Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings. Nick Robinson
member since the age of twenty-two, the touchy business of electing a statesman had never really applied.
The Jockey Club had admitted an Under-Secretary of State for War, Earl Cadogan, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the knowledge that he was much preoccupied with the unrest along India’s north-west frontier. The same applied, in smaller measure, to the Marquis of Londonderry and the Earl of Zetland in the 1880s when they were appointed as successive Lords-Lieutenants of Ireland. Different frontier, similar unrest among the natives and one or two furrowed brows in the Club. Lord Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer and owner of an Oaks winner in 1889, had had to be elected. And they could not quite avoid accepting his often fractious son Sir Winston, who won the Jockey Club Cup in 1950 with his stout-hearted grey Colonist II shortly before becoming Prime Minister for the second time.
Of course the greatest of all England’s horse-racing monarchs, King Edward VII, was a member. He would have to be included as a statesman – Emperor of India and Ruler of the Lands Beyond the Seas and all that – but like Rosebery he had not really been considered as such when proposed for membership. Elected at twenty-three, he already owned two Derby winners (Persimmon and Minoru) and, during his frequent stays in Newmarket, he usually took the Jockey Club Rooms, in a private apartment with a private entrance – a discreet little throughway not entirely unfamiliar to the occasional visiting mistress. Upon the death of his mother Queen Victoria in 1901, Edward ascended the throne a few months off his sixtieth birthday in 1901 and by this time he assuredly was ‘one of us’.
These very few apart, then, the Jockey Club had stuck for the past two hundred years to its own kind: land-owning horsemen who understood who was to be trusted and who was not. But today, 3 May 1967, in the hours following the running of the first English classic of the season, the 2000 Guineas, on nearby Newmarket Heath, there was an unmistakable apprehension in the Rooms. Before them this evening was written the name of Arthur Christopher John Soames, former Secretary of State for War, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and a Coldstream Guards officer of the highest quality who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre from a grateful, liberated French nation. He was also the son-in-law of the recently deceased member Sir Winston Churchill.
The eighty-five-year-old Earl of Rosebery, son of the nineteenth-century PM, was worried. The Club employed a legendary, not to mention brutal, ‘blackballing’ system, which ended would-be members’ aspirations with the suddenness of a guillotine. The blackballing box is a tall shiny, wooden case, with a round, tube-like aperture close to the top in which the forearm is placed. The ball can be dropped to either side: left in the ‘YES’ slot, right into the ‘NO’ slot. One ball, dropped in the ‘NO’ slot, by any member, was all it took. No one would ever know precisely who had dropped it in. Far less, why it had been dropped in.
Lord Rosebery did not like it. He and the industrialist Sir Foster Robinson had argued about the system just a couple of years previously. Rosebery believed it was a ‘damned bad idea’ because news of a blackballing of someone important would one day get out and there would be hell to pay in the press. With much apprehension, he envisaged ‘the kind of thing Cardigan had to put up with after the “Black Bottle” incident in the officers’ mess of his personal regiment of Hussars’. In the case of Mr Soames the Club had sent letters to all members sounding out the strength of feeling towards his election, conscientiously heading off the possibility of an unseemly blackballing. Indeed no member had intimated even a dislike of the rotund bon vivant Christopher Soames, far less an intention to throw him out of the Club before he was even elected. But Lord Rosebery still did not like it.
He walked slowly into the Jockey Club Rooms, leaning on his walking stick owing to a slight touch of gout that day. The master of the massive castellated Buckinghamshire manor of Mentmore, with its £7 million collection of French furniture and art, breeder of two Derby winners and a Steward as long ago as 1929, was filled with misgivings.
One by one, as the sun slipped below the long western horizon of Newmarket Heath, his fellow members arrived. There was the Chairman of the meeting, the formidable figure of the former Coldstream Guards Major General, Sir Randle ‘Gerry’ Feilden, future High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. There was the Duke of Devonshire, owner of the greatest house in England, Chatsworth, together with fifty-six thousand acres of Derbyshire. There was Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan Howard, the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England, owner of the lovely Arundel Castle and twenty-five thousand acres of Sussex. There was Lord Tryon, Keeper of the Privy Purse, Treasurer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; the Earl of Halifax, son of Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, a former Captain in the Royal Horse Guards, Master of Foxhounds, married to Lord Rosebery’s niece; and the fabulously wealthy Jakie Astor, owner of Hatley Park in Bedfordshire, son of Viscount ‘Waldorf’ Astor and the legendary Nancy Lady Astor, Britain’s first female Member of Parliament.
Quietly reading The Times in the Coffee Room sat The Hon. Major General Sir Harold Wernher, owner of the great English mansion of Luton Hoo, with its four thousand surrounding acres, where the Queen spent her honeymoon. (Sir Harold’s wife, the fabled Lady Zia Wernher, was the Queen’s godmother and daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia, first cousin of Czar Nicholas. Lord Rosebery thought she would make a damned good Empress of All the Russias if they ever got fed up with those Bolsheviks …) Lord Howard de Walden (proprietor of three thousand acres and a sizeable portion of central London) was chatting to the wealthiest of all the Scottish whisky heirs, Major Sir Reginald Macdonald-Buchanan, Chairman of Distillers; the eighteenth Earl of Derby, with twenty-two thousand acres of Lancashire, had slipped in after the short drive from his Newmarket home, Stanley House, and was enjoying a quiet drink with the old Cavalry officer Lord Willoughby de Broke, the twentieth Baron, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire. This was a rather poetic duo, both the Derby and the Willoughby titles had been awarded by King Henry VII after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Both of the first Lords had fought against King Richard III with enormous courage, and here we were, five hundred years later, with Derby and Willoughby still standing, in a sense, shoulder to shoulder.
They all made their way along to the Committee Room, past the bust of the most fearsome Jockey Club president of all, that of Admiral Henry John Rous who completely dominated the English Turf from 1846 until his death in 1877. The Admiral’s creed had been well known: ‘I do not believe in heavy gambling, and any member of this club who wins more than £50,000 on a horse should be expelled.’ Even in 1967 some of the members were a bit reticent to look the white stone bust directly into its dead, but still withering, eye. Most of the thirty or so members seated themselves around the main table with the Chairman. But the great, venerable names of the Jockey Club, such as Rosebery, Derby, Astor and Norfolk, sat in their big personal chairs strategically set around the room.
‘My Lords and Gentlemen,’ said Sir Randle, ‘there is one candidate for the Jockey Club: Mr Christopher Soames, proposed by Mr Blackwell, and seconded by Mr Astor.’ At this point the formal ballot was taken. The official Jockey Club ‘servants’ from the old racing firm of Weatherbys carried round to each member the polished wooden blackballing box. Each one of these extraordinarily influential men, who could be said to own a lion’s share of England rather than merely run it, placed his hand into the ballot box. The little wooden balls rattled into the slot which signified ‘YES’ to Mr Soames. Well, all but one. Whether misfired or maliciously misdirected, a solitary ball landed in the ‘NO’ slot. Sir Randle hesitated for a few moments before he said flatly, and without declaring the actual number of ‘blackballs’, ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, Mr Soames is not elected.’
The room went stone silent, every member, except perhaps for one, embarrassed at what they had somehow managed to achieve. ‘My God!’ whispered Sir Harold Wernher. ‘Someone’s blackballed Winston’s son-in-law.’ But the Major General recovered swiftly and said nothing of the blackballing. In a murderously contrived anti-climax, he declared, ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, the minutes of the last meeting have been circulated. Can I sign them as the correct record?’
A few voices muttered assent and Sir Randle reached for his fountain pen. But the sixth Earl of Rosebery, godson of His Late Majesty (and distinguished former member) King Edward VII, was on his feet, and he was absolutely furious. His words came out in growling torrent.