, who can tell whom they do _not_
subsidize? When Belladrum came striding from the fateful hollow in front
of Pretender, there was one "leviathan" bookmaker who turned green and
began to gasp, for he stood to lose £50,000; but the "leviathan" was
spared the trouble of fainting, for the hill choked the splendid
Stockwell horse, and "information" was once more vindicated, while
Belladrum's backers paid copious tribute. Just two years before the
leviathan had occasion to turn green our Turf Odysseus really did manage
to deceive the great betting corporation with consummate skill. The
whole business throws such a clear light on Turf ethics that I may
repeat it for the benefit of those who know little about our great
national sport--the Sport of Kings. It was rumoured that Hermit had
broken a blood-vessel, and the animal was stopped for a little in his
work. Then Odysseus and his chief confederate proceeded to seize their
chance. The horse started at 1000 to 15, and it seemed like a million to
one against him, for his rough coat had been left on him, and he looked
a ragged equine invalid. The invalid won, however, by a neck, the
Marquis of Hastings was ruined, and the confederates won about £150,000.