Low life
Sales time
Jeffrey Bernard
The Houghton Yearling Sales at Newmarket and the December Sales there give me as much pleasure as does a high quality race itself. Perhaps a thick wad of notes pressed into one's hot hand after a seller at Warwick is as good a moment as any to savour on the Turf, but I do sometimes wonder if it isn't the people in the racing business that attract me to it all much more than do the Nijinskys, Sea Birds and Mill Reefs with all their speed, class and guts. Do the horses make the men or do the men make the horses? A bit of both quite obviously, but! wonder if I'd get so much pleasure out of having lunch with Captain Ryan Price or Robert Sangster at Newmarket if they were simply an army officer and a football pools tycoon as opposed to one of the great trainers of all time and a man who's been shrewd enough to turn his racing into a profit-making business and industry.
Whatever it is it anyway makes a week that I'd hate to miss. The sales—in case you don't know — start at 9.30 a.m., stop at 1 p.m. for lunch, then, after an afternoon's racing, start again at 5.30 p.m. and go on until 9.00 p.m. It's one hell of a long day and if you happen to be mixing pleasure with business then you need great stamina.
More than anything, though, it's the very mixed and extraordinary cast list that keeps one from flagging. There is a cameo enacted on every point of the stage at all times. There are tragedians, comics, straight men, their managers and agents and a sprinkling of ingenues and harridans all hanging on, jostling or posing. Complete double Dutch and a bore if you're not interested in racing, but very much the place to see and meet the household names when they aren't behaving in a house trained manner.
The tannoy at Tattersalls must be the greatest name dropper in the world of sport and the illuminated screens in the bars that display the bidding in figures that actually reached 264,000 guineas a week ago, when Humphrey Cottrill bought a Grundy yearling, are palpable proof of lunacy, nerve and the fact that some people, anyway, aren't quite flat broke yet.
It's just about possible to generalise about the behaviour of the various cliques at the sales. The few French visitors — vendors and buyers — tend to be aloof and rather toffee nosed but you can sense that beneath their sophisticated veneer a lot of them are a shade out of their depth. The Irish are always good for a joke and for once the jokes aren't of the Irish variety. They're jolly, take up their positions at the bar very soon after breakfast and hold them until the bitter end. Jockeys get into huddles, and that's not too difficult. Any two men wih° . weigh only about 8 stone each look to be 111 a huddle when they're simply passing the time of day together. I like to watch rite owners. The very rich Ones. The likes 0' Captain Marcos Lemos, sundry Arabs, and Ravi Tikoo when he was buying here; The people who do make it somethin8.01 a three-day shindig are the men in the mid' die and small income bracket who are looking for something cheap that will make 3 dream or two come true. An average one, well-known but middlingly successful trainer, will spend half the day propping 11,P one of the bars and good humouredlY bemoaning the high prices that all the horses are fetching. He'll tell you he's got an owner who's given him a lousy 5,00°, guineas with which to buy him a miracle an" he'll go on to tell you it's just not possible. After he's spent the day being generous to. ,a fault, pushing the boat out as though it s never coming back, he'll usually manage t° salvage something out of the wreck and, next year, you might remember that the one that just won the big handicap was the one he got for a song. The evenings, after the sales are over, are devoted to dinners, parties and organ. hooliganism. Lord Chesterfield warned hos son about it all years ago. They go on these people about horses, jockeys, cards, gambling, drinking and whoring all bloody day long. Someone should put a stop to it.
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