Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings. Nick Robinson
most venerable member rose to his feet. He spoke firmly, in that blunt aristocratic manner which has always outlawed any form of interruption:
‘My Lords and Gentlemen,’ said Harry Rosebery, ‘I want to thank the Stewards for their courtesy in letting me bring up Any Other Business at the start. But I have to catch a train, at 12 o’clock.
‘Now then,’ he began, ‘I want to recall to your minds what happened last night when we had a candidate put up and blackballed. Every single person had been asked if they were in favour and every single person – except one – replied to say they were. Well, as I said last night, his subsequent rejection knocks on the head our method of election completely.’ He gazed around the historic room very slowly, and very carefully, before adding, ‘If you cannot trust members of the Club to carry out what they write, I am ashamed to think that you cannot trust them at all.’
He addressed the possibility of a blackballing-by-error in the following words: ‘There is to my mind just a chance – and it is more than just a chance, I think – that a black ball, or even two, can get in by mistake … you know, into the wrong aperture. It has happened in the past, I know. And it might always happen. I am not saying it did happen last night, but I am hoping, for the credit of members of the Club, that it did.’
‘So am I,’ whispered the Duke of Norfolk. But there was an atmosphere of mistrust in the room. Who had blackballed Christopher Soames? And why? The Duke of Norfolk shook his head, conveying his exasperation. Lord Rosebery spoke again.
‘I am proposing’, he said, ‘that we go back to what happened forty-three years ago. At that time there was a general reluctance among people who were put up for the Jockey Club, not at all sure whether they would get elected or not. I myself missed the blackballing system – they never had an opportunity to get me – which is perhaps the only reason why I’m here at all! But in 1924 they passed a resolution making membership the province of a Membership Committee. The late Lord Derby was made chairman, as I remember. A few of us were elected under that system and then, suddenly, they went back to the old method of blackballing … Can’t remember why.
‘Personally I dislike blackballing. I always have. Doesn’t give a man a fair chance. I have never blackballed anyone in my life. For anything. Also I think this system leaves a possibility of one of us making an error. I mean, you might be talking to someone, and put the damn thing in, and it goes into the wrong ‘NO’ or the wrong ‘YES’. There is the possibility for error. I don’t like it.’
He then proposed, formally, that the Club return to the method which was adopted in 1924. ‘I am not a great believer in thinking that the things of the past were better than things of the present. But I do think the 1924 method is superior. I think we are all agreed that it is quite impossible to go on as we are going on now, when people write one thing, and then vote in another way. I propose that the Order of 1924 be re-enacted and made a Rule of the Club.’
The Duke of Norfolk seconded the motion and, although it took almost a year to implement, the return to 1924 was carried out. It would never again be quite such a searching challenge to become a member of England’s Jockey Club, which still remains the most exclusive gathering of men in the history of the free world, with the possible exception of the Last Supper.
Lord Willoughby never did come clean and admit what he had done, although he felt extremely strongly about it. Very late one night, Lord Willoughby, pressed on the subject, put the blackballing down to events in the North African campaign of the Second World War, where Christopher Soames served in the Coldstreams. ‘Tobruk,’ snapped his Lordship. There was not another word. Not another clue.
Christopher Soames was finally elected in May 1968, by which time he was indeed Britain’s ambassador to France, and a Peer of the Realm, as Andrew Devonshire had forecast on that most awful of nights a year previously. His election went some way towards stabilizing relations with the diplomatic world, but it was always overshadowed by his blackballing. The outlook of many members, not least the Duke of Norfolk, had been changed irreconcilably. For them it was essential to recruit new blood into the Club, to make contact with new younger racehorse owners and breeders, who had experience beyond that of the land and the military. But despite some powerful voices in the Jockey Club pushing for a more enlightened and forward-looking approach to the new decade of the 1970s, there remained many reactionaries in the world’s oldest sporting club. They refused to elect to membership Mr David Robinson, England’s biggest racehorse owner, presumably because he made his vast fortune in renting television sets rather than fields of turnips or corn to tenant farmers. As a result Robinson turned his back on racing to fund the most beautiful new college at Cambridge University and dispense charitable largess around the country totalling some £26 million.
However, an era had passed. No longer could the membership be founded on quasi-medieval families, whose main qualifications had been derived through the execution of noblesse oblige: fighting wars, acquiring money and land from the peasant classes and displaying a sycophantic devotion to various dull-witted monarchs. Times were changing. This was the twentieth century. Had been for some time now. It was time to wake up, to breathe new life into the two-hundred-year-old organization which rules, runs and organizes horse-racing in Great Britain, and sets a standard of excellence and integrity for the Sport of Kings which is unmatched anywhere in the world.
Over the centuries the Jockey Club established itself firstly as the supreme rulers of Newmarket and all of the heathland gallops which surround it, virtually all of which the Club now owns. Then, with inordinate speed, before 1800, it became the sole ruler of all racing in Great Britain. In 1967 its traditions were without parallel, its authority unquestioned, its power in racing absolute over all men. Each member wears a little silver badge to admit him to every racecourse in the country, almost all of them with a private room for members. Royal Ascot is run principally for, and essentially by, the Jockey Club. Members have total priority in every aspect of a day at the races.
The Jockey Club still enjoys considerable royal patronage. The Queen and the Queen Mother are its two Patrons; Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne are honorary members, and in addition there are the two dukes, Devonshire and Sutherland. One way and another, it is an organization to which any owner of any racehorse might longingly aspire. Today it has more than one hundred and twenty members, still drawn from a frightfully narrow social stratum. With any one of the Queen’s subjects having only a 467,000 to 1 chance of ever being elected, the odds of acceptance are depressingly daunting for the socially ambitious, notwithstanding the 1967 outlawing of the hated blackball. Its membership is still heavily loaded with the military: high-ranking officers combined with haughtily born captains and majors who spent time in Her Majesty’s Service but never threatened to reduce the importance of Field Marshal Lord Montgomery in the roll of British Army strategists. There is certainly no record of a former private, lance corporal or even sergeant ever being elected.
It has always been difficult to assess the precise criteria required for membership, principally because the members have historically behaved in such an arbitrary way. Collectively they have demonstrated a whim of iron. Until the early 1970s there might be said to have been ten ‘Rules’ which had served as general electoral guidelines. They were never, of course, formalized, but they were unfailingly observed:
1 The Club does not like trade, nor the people involved in it.
2 The Club does not like ‘other ranks’ from any branch of the Armed Services.
3 The Club does not like professional sportsmen, or trainers.
4 The Club does not like jockeys.
5 The Club does not like journalists.
6 The Club does not like bookmakers.
7 The Club does not like commercial horsetrading.
8 The Club does not like ostentation – film stars, play actors, entertainers of any type.
9 The Club does not like foreigners.
10 The Club does not like persons of low rank, not Honoured by Her Gracious Majesty.
These ‘Rules’ for membership, unwritten, unspoken, but rigid, have stood the