Racing
Strawberries
Richard Ingrams
Visiting Newbury Races last week would make, 1 assumed, a welcome change from watching the television and what's more, it would be in colour. All the same I agreed to write about it only on condition that 'Colonel Mad' the pseudonym of a compulsive gambler, drinker and Soho layabout who writes the 'Sporting Life' column in Private Eye would agree to accompany me to the course. I felt I wanted some professional Assistance if I was to undertake the task. The non-racing man like me always feels a bit of an outsider at these gatherings, at least in the Members' Enclosure. You need not only the right kit binoculars and one of
those soft hats with a dent in it, but also a particular kind of mottled complexion and sunken jaw, produced, I imagine by long years of watching fancied horses lose and subsequent over-drinking.
The gloomy air of most of the habitués is what lets racing down. Everything else at Newbury was splendid. The course stretching along the Vale of the Kennet was looking its best in the sunshine, the horses were sleek and elegant, the jockeys, including the wrinkled and inscrutable Lester Piggott, resplendent in their garish outfits. Only the people looked a bit strained and bleak. In this atmosphere it was hard to sustain an air of gaiety and when one member of my party, the ebullient Mrs Tilehurst, shouted with joy after winning at least a fiver on the first race she got a few nasty looks from the men with the sunken jaws. Some of them had won too, but it doesn't do to show it.
The really hardened cases don't actually watch the races at all but sit morosely in various bars behind the stands. I 'don't know if it's the same at other places, but none of the bars at Newbury face the course. To the outsider this seems odd as it would be nice to watch the races out of the window, drink in hand, as if you were in the Lords tavern. The placing of the bars seems to confirm the fact that the last thing racegoers want to do is watch races.
'Colonel Mad' was not in any of these darkened drinking holes but I met the next best thing in the burly shape of Charles Benson, alias 'The Scout' of the Daily Express, a man recently described in Private Eye as a 'fat bankrupt tipster'. He politely refrained from beating me up and said it was the first accurate thing that the Eye had ever said about him. At the time of our meeting I was very pro-Scout, as alone of all the racing hacks he had tipped He Loves Me to win the Hungerford Stakes. It was therefore on his advice that I backed Apple Peel and Master Cutter in the following two races, both of which were beaten, admittedly by a whisker if that is an appropriate term. At this point I decided to abandon the Benson tipping service and, acting on a personal whim, put three pounds on St. Cyr which promptly won. Unfortunately I then reverted to Benson and Lady Lindsay which was beaten by several other horses including the winner Court Barns.
Upstairs in a deserted restaurant a group of trainers and breeders were avidly watching Boycott on the television over a litter of sandwiches and champagne bottles. There was still no sign of the Colonel. I decided afterwards that his absence had been a good thing. A man called Danny Mellen gave me a very dirty look when I told him I was the editor of Private Eye. And the Colonel is, I learned, getting the press in general a bad name. One poor hack rang up a local trainer recently to make an innocent enquiry only to be told 'Don't you go calling me an 'alcoholic strawberry.' That wasn't me, sir, that was Private Eye,' replied the hack indignantly. 'You're all the same you lot,' .spluttered the alleged strawberry illogically.
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