Today is the City and Suburban Handicap at Epsom racecourse, which of course also stages the Derby, the foremost contest of the Flat season. The City and Suburban (1915 running in the pic) is vin ordinaire by comparison but in its day it was a grand old race, a height of Spring race. Established in 1851, it was the creation of a man who owned The Dolphin in Cheapside (Epsom was very much a Londoner’s racecourse), a hostelry where - 110 years before the opening of the first betting shops - customers also went to gamble. One can imagine.
The City and Suburban is scarcely known today (I sometimes wonder if this is true of the Derby also), but it always resonates with me because it is mentioned in one of the letters written by Edith Thompson to her lover, Freddy Bywaters.
In December 1922, twenty-seven of these letters would be used in evidence at the couple’s joint trial, at the Old Bailey, for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy. Indeed her letters constituted pretty much the whole of the case against her. In an antagonistic courtroom, suffused with prejudice (notably from the judge), certain passages were presented as ‘proof’ that she had incited and conspired with Freddy, who was eight years her junior, and who had fatally stabbed Percy Thompson - in Edith’s presence - on the night of 3rd October. Freddy always insisted that he had acted as a sole agent, and that Edith had no foreknowledge of his intention to confront (not murder) Percy. Nevertheless both were hanged, on 9th January 1923. An application for a posthumous pardon, on the grounds that Edith Thompson did not receive a fair trial, was very recently denied.
It is therefore the airy, ordinary, spirited, Everywoman passages in Edith’s letters - which far exceed anything that might be parsed as sinister by what passed for a justice system - that I find the most moving. Like this, a typical refrain, from 15th May 1922.
Do you know darlint I won 30/- on Paragon in the City and Sub. and lost 20/- in each of the 2000 gns. 1000 gns. and the Jubilee. Money was never made to stop with me.
The ‘gns,’ are the two Guineas races held at Newmarket at the start of May; the Great Jubilee Handicap was run at Kempton.
Edith, supremely engaged with the life she was soon to lose, adored a flutter. In the days before betting shops, when it was illegal to gamble off-course, there were always people who would place bets on your behalf - in Edith’s case it was the driver, Jim, at her office in the City; at my great-grandfather’s pub it was an old girl in a hairnet known as Woodbine Minnie. There were risks, of course, as when she and Freddy backed the winner of the 1922 Oaks at Epsom with a dodgy bookmaker. On 14th June she wrote:
The Oaks money has not been paid out† – I don’t think we shall get it – at all – Jim tells me the man got 7 days for obstructing the Police and he (Jim) can’t get hold of him now…
At the end of the letter, Edith did the thing that gamblers often avoid doing, and honestly totalled the losses sustained so far that year - which came to £6, her entire weekly wage. Yet she was already planning her bets for Royal Ascot. She was fascinated by fate, and by its flashy cousin, luck, and by whether or not it was possible to subvert their course. That, of course, is the gambler mentality.
The love of a bet was quite normal in an era when racing was hugely - almost unimaginably - popular. At the same time, the newspapers kept in libraries had the daily racecards and results pasted over; this spirit of puritanism, the Roundhead tendency that flourished in the fearful years after the First World War, was at the heart of what killed Edith Thompson. As I wrote in Au Revoir Now Darlint: The Letters of Edith Thompson (Unbound), which I collected and edited for publication:
Her habit was later used to bolster the image of a hopeless wanton. In January 1923 her brother-in-law, Richard Thompson, gave a series of vengeful interviews to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, which characterized Edith as not merely a murderess, but a woman of almost fathomless depravity, an amateur prostitute and a spendthrift of Percy’s money (of course Edith’s money was her own, and when bonuses were included her income exceeded her husband’s).
And to a certain type of man – not entirely extinct, but in 1922 openly enraged by the first visible shoots of female empowerment – this business of the money, the independence, was the real insult.
Like Edith, I enjoy a bet. A flutter. Only during the Flat season (I loathe the jumps), which means that I can only lose money between March and November. I grew up with it: all my older relations gambled on the horses. It was as natural as having a nice glass of something, an expression of a very English relationship to minor sin, ie one that has an in-built expectation of disappointment. My father really enjoyed gambling - albeit in a controlled, don’t chase money sort of way (the opposite of his own father), which I have tried to emulate, because as soon as emotion is involved one is lost. This is Dostoevsky in The Gambler: ‘One must win at gambling if one can only remain calm and calculating. That’s all it is. If one does that, then one cannot lose – one has to win.’ Not win every time – that isn’t possible – but win overall, as I think Dad did (I’m still getting there).
I can think of nothing more tedious and destructive than random gambling, wherein one has no meaningful chance of moving the odds in one’s favour. Studying form is interesting (to me). Pure chance is utterly ridiculous, whether one is scribbling away at a tattered pile of scratch cards or losing £40,000 on the roll of the dice, as the nineteenth century gambler, George Payne, did, before exclaiming: ‘It’s a pleasure to lose it, by God!’ What I do has nothing to do with the extremely serious business of addiction - a whole other story. It is the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine, rather than the bottle. A matter of temperament: of luck.
The fact is that I find gambling reassuringly adult. Not much is, these days. I like the stoicism that goes with it, the requirement to be a good loser. Also adult. I consider it a small geste insolente towards the Cromwellian tendency, back in force as surely as it was a century ago (it would destroy the equivalent of an Edith Thompson on X, even though the absolute obliteration of 1923 is blessedly impossible). Having my little bet on the Ladbrokes website is only slightly fun, but betting shops are forcibly turned into Gail’s where I live. Nevertheless: the pleasure remains.
This is how I described it in A Different Class of Murder, my book about the Lord Lucan case, which of course has a ‘professional gambler’ as its main character.
The gamblers of the Georgian and Regency years, who lost the equivalent of hundreds of millions in a night, had done so with a kind of fine, hilarious flourish. Their behaviour was stark staring mad, but they had enjoyed it in their way, just as Lord Bingham [Lucan] had enjoyed standing on the stone steps at Harringay dogs, beneath the warm creamy lights of the stadium, amid the infinite vitality, the jabbering of ‘9/4 the field’, the frenetic clockwork arms of the tic-tac man. ‘It’s a pleasure to lose it, by God’ could have been his battle cry, as he chucked carefree fivers into the hands of the bookmakers. There was a lonelier, grimmer determination about his later gambling, as there would be in a particular aristocrat of the later nineteenth century.
Lord Hastings lost £120,000 on the 1867 Derby, and got no pleasure from it at all. In order to pay the debt, and the £79,000 that he had lost in one night at cards, he had to sell his Scottish estate. Yet after the Derby he had been the first to pat the winning horse, Hermit, on the neck. ‘Hermit fairly broke my heart,’ he said as he was dying, ‘but I never showed it, did I?’
Never show it: that is the code. As important, or more so, than paying up. There was no surer sign of breeding than to maintain one’s insouciance with the hounds of hell nipping at one’s tailored shoulders. When Lord Hastings lost a further £50,000 at Newmarket in 1867, his knees visibly buckled; he pulled himself together immediately, but in that brief moment of collapse the whole mighty edifice of illusion had been threatened.
Gambling is not, of course, merely an aristocratic pleasure. Nor is there necessarily anything louche about it; to many people it is a perfectly normal thing to do, something that puts a bit of savour in the stew of life. There are many ways of being a gambler, just as there are of being a drinker. And not all gambling is foolish, by any means. A person who can assess risk, or better still has inside information, is as likely to win at gambling as at many other kinds of financial scheme or job.
Gambling is a pleasure. There is no feeling quite like it. Even the hard-headed, the people who will restrain themselves to one enormous as-near-as-dammit-certainty bet in a year, are doing it for the pleasure. There are different ways of feeling this: some like the conviviality, some the self-absorption, some the simple fun. Some are entranced by the atmosphere. Some are showing off. Some enjoy the helplessness, the sense that fate is carrying them away from the responsibility of living. Any of these can be part of the pleasure. Always, though, a gambler is making a secret communion with the future: treating the future as something that they can manipulate, a moment that they can control and own. Beneath it all, this is the real joy of gambling. The future becomes yours. You make of it your own plaything. You feel it becoming a possibility, then – the purest sensation of all – feel the smooth little slip in time when you know that possibility must become certainty. When the other cards are being played and you know that your own must be the winner. That is what John Bingham would have felt, in the merry-making days at Harringay, when he watched a dog come round the bend, paws outstretched lovingly towards him; when he had asserted the belief that something would happen, and it did. Such power! Such happiness!
I don’t usually bet on handicaps, but in honour of Edith - her fatal belief that the future might be hers to command: a source of power and happiness - I shall try and find the winner of today’s City and Suburban.
The frisson of an adult pleasure is exactly right! A perfectly made cocktail, a studied bet, a cigar in the right moment and setting - oh yes
What a strange sensation to read this post only to discover that I read your excellent book on Lucan in 2018! Thank you for a very enjoyable read, Laura - I still have it on Kindle 😀
I don't gamble but I'll tell you a story that might amuse you. It had me half convinced that in another life I might have become a woman of the turf. Many years ago I went to the races in Bangor-on-Dee with my partner and his father. I was in my twenties and had never been to the races - just tagging along. I wasn't going to bet, thinking it a mug's game, but decided that since I was there I might as well put a quid on, just to get in the spirit of things. I picked horses based on their names and won on every race I bet on, bar the last, and even then the horse led all the way, only failing on the home stretch. One was called Who the Hell is Harry? I never went to the races again but if I'd used that experience as an indication of future success I'd probably have lost my shirt. At least it's a memory of a fun day and I came home with a bag of pound coins. I needed the money then too! Really enjoyed this Laura and yes, I do get the attraction of horse racing and gambling. In moderation it's great fun.