York style
RACING CAPTAIN THREADNEEDLE
Fred Archer's braces, richly embroidered with designs of wild flowers, are among the attrac- tions of the York races. They were worked for him by that duchess to whom he explained a failure to finish first in the Derby with `Couldn't come without the horse, my lady.' Racing tradition asserts that there were other favours that the duchess would have bestowed on Archer. So it is fair to say that he bought his own nightshirt, an episcopal crimson silk shift from Harborow's in New Bond Street.
The Racing Museum, where braces and night- shirt mingle with whips, hooves, fearsome iron implements and the no less fearsome correspon- dence of Admiral Rous, is one of Major Leslie Fetch's numerous bright ideas. Major Petch manages York and is the managing director of Redcar and Catterick : York, in particular, is regarded by many racing people as the best course in the country. They include Lord Wigg, chairman of the Levy Board, who said just that —adding 'and superbly managed'—when he went to the Ebor meeting last week. They also include, presumably, a fair number of the 100,000 who paid for admission on the three- midweek—days of the meeting. If racing is, in the Benson committee's phrase, a declining in- dustry, then appearances deceived.
About the quality of management in British racing—and every racegoer knows that it varies from good to execrable—the Benson commit- tee had oddly little to say, except by implication. It recommended that racecourses should no longer be responsible for prize-money, which should be doled out by the new central authority. Since the committee also found that a higher standard of prize-money was what rac- ing needed most, the inference is that racecourse managements are not to be trusted with the most important tool of their trade. Major Petch has his own word for this proposal: he calls it nationalisation. 'Racecourses should manage their own business.' Though if racing were enabled to show a proper return on capital, pro- fessional management would more readily be attracted in : `Racing has been run as a sport, and now it's a competitive business.'
Being competitive means offering the public more than just racing. This approach was dismissed by Benson with a few patronis- ing remarks on 'bands, sideshows and other attractions.' But Major Petch is a great believer in extras, and his customers bear him out. For the last two years at York, racegoers who have paid £2 lOs to get in have been solemnly clustered behind the grand- stand, watching the races on a colour television set. 'My Punch and Judy show in the cheap enclosure' (says Major Petch) `—a thing I never expected to see at York—was a huge success. Parents from every ring brought their children there . . . Lord Wigg and Lord Halifax were most impressed by the numbers of children watching—and of adults.' In his tour of Ameri- can racecourses—'18,000 miles in twenty-one days'—Major Petch found the public watching 'sideshows and aquaria; and there was just as much betting in the aquaria as anywhere else.'
This points, in effect, to one of the strangest defects of the Benson report: it owed nothing to market research. The committee was at pains to find out how racing was conducted from West Malaysia to Limerick Junction. But it did not try to find out what kind of unrealised potential racing has; who might start to go racing, and on what terms. Indeed, there was no real analysis of the market that racing now has. It seems odd to make scores of proposals for the industry, and list over a hundred principal races, without any reference to handicaps. But the big handicap races have a great following and, compared to the classics and 'pattern races' Of the committee's plans, are cheap to stage. The Ebor Handicap is the richest of the flat-racing season, with £10,000 added money—half of it found by Johnnie Walker. It drew the biggest crowd of the York meeting. Does it really make sense to put up £35,000 out of Levy Board money for the Champion Stakes, run on New- market Heath in windy October before a nor- mal audience of three men and a stable cat?
York itself can never have looked better than at this Ebor meeting. Brilliant sunshine kept Mary, the presiding waitress, busy in the cham- pagne bar, where sorrow-drowners, victory-cele- brators and mere thirst-quenchers are offered a choice of thirteen marques; the course ran like a broad green river between the packed enclo- sures; and on Thursday, two hours and ten minutes before the first race, a family picnic was under way at the one-furlong pole—`Give Ern a feed of it, then.' Mr David Robinson won three principal races, including the Gimcrack, in which his handsome colt Tudor Music ran right away from a strong field. This earns Mr Robinson—who in the last decade must have put more money into the game than any other owner—the right to air his views at the Gim- crack dinner, and they will deserve special re- spect. All the same, the Gimcrack speech most racegoers would like to hear will be made when the winner belongs to Major L. Petch.
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