Racing
Love-hate
Jeffrey Bernard
There's a betting shop in Berkshire where most of the customers can only just reach the counter. Most stable boys are compul sive punters and if you worked in this particular shop just about all you'd see of them would be their grubby little hands reaching up with fivers clutched in them. When they're in the chips they really shovel it on.
Of course, their downfall in the long run is the fact that they always fall in love with the two they do and even if they're second-rate selling platers they still back them and back them. Some boys are lucky enough to look after champions. I remember meeting the lad who did Bolkonski when I went up to Newmarket during the stable lads' strike. All the other lads in the pub were teasing him mercilessly and it turned out to be because of this lad's involvement with his 2000 Guineas winner. Although, as I say, he was on strike, he still heaved himself out of bed at the crack of dawn to walk to the Heath to watch Bolkonski work. He told me that the sight of that horse galloping made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It certainly must have stood up when Bolkonski won the Guineas at 33-1.
But you don't have to work in a racing stable to get involved with horses and some of my own likes and dislikes are quite illogical. For some reason or another I could never get worked up about Grundy, magnificent as he was. Perhaps it was because I always had the quite wrong hunch that this time he would get beaten and then I'd be annoyed with myself for having opposed him. In retrospect, I always think of the gallant Bustino when I think of that epic race for the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes and not his conqueror Grundy. You can get to almost hate a horse, too, for no good reason. Canisbay the 1965 Eclipse winner fell into that category. Not only did he beat one of my favourite horses, Roan Rocket, but he was a chestnut and I've got a daft prejudice about chestnuts. Some know-all was giving me a lecture just before the race about chestnuts and instead of cocking him a deaf 'un I stood there mesmerised by his lecture on all chestnuts being 'ungenerous'. Well, some of them are, but plenty aren't and there are a few descendants of Hyperion who've got and had got plenty of guts. I fancied Canisbay, went off him and he then won at 20-1.
But the love and hate isn't all through the pocket. I never had a bet on Arkle and I only backed Brigadier Gerard once at the beginning of his racing career. That anyone could have ever wanted to see two horses like those beaten for the sake of a few shillings is beyond me. But if you really want to see pigs at close quarters you should spend an afternoon in a betting shop in Frith Street. I use the place sometimes because it's adjacent to a few of my haunts, but it's racing's Chamber of Horrors. The punters therein are mostly Italian and Cypriot and horseracing to them is a sort of animated roulette. I once saw a man have a nervous breakdown in the place and he was carted off by the authorities. His temporary madness was due to a prolonged bout of idiocy that had started when he took up betting without knowing anything about it except for the fact that Lester Piggott was a dab hand at race riding. He screamed that for all his life he'd been good to his wife and children and that they had shoes on their feet and food in their stomachs. And now, he raved, God had sent him this monster Piggott who had purposely lost the last race at Goodwood and ruined him.
All that was some time ago. The man in question has recovered and he makes very little noise now, but the others are awful. In the winter they scream for favourites to fall till I'd really like to put a few of them up on a steeplechaser and send them round Aintree for three miles. Not far away from that shop there's the one in Gerard Street that's used by the Chinese. I've seen a waiter in there put a week's wages on a horse. It would be interesting to know what thoughts the Chairman might have had about that sort of behaviour. Most of them are, apparently, Maoists, but they bet like men possessed. Possessed by something that makes them very quiet, mind you, but possessed nevertheless. A Chinese trainer or jockey would indeed be extremely inscrutable and I don't think that you would get much information there.
In yet another betting shop I know there's a man who's still in love with Harry Wragg. He must be getting on a bit to have seen Harry win the 1928 Derby on Felstead, but after nearly every race he will insist on telling anyone present how Felstead and Wragg would have murdered the opposition in the most recently run event. My own softest spot is for Manny Mercer who was sadly killed at Ascot. In some ways I suppose it's he that's responsible for my downfall. In 1950 1 was hanging around Soho street corners wondering what to do with myself when I got the brilliant idea one day of having a bet on the horses. I'd heard men in pubs waxing lyrical about Mercer so picked out two of his mounts, borrowed 5s from someone and did the two in a double. You never forget the names of your first winners and Burnt Grass and Cherry Neering are engraved in my skull. The street bookmaker handed me f I 8 in an alley which made it all the more wicked and I was temporarily almost rich. Twenty-six years later, the struggle goes on. I've just backed Welsh Flame for the Cambridgeshire and I can barely sleep for wondering about what's going to win the Cesarewitch. That something as odd as seeing whether one horse can go faster than another can obsess one for that long seems to be sometimes slightly absurd.
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