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Keep up the reminiscences AP, I enjoy reading them very much. I guess I’m just a few years younger than you (and an ex Computer Operator too). So most of the names you mention are familiar to me.
Over the years I’ve tried to go to as many UK racetracks as possible; still got a few to do but don’t go racing that often nowadays. I never managed to get to Ally Pally or Stockton(Teesside Park) or Wye which all had fixtures when I used to go racing a lot. I don’t imagine I missed much by not visiting Stockton (although I may be wrong), but I imagine Wye had a certain charm. Did you ever go there?
I used to really enjoy a quiet Monday at the old pre all-weather Wolverhampton. No problem getting served at the bar, and no problems viewing the horses in the paddock. Every now and again a half-decent animal would run there too ( I seem to remember a Dante winner with Luca Cumani winning a maiden there prior to his York success).
In my teens I’d go racing around the North West and West Midland courses. Some of the more successful trainers at Bangor / Ludlow and similar courses were George Owen and R. Whiston who used to put up a capable jockey in Roy Edwards – remember him? (He won a Champion Hurdle on Saucy Kit for M.H. Easterby I think and would often pick up rides for Fred Rimmell when Biddlecombe was unavailable). Other top NH jocks from those days included Stan Mellor, Johnny Haine, David Mould, Josh and Macer Gifford, Johnny(or was it Jeff) King, Andy Turnell…. better stop now, I’m beginning to feel my age!The lounge seems very quiet nowadays, so just thought I’d chuck this article in to see if the Scots contingent on here have an opinion on the piece. I’d be interested to know if the scot-on-the-street is prepared to turn a blind-eye to SNP behaviour that they’d scream blue murder over if it was a tory (or Labour or even just English) act. Courtesy of Alex Massie from The Spectator Coffee House blog.
“The great thing about the ‘new politics’ – or at least the new politics we have lately been privileged to endure here in Scotland – is that it’s just as fetid and grubby as the old politics it replaced. The band may change but the music remains the same.
Consider the twin controversies swirling around the SNP. Neither, on its own, is enough to torpedo Nicola Sturgeon but, combined, they represent the largest challenge to her authority the First Minister has yet encountered.
First there is the curious case of Michelle Thompson, the MP for Edinburgh West. Mrs Thomson was previously managing director of the ‘Business for Scotland’ group arguing for a Yes vote in last year’s independence referendum. She received glowing endorsements – not least for her business nous – from senior figures within the party.
Awkwardly, it turns out that a considerable part of her business appears to have involved purchasing properties from desperate sellers at below market valuations. In 2009, for instance, Mrs Thomson and her husband bought an Edinburgh flat from a pensioner couple needing a quick sale on account of the husband having been diagnosed with bowel cancer. The Thomsons bought the property for £73,000 but, oddly, the Land Register records the sales price as being £105,000. “We needed the money”, the previous owner said. “We knew that we would take a loss, but we were desperate. I knew I was being taken advantage of, but we were about to get our home dispossessed.” Another seller in financial difficulty sold his flat to the Thomsons for around £60,000 and is surprised – to put it mildly – that the sale price was registered as being £85,000″. “I never got anything like that”, he says.The Thomson’s solicitor, Christopher Hales, was struck off in May 2014 for professional misconduct, much of it centring on work he did for the Thomsons. A disciplinary tribunal concluded he “must have been aware that there was a possibility he was facilitating mortgage fraud, whether or not this occurred.”
In December 2014, the Law Society of Scotland raised Mr Hales’ case with the Crown Office “informally” and did so again “formally” in July this year, by which time, of course, Mrs Thomson had been elected to parliament. The 12 month delay in alerting the Crown Office is, on the face of it, inexplicable.
As always, the detail of the law – and Mrs Thomson’s potential or alleged collusion in mortgage fraud – is one thing and the public impact of the case another. It is not illegal to purchase property for less than its market value and nor is it illegal to take advantage of sellers who are battling cancer or are in considerable financial distress. On the other hand, it is not the sort of behaviour you would expect from a self-styled champion of ‘social justice’.
Ms Sturgeon says the first she knew about any of this was when she read about it in The Sunday Times. Mrs Thomson has resigned the party whip, pending the outcome of the police investigation. She maintains her innocence. But this is a lose-lose situation for the MP and her party leader. As a political matter, the distinction between what is legal and what is ethical is of considerable importance.
And at the very least, there are questions about the manner and seriousness of the SNP’s vetting procedures. Then again, these have plainly not been terribly rigorous. It is true that if a prospective MP says there is nothing that the party needs to know then there may sometimes be nothing the party can do to prevent being blindsided by this kind of affair.
On the other hand, candidates such as Paul Monaghan, the eccentric MP for Caithness, were approved despite him having likened life under the Cameron-Clegg government to ‘the early days of the Third Reich’. At the very least this might, you would have thought, have placed him in the Untouchable Zoomer category. But, no.
And so at First Minister’s Question today we enjoyed the spectacle of the Presiding Officer telling parliament that Nicola Sturgeon had no need to address the allegations about her party’s business spokeswoman in the House of Commons.
Granted, Sturgeon chose to answer – or, rather, pretend to answer – the questions anyway. As a matter of politics and perception she could hardly do otherwise.
Then there’s the fracas over the Scottish government’s decision to hand £150,000 of public money to the organisers of the T in the Park music festival, Scotland’s largest such gathering and, if you like, the Caledonian equivalent of the Glastonbury festival.
According to Fiona Hyslop, the culture secretary, this unusual grant of public money was necessary because there was a risk that, if it were not given, the festival – a profitable, private concern – might have moved out of Scotland. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Granted, £150,000 is hardly a world-changing amount of money but the principle and the perception is, again, as important as the substance.
Certainly, it was wise of the concert promoters to engage a lobbyist to press their case with the government and wise too to select for the job a lobbyist, Jennifer Dempsie, who had been a special advisor to Alex Salmond, is currently the partner of Angus Robertson MP, and was until recently a candidate to be selected as an SNP candidate for next year’s Scottish parliament elections.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with lobbying and no suggestion Ms Dempsie did anything improper.
Still, the opposition parties have no great difficulty in spinning this as another example of how, if you are ‘sound’ politically, doors can be opened and blind eyes turned.
In similar fashion, the delay in the Law Society’s reporting the Thomson case to the Crown Office may – or may not! – be at least partially explained by the fact the secretary of the Law Society committee responsible for dealing with disciplinary tribunals was herself a member of ‘Lawyers for Yes’ and, according to her Facebook page, a keen admirer of a certain Michelle Thomson. This, of course, could well be entirely coincidental.
But, again, you can see how these matters can be used to their profit by the opposition parties at Holyrood. As so often, it is not the detail that matters but the manner in which a ‘narrative’ can be constructed. One that suggests, fairly or not, that there is one rule for on-side Nationalists and another for everyone else.
Scotland is a small place and being so it is inevitable that these kinds of storms must arise. But the SNP, having made great play at the expense of other parties’ ‘sleaze’, can hardly be surprised if Labour and the Conservatives enjoy themselves now the boot is on the other foot. That’s politics and that’s the way it is – and should be – played.
In fairness to the contestant though, he may well have known the answer to all his questions but couldn’t afford to spend time dredging them up from memory. In Mastermind you’re under extreme pressure to answer quickly and sometimes it’s better to pass and move on to the next question. It’s one thing to call out the answers from the comfort of one’s living room, quite another to do so when under the spotlight in the TV Studio knowing millions will be watching you.
Thanks for taking the trouble to write about this. Opinions will of course always differ. Robin Oakley writes a regular column in The Spectator, nearly always informative and always a pleasure to read(although his racecourse sorties seldom go north of Newmarket).
For my part, the greatest performance by a flat horse in Britain in my lifetime was by Roberto in beating Brigadier Gerard at York, but I doubt too many would agree.There’s no denying that the situation you refer to will happen (and did happen in the days when the rules on dangerous riding were stricter). Which of the two “evils” is better? Dangerous riding is okay or unsportsmanlike riding is okay? There’s no perfect answer.
What might happen though is that eventually, jockeys who regularly hemmed in horses would find they too were on the receiving end of such treatment; they might all come to realise that employing such tactics is not a win/win situation for the jockey behaving in this way.Would you risk doing so if you thought the jockey you’d just stuffed might be able to do the same to you – maybe in a bigger race than the one you’ve just played around in?
The better jockeys – more capable of avoiding such trouble (admittedly not always possible, even for the best jocks), will rise to the top just as they did in times when rules were more stringent.
I’m sure all the tutors at racing apprentice schools will now be showing the Pesilier ride and saying, “there you go lads (or lasses) don’t bother trying to steer a more trouble free passage, don’t try and use too much brain, just barge your way through and win by a couple of lengths; that’s what great jockeyship is all about.”
If they changed the rules to disqualify any bit of a barge…
If we have so little confidence in our stewards that we don’t think they’re capable of judging what’s dangerous and what’s just a bit of an accidental brush, then we might as well say to hell with it jocks, use whatever force you can muster to bash anything in your way sideways, we’re too afraid of making possibly contoversial decisions.
Contact in races is inevitable but just because a horse goes on to win comfortably should not mean all the sins of the rider must be forgiven. If this (at Goodwood) had been a slight brush then, even with the old rules in place, one might have hoped common sense would have prevailed and the result would have been allowed to stand. It wasn’t though,it was a deliberate action that resulted in more than a slight coming together of two horses, yet our rules emasculated the stewards from issuing a sufficient punishment to discourage jockeys from similar decisions. We should hand back that power to them. They’ll make bad decisions I’m sure (they always did in the past), but you shouldn’t revoke a good rule because of occasional mis-application.
Do you think a football referee should dismiss a foul on the grounds that, well, he only lightly kicked his opponents ankle? Of course not. Although that’s not really a fair comparison in this case. It may be better to say would you allow a goal to stand when the scorer has elbowed the front teeth off a defender leaving him bloodied and dazed simply because the defender wouldn’t have stopped the scorer finding the net anyway?As the rules stand he kept the race; they are wrong and should be changed.
If you back a horse you are also backing the jockey; if the jockey lacks the foresight to avoid trouble in running, then tough 5h!t, he deserves to be disqualified. The punter will just have to apply an extra level of judgement and consider the likelihood that the jockey will get himself boxed in. Neither jockey nor punter should expect a bad rule to come to their rescue.
If a jockey knows with almost total certainty that a dangerous manoeuvre like the one under discussion will result in disqualification (+ fine and suspension),no matter how easily he wins, then he might just engage his brain a little earlier and try and avoid getting boxed in.
Not only would a much stricter rule reduce the likelihood of injury to other riders but it would actually encourage jockeys to exercise a higher level of skill. Trainers might eventually twig that they should employ jockeys less likely to get boxed in. All jockeys make errors: as the rules stand, they’re encouraged to try a potentially dangerous tactic to mitigate their misjudgement.I think it’s an interesting and enjoyable propgramme. This isn’t made to inform those who are already familiar with gambling – especially horse racing, it’s for the general public’s consumption, so will inevitably make some points which seem obvious to “Racing Forum” followers. So far, it hasn’t concerned itself too much with such things as the levy / bookmakers’ funding of racing and the like – maybe next week. But why should it bother? To the average Joe that’s not particularly interesting or entertaining.
The presenter/narrator isn’t trying to appeal to deeply knowledgable gamblers (why, they even called it the “Epsom Derby” – a race which true racing bods know does not exist!
).
That there are moral and social issues where gambling becomes an addiction hasn’t been skirted but didn’t need an in-depth psycho-social anaylsis. I felt they got it right. Show there’s a problem, leave it to others to moralise / make judgements.
I have no particular love of bookmakers but those who slam them and those who use them might be better employed aiming their sights at the National Lottery – now that really is robbery!Getting quicker? Maybe so (although the extent to which this could be put down to improved training methods / jockeyship / track management / timing accuracy) who can say?
When considering the breed, is it an improvement if the racehorse nowadays is faster but can’t take as much racing?
Was the average racehorse of the late 19th / early 20th century hardier ? Able to race more often and less susceptible to injuries? Have we sacrificed physical strength for speed? Maybe not; maybe a statistical analysis would show horses race just as often nowadays as 100+ years ago. Maybe even more often (which might be considered the more likely outcome given improvements in veterinary science.)
Comparisons across generations/centuries are fascinating but probably inconclusive.
Who was the greater racehorse Frankel or Sceptre?
Who is the greater racehorse, one who regualry runs to a mark of say a Timeform rating 130, or one who usually posts 120 but can, when all circumstances are favourable can reach 145?Yes, the racing’s enjoyable, but can I be alone in finding the ingratiating, fawning, knee-bending obseqiousness of many (most) of C4’s presenters off-putting? In fairness, it was just the same when covered by the BBC.
Every year we’re informed by some lick-spittle how the queen is a real expert on horses (Yes – we know, we don’t need reminding every day of the meeting, every year!!). Are the presenters after OBE’s or something?
Whilst I’d rather have a monarch than a political head-of-state, I could do without the brown-nosing, lick-spittle worship of royalty. It reaches truly vomit inducing levels at this meeting.
And don’t get me started on Gok Wan and the fasion coverage!!!There are many things that cannot be easily explained but such things, whilst not completely scotching the idea that there is no life after death, certainly DO NOT prove the existence of god / allah / thor/ zeus etc.
I’m sure many of you will have had a similar experience to the one I had a few months ago.
Maybe 3 or 4 times a week for the last 9 years I drive to an office in a nearby town and always park in the same, reserved spot. Yet this one morning, as I turned into the side road that led to the entrance to the car park, I just sensed that another car was parking in that space; I also pictured the particular person who was parking there; he’d never ever parked there before. I couldn’t actually see him parking- it’s behind a high wall, yet when I enetered the car park, there was this same guy, with a completely empty car park to choose from, parking in the place reserved for me. I didn’t jump out of my car and start saying it was a miracle and proof that Jesus (or Allah) loves me and exists and moves in mysterious ways and supplicate myself like some brain-dead half-wit. I don’t know why I sensed this event was unfolding before it did, but it sure didn’t prove that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth or that all lads should have their foreskins chopped off.
Does anyone who happens to believe in a god REALLY think that that god gives a t@ss whether you have a foreskin, or have sex in a particular position, or bend the knee in abject subjugation so many times a day or week or year? Can such a dark-age mindset be so deeply impregnated into modern day children that it can never be shaken off in adulthood – at least in a modern western society? It would seem for millions it cannot. Superstition (in the form of religion) should never be taught to children unless thay are also taught the Spinoza / Secularist views too.There’s a lot about the brain that we do not know; can’t explain. There’s a (perfectly understandable) desire to put the best interpretation (eg – hey there’s a god and a sunny, green-fielded heaven awaiting us – honest!!). But the probability is there’s a scientific, chemical, biological explanation. Sorry Grimes, you want a happy ending to your life (don’t we all?), but you’d be better off trawling the internet for Christopher Hitchens’ lectures on religion/philosophy/history than the NDE sources who jump to the “it must be god” assumption. Man up; accept there’s no benevolent god or eternal life and move out from the religious dark-age mindset that religion infuses on gullible, impressionable children who are too scared to shake it off when they’re old enough to think for themselves.
Well racegoers and punters can find out in advance what the going/weather is like and choose not to go or not to bet if they wish.
And if you own a horse who really relishes heavy ground why should it be denied a chance to perform on it?Ever since I started following the sport in the 60’s there have been complaints about how the sport was funded / governed. The moans today are not too dissimilar from those of yesteryear. Does anyone recall the Jack Logan column from the
Sporting Life
?
There are too many separate/discrete interested parties to ever be able to satisfy them all.
Owners, breeders, racegoers,trainers, stable-staff, punters, racecourses, bookmakers – trying to find a formula for racing that would satisfy all those makes solving the Middle East conflict seem like a doddle.
A quick rule-of-thumb as to the health of the sport is the number of horses in training. As that seems to be healthy then perhaps things can’t be too dire.
That said, what changes would I advocate? Well, to encourage future generations to actually GO to the racecourse to watch the sport, I’d redistribute many of the G1 flat races to courses outside the "golden triangle" of S.E. England and back that up with a big advertising campaign in the regions where the moved G1 races were now being run to stimulate interest in the events.
Also, there should be a Staying Handicapper’s "triple crown" with say a prize of £1million+ for any horse that could win the Chester Cup, Northumberland Plate and Cesarewitch within a twelvemonth. Should a horse ever be likely to win the first two, then the publicity that could be generated prior to the third leg might be enormous. It might also encourage the breeding of horses likely to stay a reasonable trip. I don’t think this treble has ever been acheived before (although I’ve not researched it) and the likelihhod of the pot having to be paid out could be covered by the 3 raccourses involved insuring/betting against it happening.It’s a dreadful programme and should be called "Sports PERSON of the year". Someone can have a great personality yet acheive nothing at sport.
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