Horseracing and the British 1919–39 (2025)

H orseracing has a powerful claim to be Britain's leading interwar sport. Cricket had its adherents; indeed, Jack Williams, the historian of interwar cricket, shows that its supporters presented it as the English 'national game'. 1 But British racegoers claimed that racing was 'our real national sport'. 2 On the basis of active participation, cricket was certainly superior with somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 playing each week in the early 1930s, although football had even more participants, with 37,000 clubs affiliated to the Football Association by 1937, and many others unaffiliated. In terms of spectatorship, First Division soccer attracted average crowds of over 30,000 in 1938-39, but cricket only got large crowds for test matches and a few important county matches, and these probably never exceeded 50,000 in a single day. Such figures were dwarfed by the crowds attracted to racing's 'national' events: the Grand National, the Derby, 'Royal' Ascot and the Doncaster St Leger. Even small racemeetings got higher crowds than most country cricket games. If a third criterion, interest in betting on the sport, was included, horseracing was supreme, although football pools and greyhound racing were also important. It was racing, not cricket or soccer, which really sold newspapers across Britain. Widespread public interest in results, longer traditions, its year-round season and largest crowds, all support racing's claims as Britain's leading national sport. Yet Ross McKibbin's critically well-received book on classes and cultures in England between 1918 and 1951 marginalised racing, arguing that: Horseracing was a national sport only by a somewhat skewed definition of 'national'. What made it 'national' was popular betting which linked a mass of working-class betters to a sport which was, in fact, aristocratic-plutocratic. Without betting it would have been no more national than 12-metre yachting or deer hunting … many had little interest in horses or horseracing as such. The middle class as a whole and the sober, serious working class were even more indifferent, even hostile. 3 was strongly anti-racing but its numbers, never large, were dropping, while the Church of England was divided and the Roman Catholic Church showed little opposition. Although Labour and Liberal activists and politicians were generally negative, racing was popular amongst many of their voters. The Civil Service, formerly opposed to betting, was split. The Home Office was opposed, but the Customs and Excise and Post Office departments both encouraged it as a useful source of revenue. As the popularity of betting and racing rose, debates over their meaning and importance faded. By the 1930s interest in and support for racing could be found right across the social scale. Increasingly it seemed exciting yet safe. Those worried about class revolution entered racing in large numbers because it had traditional and conservative features. This fascinating variation of views provided a starting point for this study. Popular images of the interwar years have focused largely on mass unemployment, the General Strike, increasing government control, or improved welfare and education. Yet the period also saw a major spurt of growth in leisure, recreation and sport. Mass unemployment and business depression coexisted with increased standards of living within some sectors and for some social groups, creating tensions and opportunities which heightened and transformed social attitudes to leisure. Britain was the originator of much modern sport, and in turn sport was a paradigm of British culture. Historians have been slow to develop an understanding of the way sports influenced and were influenced by the cultural, social and economic changes of the interwar years, a sporting era aptly described by Sir Derek Birley as 'confusing and sometimes contentious', with key continuities alongside a strengthening of professionalism and commercialism. 9 This ambiguity about the treatment of interwar leisure and sport as a whole has not been aided by the potentially problematic role of social class in sport. Sports were differentially presented as 'upper class', 'middle class' or 'working class' in different social contexts. Sport could both unite and divide. Professionalism and amateurism, gender roles, commercialism, and the extent to which physical violence or active support was acceptable were all issues of debate. Sport was popular throughout the class structure of much of Britain, although some of its manifestations were very unpopular with a minority. Class as culture is a complex manifestation, and its visions were socially constructed. The picture sports provided was highly complex, subtle and more nuanced than historians have admitted. For example, some at least amongst the middle classes were always attracted, for a variety of reasons, to more supposedly 'workingclass' sports, including those sports like racing associated with drink and gambling. This could be due to earlier working-class origins, the attractions of More importantly, it helps to move forward our understanding of the ways in which social class, gender, culture and leisure related to each other during this period. McKibbin argues that interwar Britain was characterised by a major divide between manual and non-manual workers, and that leisure, lifestyle and employment created subcultures which he calls 'working-class culture' and 'middle-class culture'. Yet at the same time he accepts that 'England had no common culture, rather a set of overlapping ones', although the sports played and watched were partially at least self-enclosed and determined by class. 11 The social theorist W. G. Runciman sees the cultural gulf between the two major social groups, the working and middle classes, as important in terms of selfascription, but he attaches more importance to employment conditions and self-ascribed status. 12 In leisure terms, Cunningham's picture of overlapping leisure cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is potentially useful, discriminating as it does an upper-class 'leisure' class, 'urban middleclass' and 'artisan' cultures, separate 'religious' and 'rationalist' 'reformist' leisure cultures, 'rural' and 'urban' popular culture forms. But Cunningham has been criticised both for an overly-simplistic picture of middle-class leisure, and for underestimating the extent to which cultural roles in particular leisure contexts were fluid. 13 It is becoming increasingly clear that while social distinctions were still expressed in class terms, social roles were increasingly dependent on leisure contexts. 14 A polarised dichotomous view of class might be embraced at work but not in wider leisure relationships. There might be strong consciousness of status divisions within a middle-class group, yet the group might present a solid face to the world. The spatial aspects of class, expressed in the more middle-class ethos of the suburbs, and the more working-class feel of terraced city streets or newly-built council estates, clearly had their effects. But there were manual labourers in the suburbs, and clerks in city streets, embracing or standing against locally dominant cultural practices like betting. Racing has often been seen as a sport which united the top and bottom of British society. Certainly in part, but only in part, racing was a sport which relied on the continued persistence of working-class deference, and a strong emphasis on rank and status within the sport, helping it sustain a clear rearguard defence of hierarchy. Runciman has presented powerful arguments that fundamental, societal-level changes in social, economic and political practice, and resultant shifting patterns of class, were a result of the First World War, arguing that notions of natural hierarchy were under attack from 1915 onwards. 15 Yet gentlemanliness, and its characteristic sporting amateurism, still complex geographical divisions between north and south, and between the middle classes in competing regions or cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. So in what ways were the middle classes involved in racing? Were they, as McKibbin has suggested, indifferent or even hostile? Not so. In fact the middle classes were increasingly supportive, taking part as spectators, owners, trainers and investors, occupying professional roles in racing's administration, placing bets or heading bookmaking firms. For some, with anti-working-class attitudes, often coupling snobbery and wish-fulfilment, it was the upper-class owners from which they took their model. Others were prepared sometimes to move across what were in reality by this period, highly porous divisions between classes, and between 'roughs' and 'respectables', to enjoy racing's liminal pleasures. Betting could be presented as essentially modernistic, and the reliable, known salary of the middle classes, stepped by age and promotion, allowed them to indulge betting, ownership or spectatorship as a leisure habit. Although the separation of suburban home and work sometimes confined sociability, people in many middle-class occupations, from industrialists to merchants, lawyers to shopkeepers, were able to attend nearby race meetings a few times a year. The bulk of racehorse owners were middle class. Others derived substantial incomes from economic activities which ministered to the needs of the racing world. In terms of academic racing historiography the interwar period has been addressed only en passant in histories covering longer time periods and emphasising economic rather that cultural features. Wray Vamplew's well-researched The Turf focused on regulation of the sport, changes in transport, betting and bookmakers, ownership and breeding, and the lives of jockeys and trainers, covering the last two hundred years. 20 It could profitably be read in conjunction with my recent culturally-oriented study of flat racing from 1790 to 1914. 21 The economic...