On grown-up pleasures

And the geste insolente of having a flutter

This post is exactly one year old, and I woke up with the idea of expanding and reissuing it.

I have measured out my adult life in Epsom Derbies: the foremost contest of the British horseracing Flat season. The Derby is more than six weeks away, but today Epsom stages the City and Suburban Handicap, whose 1915 running is pictured here.

Oh that old Epsom grandstand. Replaced by something similar yet less magical by the time of my first Derby, but still proudly alive in images (William Frith’s 1858 ‘The Derby Day’ at the head of the page) and in the 1952 film Derby Day, starring Anna Neagle, who owns the winner of the race but is too busy having a drink with Michael Wilding to take much notice.

Meanwhile in 1851, when racing was reaching great popular heights and becoming ever more democratized, the City and Suburban was established by the owner of The Dolphin in Cheapside, a hostelry where - 110 years before the opening of the first betting shops - customers also went to gamble. My kind of place. The race, along with its counterpart the Grand Metropolitan Handicap - also run today; the names tell us that Epsom was very much a Londoners’ racecourse - is now scarcely known (I sometimes wonder whether this is true of the Derby also). Yet in its day it was a grand old race, a full of the joys of Spring race. And it resonates with me because it is mentioned in one of the letters written by Edith Thompson to her lover, Freddy Bywaters.

Regular readers will know of my fascination with the Thompson-Bywaters story, about which I have written two books and am writing a script.

In December 1922, twenty-seven of Edith’s letters were used in evidence at the couple’s joint trial for the murder of her husband, Percy Thompson. Certain passages were presented as ‘proof’ that she had incited and conspired with Freddy, who had fatally stabbed Percy - in Edith’s presence - on the night of 3rd October. Freddy always insisted that he had acted as a sole agent. Nevertheless both were hanged, on 9th January 1923. An application for a posthumous pardon to Edith was recently denied.

As others have done, I find it easy to identify with Edith: a woman of imagination who sought more, that ineffable more, from life and found that life had other ideas; a woman whose dreams of freedom led her to be trapped in that terrible thing we call ‘the system’; a woman whose letters show that her deepest passion was not so much for Freddy Bywaters but for self-expression. And a woman who loved ordinariness - a show, a drink, a new outfit, a bet. It is the airy, spirited, in-the-moment, Everywoman passages in Edith’s letters 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: £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 is the gambler mentality.

The love of a bet was quite normal in an era when racing was hugely - unimaginably - popular (think of Agatha’s 1936 The ABC Murders, which states the impossibility of finding a murderer within the vast crowds converged upon Doncaster - ‘D’ - for the St Leger). Meanwhile newspapers 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, and continually reasserts itself in this country, was at the heart of what killed Edith Thompson. As I wrote in Au Revoir Now Darlint: The Letters of Edith Thompson, 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 have written before about my deep loathing for the jumps), which means that I can only lose money between March and November. It is not true to say that racing and gambling are indivisible, and my love of the thoroughbred is infinitely stronger than my pleasure in betting on it. But I grew up with gambling: the Saturday rustle of the Sporting Life, the painstaking markings in the newsprint, the theories, the hope. 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 a bet, albeit in a highly-controlled way (the opposite of his own father). This I have tried to emulate, because as soon as emotion is involved one is lost. 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 is not possible – but win overall, which in the 2022 Flat season I actually achieved.

What I do has nothing to do with the extremely serious business of addiction (another story altogether). It is the equivalent of a glass of wine, not the bottle. A matter of temperament: of luck. 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!’

The fact is that I find gambling reassuringly adult, and these days that is true of very little. I like the stoicism that goes with it, the gamblers’ code that requires one to be a good loser, which is also adult. Remember that racetrack scene in White Mischief, the film about the Happy Valley set, when Joss Ackland as Jock Broughton watches his horse lose and more of his family thousands evaporate into the Kenyan heat? ‘The devil’, he mutters. Nothing more.

Moreover I consider gambling a small geste insolente towards the Cromwellian tendency that holds society in its grip, as surely as it did a century ago (it would destroy the equivalent of an Edith Thompson on social media, 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.

I wrote about it at some length in A Different Class of Murder, my book about the Lord Lucan case. Lucan, described to me as ‘cripplingly introverted’, was only at ease within a setting such as that of the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, which had deliberately recreated the mise-en-scène of an eighteenth century gambling club for aristocrats: the forebears whom Lucan, the perfect waxwork earl, physically resembled.

50 guineas that Mlle. Heinel does not dance at the opera house next winter… 5 guineas down, to receive 100 if the Duke of Queensberry dies before half an hour after five in the afternoon of the 27th June, 1773… Lord Ossory betts Mr Charles Fox [yes him] 100 guineas to 10 that Dr North is not Bishop of Durham this day two months…’

This is from the betting book at Brooks’s; two centuries on, it was the atmosphere replicated at the Clermont.

And what follows is from my Lucan book:

… 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!…

In honour of Edith Thompson - 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.