Tale of Two Temples – racing could be sacrificed on a false morality altar
Rolf’s Ramblings
ROLF Johnson
“All Doumen gloom for the Duke” was the headline which fitted, precisely, the centrefold of two pages of racing in the tabloid Daily Express the day after the 1994 Boxing Day King George VI Chase at Kempton. Nowadays, barring the Sun, which boasts a racing supplement, racing coverage in our newspapers is buried and unlikely to be exhumed.
The Irish Times shames our Dailies with its racing coverage. On Galway Plate Day in July two entire broadsheet pages were devoted to racing in Ireland, along with all the British meetings! So Irish racing is in rude good health – Coolmore in control; crowds up at the week-long Galway Festival. (We might even have seen next week’s Ebor winner there – Willie Mullins’s Hipop de Loire who won a maiden hurdle!).
Well no: the doom and gloom came on yet another page of the Irish paper, with the thunder clap from Thurles. At a stroke the twenty-six courses in Ireland were reduced by the closure of the country’s lone privately-owned track. The Molony family, matriarch and four daughters, slammed shut their turnstiles with immediate effect. The loss of the Tipperary track, which first raced in 1732; the place where A P McCoy and Rachel Blackmore rode their first winners, took even the savvy Irish racing Press by surprise. In an unfortunate choice of words (anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by the Irish Times reporter, the Molonys had “taken the nuclear option”.
There was no watering system at Thurles (see also Bath). Declining media rights revenues and rising costs were the explanations given for closure (sound familiar?). The threats to British racecourses, indeed racing worldwide, are creeping closer – and you can add falling foal crops and cave-dwelling Governments bludgeoning racing with tax rises to the threats. They won’t have my vote, though whether signing the digitalized #Axethetax petition going the rounds will have much influence is debatable.
Thurles needed investment: the BHA have just announced increased prize money for next year; the Levy Board are coughing up; if only money was the answer – and I’m not about to burden you with a treatise on racing politics, the reasons for racecourse closure are multifarious. I commend everyone to Chris Pitt’s ‘A Long Time Gone’ (pub 1996) which records the ninety-eight racecourse closures between 1900 and 1981 many of which went under in more congenial times.
Since the publication of this seminal work (foreword by Lester Piggott) only Folkestone (2012) and Towcester (2018) have gone. ‘Development’ has been the prime excuse – Birmingham (1965) lies under Spaghetti Junction; Folkestone and Towcester though are as green as the day they shut shop. So too Stockbridge, Hampshire which closed, 1899, just before the scope of Pitt’s book. A straight mile was obligatory then but the lady who owned the last couple of furlongs took against gambling so the course at Danebury, which had rivalled Newmarket as a racing centre, was forced to close. It lies still in Arcadian slumber, disturbed only by birdsong.
The last racecourse (alphabetically) in Pitt’s book to shut was Wye in Kent in 1974. Finance was not forthcoming to alter a camber on a bend in the track that was described as “tight as Wimbledon dogs”. Another hazard was horses slipping on sheep droppings at the bucolic outpost. When it closed there was a sale of artefacts. The silver ring stand made just £280 and, Pitt noted, the toilets were knocked down to ‘Albert’ for £7. The Sporting Life (R I P) epitaph was: “Ten stall urinals, six wc’s and three hand basins all for seven knicker, but then to the connoisseur racing at Wye was always a bargain.”
If Thurles, first Irish course to close since Tralee in 2008, Willie Mullins endorsed, isn’t safe then where is? There is no connection with the death of the jockey Michael O’Sullivan in a race there in February. The review of the tragedy found it was not the fault of the track though it recommended a watering system should be installed. The owners couldn’t afford it. Rumours abound about its future – and others. Doom and gloom indeed.
The most overworked member of the Racing Post writers is the Industry Correspondent – and he is probably the least read despite his best efforts not to be repetitive while trying to exorcise the doomsters. He (Bill Barber) will have a new top man to prop up with the appointment at the BHA of Lord Allen who whatever else he brings shouldn’t have too many prejudices since he hasn’t any previous experience in with racing. ‘No experience required’ – the last time I saw a job advert with that requirement it was for bus conducting. Is his Lordship the answer? The last ‘saviour’ came over a hundred years ago and he was only an Admiral – Rous.
The French have their troubles too. Our High Street betting shops are squeezed between the Nail Bar or the Turkish barbers. The 14,000 antique state monopoly Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU) cafes, equivalent of our pubs, were communal harbours, zinc counters, Gitanes and Pastis refuges of old men in berets pencilling their bets – mostly on trotting, since 1930. Only lately have they aped our shop’s banks of push button roulette wheels, slots or cartoon racing from Portman Park - anything to divert us from slow coach racing.
But their problems mirror ours. The old model of coughing (Gitanes as effective ‘coffin nails’ as Woodbines) and camaraderie has given way to online sites – which is where the respective governments have their beef. Foreign companies have flooded the market overtaking domestic betting outlets. Monsieur Macron’s answer was to impose a 15 per cent tax on sports betting adverts. India’s is 28 per cent on all bets – not that the tax can be collected because betting there has gone underground – as it will here if the Government has its 21 per cent way.
The AxeTheTax campaign – anticipating the punishment we’ll have to come to terms with, or not, has to emphasize the law of diminishing returns for Government and everybody concerned when betting takes itself underground: well, we all saw it coming and some stuck heads in the sand – or all-weather if you prefer: Government is digging its heels. For racing’s part a glutinous fixture list is supposed to compensate for a decline in the betting numbers. The powers that be have come up with the answer - two less meetings in 2026.
The politicians are an easy target (It’s making an impact on them that’s the difficult bit). In the early days of this century gambling wasn’t such a dirty word, indeed they wanted to bring in forty super casinos which eventually was whittled down to one – Manchester – and that was scrapped too, with a lot less fanfare than HS2. And yet the next step was, in 2005, to bring in one-arm bandits to betting shops that were faster on the draw than The Sundance Kid. Problem gambling? No problem gambling. To be fair the mind blowing amounts you could choke them with were eventually reduced to infinitely smaller stakes.
Somehow taxes on remote gaming have got muddled up with sanctioned betting from which racing derives income through the Levy Board. The proposed online betting tax rise from 15 to 21 per cent would, according to the AxetheTax petition take £330 million out of the sport in the next five years. Set against that, problem gambling is reputed to cost society £7.2 million in family debt, breakdown and people falling through societies threadbare blanket. These dubious figures are bandied around as catechisms.
That Doumen headline: Barton Bank was about the win the King George by a wide margin when Adrian Maguire wanted to go long at the last – and Barton Bank didn’t oblige, allowing Francois Doumen’s Algan in. David ‘The Duke’ Nicholson was not amused by a photographer’s comment on Barton Bank’s tumble and was fined by the Jockey Club for his attack on the ‘snapper’. The previous year The Duke attacked the Kempton stewards for the ban they gave his jockey for use of the whip on Barton Bank when winning the same race, narrowly.
Those temples? There were two William Temple’s: one a pseudonym for the most astute punter of his day, Timeform founder Phil Bull (1910-89) self-professed Marxist, atheist who maintained, insisted even, that betting was “the last democratic act of an Englishman”. The other, William Temple (1881-1949) Archbishop of Canterbury was an otherwise sound theologian who collaborated on a book on gambling and ethics which concluded there were no ethics in gambling. Not much in common then, except that the Archbishop lived by the Ten Commandments…as did Phil Bull – though his wouldn’t have been recognised by the clergyman.
“Let thy stake be related to the depth of thy pocket – he that would make his fortune in a week loseth his ducats in a day”; followed by “Thou shalt bet only when thou seest value” and “Deliver thyself from the temptation to bet in every race” – the nearest he came to agreement with the Archbishop.
A different language then, from opposite poles, but if translated for the understanding of purblind sanctimonious governments, racing might yet be saved.