History The going is good for racing historians

The Cheltenham Festival has 100 years of winners – and losers

david horspool

The Cheltenham Festival is back again this March.

Cheltenham has a lot of festivals, including jazz, music, science and literature.

But the only one that doesn’t need a qualifier is for horse-racing. COVID couldn’t stop it (and it far from stopped COVID – the 2020 Festival was a virus super-spreader) and it has been cancelled or interrupted only by war, frost, and foot and mouth. This year, its main event, the Gold Cup, will be 99 years old.

But should any of that interest a historian? Don’t we get enough sport in the sports pages (and in Jim White’s excellent Oldie column)?

Well, not many of us like war, famine, or, for that matter, the minutiae of parliamentary debate. But they are all legitimate subjects of historical enquiry.

So is sport. About 50 years ago that might have been a contentious point, but not now. History has got bigger. Increasingly historians have focused on the history of what we might call ‘ordinary life’. And in Britain sport is embedded in everyday life, and has been for several centuries.

Sport has always had its historians of sorts. There have been careful archivists of every bareknuckle contest of the prize-fight era (documented in Vincent George Dowling’s Fistiana [1841], a champion among titles). There have been enthusiastic sporting narrators and memoirists, too, from Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) to Daniel Mendoza (the boxer who wrote a self-aggrandising memoir in 1816).

But only in the later-20th century have they been joined by teams of academic sports historians, variously enthusiastic or sniffy about what a football historian described as ‘scarf and rattle history’.

National Hunt racing, in history as in life, is something of a poor relation.

Racing has had some fine historians, but they have tended to focus on the flat. It’s understandable. Flat racing has a longer pedigree, going back at least to Charles II’s involvement on Newmarket Heath. It was the sporting focus of the most influential class in society for centuries, if not always of their most upstanding members.

The stories of lost aristocratic fortunes are legion. They range from the tragic –Henry Berkeley Craven shooting himself in 1836 after losing an astonishing £8,000 on the Derby – to the glorious.

The ‘Yellow Earl’, the fifth Lord Lonsdale, steadily blew through a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in extravagant forays into racing and other, equally expensive pursuits (including equipping private battalions for the Boer War and First World War).

National Hunt racing, by contrast, didn’t really get going in Britain until the St Albans steeplechase in 1830. It started to imprint itself on British life with the beginning of the Grand National, first run in 1839.

Most of the horses involved in steeplechasing before this were ‘hunters’, which their owners raced themselves. Jump racing has a long history of the ‘gentleman amateur’ rider, who, not needing to be as light as the flat jockey, was able to compete more comfortably.

Cheltenham was just one of many places where racing was tried in the 19th century without much lasting success. At a flat meeting there in 1830, the grandstand was even burnt down after a riot.

It was only in the 20th century that the course became the home of the National Hunt festival and the most prestigious races over jumps, such as the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle.

Over the past 100 years or so, jump racing and Cheltenham have produced lots of stories to interest historians.

The most obvious involve the Irish connection. Cheltenham becomes a little Dublin every March, with thousands of spectators making the journey to cheer on Irish horses and jockeys.

Steeplechasing has Irish roots, with some of the first recorded races taking place in Ireland. The Irish love affair with jump racing has survived some of the bitterest periods of Anglo-Irish relations.

Irish racegoers began to come in ever larger numbers after the Second World War, when Cottage Rake won three Gold Cups in successive years (1948-50). The horse was trained by Vincent O’Brien, the Irish nonpareil who, uniquely, was a champion over jumps and on the flat.

A decade after ‘the Rake’ came Ireland’s most famous equine export, Arkle, who managed his own treble, beginning in 1964. He is memorialised in bronze at the course (though his skeleton, rather oddly, is on show at the Irish National Stud in County Kildare).

Sports commentators are fond of referring to ‘the history books’ and ‘making history’.

Usually, they just mean breaking records, which isn’t the sort of historymaking most historians have much time for. But the hundreds of thousands who flock to Cheltenham, the Grand National and other race meetings every year are making history too.

The Cheltenham Festival is from 14th to 17th March 2023

The powder monkey at the Battle of Trafalgar writes, ‘We had to leave our Quarters 2 get breath.’

So boys of 17 were using text messaging in 1805. Plus ça change Dr Pam Macdonald, University of Wales academic

Paolo Coelho writes because he wants to be loved. I read because I want to be interested. At this point, it’s hard to say which of us is the more disappointed.

Adam Mars-Jones, review of The Zahir by Coelho

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, no great universities, nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.

Henry James on what is absent in American life, 1879

An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.

Viscount D’Abernon

A reporter beckoned me aside and asked, ‘Would you call this a reunion of the neo-conservative clan?’