Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings

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Prologue: The Historic Blackballing of Lord Soames (#ulink_73bb8db6-5437-575d-aac6-5c33e8d52856)

It was always tense in The Rooms when they were proposing to elect a statesman to membership. Actually, it was always tense in The Rooms whomever they were proposing to elect to membership. But a statesman created a special feeling of apprehension. Such an event happened only every fifty years or so, because, by and large, the Jockey Club did not see statesmen as the right calibre of chap. Most of them had depressingly brilliant intellects coupled with dazzling charm and tact. Or, put in the more ducal vernacular of the Club, they were too clever by half, ‘too smarmy’.

The Earl of Rosebery, during his Lordship’s tenure as Prime Minister of England, had of course been a member of the Club back in 1894 when his colt Ladas had won the Derby at Epsom. However, having been a member since the age of twenty-two, the touchy business of electing a statesman had never really applied.

The Jockey Club had admitted an Under-Secretary of State for War, Earl Cadogan, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the knowledge that he was much preoccupied with the unrest along India’s north-west frontier. The same applied, in smaller measure, to the Marquis of Londonderry and the Earl of Zetland in the 1880s when they were appointed as successive Lords-Lieutenants of Ireland. Different frontier, similar unrest among the natives and one or two furrowed brows in the Club. Lord Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer and owner of an Oaks winner in 1889, had had to be elected. And they could not quite avoid accepting his often fractious son Sir Winston, who won the Jockey Club Cup in 1950 with his stout-hearted grey Colonist II shortly before becoming Prime Minister for the second time.

Of course the greatest of all England’s horse-racing monarchs, King Edward VII, was a member. He would have to be included as a statesman – Emperor of India and Ruler of the Lands Beyond the Seas and all that – but like Rosebery he had not really been considered as such when proposed for membership. Elected at twenty-three, he already owned two Derby winners (Persimmon and Minoru) and, during his frequent stays in Newmarket, he usually took the Jockey Club Rooms, in a private apartment with a private entrance – a discreet little throughway not entirely unfamiliar to the occasional visiting mistress. Upon the death of his mother Queen Victoria in 1901, Edward ascended the throne a few months off his sixtieth birthday in 1901 and by this time he assuredly was ‘one of us’.

These very few apart, then, the Jockey Club had stuck for the past two hundred years to its own kind: land-owning horsemen who understood who was to be trusted and who was not. But today, 3 May 1967, in the hours following the running of the first English classic of the season, the 2000 Guineas, on nearby Newmarket Heath, there was an unmistakable apprehension in the Rooms. Before them this evening was written the name of Arthur Christopher John Soames, former Secretary of State for War, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and a Coldstream Guards officer of the highest quality who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre from a grateful, liberated French nation. He was also the son-in-law of the recently deceased member Sir Winston Churchill.

The eighty-five-year-old Earl of Rosebery, son of the nineteenth-century PM, was worried. The Club employed a legendary, not to mention brutal, ‘blackballing’ system, which ended would-be members’ aspirations with the suddenness of a guillotine. The blackballing box is a tall shiny, wooden case, with a round, tube-like aperture close to the top in which the forearm is placed. The ball can be dropped to either side: left in the ‘YES’ slot, right into the ‘NO’ slot. One ball, dropped in the ‘NO’ slot, by any member, was all it took. No one would ever know precisely who had dropped it in. Far less, why it had been dropped in.

Lord Rosebery did not like it. He and the industrialist Sir Foster Robinson had argued about the system just a couple of years previously. Rosebery believed it was a ‘damned bad idea’ because news of a blackballing of someone important would one day get out and there would be hell to pay in the press. With much apprehension, he envisaged ‘the kind of thing Cardigan had to put up with after the “Black Bottle” incident in the officers’ mess of his personal regiment of Hussars’. In the case of Mr Soames the Club had sent letters to all members sounding out the strength of feeling towards his election, conscientiously heading off the possibility of an unseemly blackballing. Indeed no member had intimated even a dislike of the rotund bon vivant Christopher Soames, far less an intention to throw him out of the Club before he was even elected. But Lord Rosebery still did not like it.

He walked slowly into the Jockey Club Rooms, leaning on his walking stick owing to a slight touch of gout that day. The master of the massive castellated Buckinghamshire manor of Mentmore, with its £7 million collection of French furniture and art, breeder of two Derby winners and a Steward as long ago as 1929, was filled with misgivings.

One by one, as the sun slipped below the long western horizon of Newmarket Heath, his fellow members arrived. There was the Chairman of the meeting, the formidable figure of the former Coldstream Guards Major General, Sir Randle ‘Gerry’ Feilden, future High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. There was the Duke of Devonshire, owner of the greatest house in England, Chatsworth, together with fifty-six thousand acres of Derbyshire. There was Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan Howard, the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England, owner of the lovely Arundel Castle and twenty-five thousand acres of Sussex. There was Lord Tryon, Keeper of the Privy Purse, Treasurer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; the Earl of Halifax, son of Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, a former Captain in the Royal Horse Guards, Master of Foxhounds, married to Lord Rosebery’s niece; and the fabulously wealthy Jakie Astor, owner of Hatley Park in Bedfordshire, son of Viscount ‘Waldorf’ Astor and the legendary Nancy Lady Astor, Britain’s first female Member of Parliament.

Quietly reading The Times in the Coffee Room sat The Hon. Major General Sir Harold Wernher, owner of the great English mansion of Luton Hoo, with its four thousand surrounding acres, where the Queen spent her honeymoon. (Sir Harold’s wife, the fabled Lady Zia Wernher, was the Queen’s godmother and daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia, first cousin of Czar Nicholas. Lord Rosebery thought she would make a damned good Empress of All the Russias if they ever got fed up with those Bolsheviks …) Lord Howard de Walden (proprietor of three thousand acres and a sizeable portion of central London) was chatting to the wealthiest of all the Scottish whisky heirs, Major Sir Reginald Macdonald-Buchanan, Chairman of Distillers; the eighteenth Earl of Derby, with twenty-two thousand acres of Lancashire, had slipped in after the short drive from his Newmarket home, Stanley House, and was enjoying a quiet drink with the old Cavalry officer Lord Willoughby de Broke, the twentieth Baron, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire. This was a rather poetic duo, both the Derby and the Willoughby titles had been awarded by King Henry VII after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Both of the first Lords had fought against King Richard III with enormous courage, and here we were, five hundred years later, with Derby and Willoughby still standing, in a sense, shoulder to shoulder.

They all made their way along to the Committee Room, past the bust of the most fearsome Jockey Club president of all, that of Admiral Henry John Rous who completely dominated the English Turf from 1846 until his death in 1877. The Admiral’s creed had been well known: ‘I do not believe in heavy gambling, and any member of this club who wins more than £50,000 on a horse should be expelled.’ Even in 1967 some of the members were a bit reticent to look the white stone bust directly into its dead, but still withering, eye. Most of the thirty or so members seated themselves around the main table with the Chairman. But the great, venerable names of the Jockey Club, such as Rosebery, Derby, Astor and Norfolk, sat in their big personal chairs strategically set around the room.

‘My Lords and Gentlemen,’ said Sir Randle, ‘there is one candidate for the Jockey Club: Mr Christopher Soames, proposed by Mr Blackwell, and seconded by Mr Astor.’ At this point the formal ballot was taken. The official Jockey Club ‘servants’ from the old racing firm of Weatherbys carried round to each member the polished wooden blackballing box. Each one of these extraordinarily influential men, who could be said to own a lion’s share of England rather than merely run it, placed his hand into the ballot box. The little wooden balls rattled into the slot which signified ‘YES’ to Mr Soames. Well, all but one. Whether misfired or maliciously misdirected, a solitary ball landed in the ‘NO’ slot. Sir Randle hesitated for a few moments before he said flatly, and without declaring the actual number of ‘blackballs’, ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, Mr Soames is not elected.’

The room went stone silent, every member, except perhaps for one, embarrassed at what they had somehow managed to achieve. ‘My God!’ whispered Sir Harold Wernher. ‘Someone’s blackballed Winston’s son-in-law.’ But the Major General recovered swiftly and said nothing of the blackballing. In a murderously contrived anti-climax, he declared, ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, the minutes of the last meeting have been circulated. Can I sign them as the correct record?’

A few voices muttered assent and Sir Randle reached for his fountain pen. But the sixth Earl of Rosebery, godson of His Late Majesty (and distinguished former member) King Edward VII, was on his feet, and he was absolutely furious. His words came out in growling torrent.

‘May I say something on that?’ he said. ‘The blackballing, I mean, not the damned minutes. We have all had confidential letters round and presumably you, sir, have read all those replies and come to the conclusion that the Club thought this was an excellent candidate for the Club. Well, if these letters go out … and you yourself read them, and feel a man should be elected, and he is then not elected … well, it does not seem to me there is much good going on this way … not if you are trying to get members into the Club.’

‘I could not agree more, Lord Rosebery,’ replied the Major General.

By now there was an air of great consternation in the Committee Room. The Duke of Devonshire, a former Commonwealth Minister of State in his Uncle Harold’s Government, was mentioning that he was quite sure that his former Tory Party colleague Christopher Soames was to become Britain’s next ambassador to Paris, which would probably carry with it a peerage.

The Duke of Norfolk, sitting forward at the table with his natural magisterial authority, observed that as a result of ‘this damned blackballing’ there were certain people he was not absolutely dying to encounter. He knew beyond all doubt that trouble involving a statesman is apt to be ten times more awkward than that involving anyone else. As seconder to Mr Soames’s candidature, Jakie Astor, himself a former Member of Parliament, was very, very angry.

The previous year’s Senior Steward Tom Blackwell, Brigade Major to the 5th Guards Armoured Division in the Second World War, was now on his feet. It was this former Coldstream Guards officer who had proposed Mr Soames in the first place. He also was not pleased. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I support every word Lord Rosebery said. It is pointless going on with this. We would not have put Christopher Soames up if we had not understood that people approved. If they have changed their minds at the last minute, they might have let the Senior Steward know.’

Major General Feilden declared helplessly, ‘What Mr Blackwell says is absolutely correct. I advised them there was no doubt Mr Soames would be elected to the Club. It must be that people have changed their minds … They should have let me know, I think. My Lords and Gentlemen, do I take it that the Club wants to go back to the original method of election?’

‘The original what?’ asked Lord Rosebery grumpily.

‘The old method of election,’ said the Major General.

‘Oh, yes, that,’ replied his Lordship. ‘We’d better get a sub-committee or something to go into it, rather like they did after the First War. They’d better present it to the Club at the Summer Meeting. Because if it goes on like this people will refuse to be put up for Membership.’

‘And I’, stated the still-irritated Earl Marshal of England, ‘am quite prepared to second Lord Rosebery’s suggestion.’

‘Would that be the wish of the Club?’ asked Sir Randle. The members muttered ‘Agreed’, with each man glancing sideways to see if there was a dissenting voice – perhaps belonging to the men who had embarrassed them all so utterly by ‘blackballing’ the Rt. Hon. Christopher Soames.

The meeting droned on for another hour, discussing a modernization plan for the racecourse at Newmarket. But nobody’s heart was really in it. This packed formal gathering of the great, the landed, the titled and the highest officer classes, was nervous. ‘Damned nervous’, in the words of Tom Blackwell. ‘Because this is not going to reflect at all well on us – and it’s made a damned sight worse because even we do not know who blackballed Soames. We should have listened to Harry Rosebery two years ago and scrapped the blackballing system once and for all.’

The Duke of Norfolk, was widely reputed to be an organizational genius, having masterminded the arrangements for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and managed an England Cricket Tour of Australia. Now, as he walked slowly back to the more comfortable morning room, there gathered about him a group of fellow members seeking not only comfort from his great wisdom, but also some guidance as to how to explain the aberration which had just taken place, should the news become public.

Lord Rosebery was not among them. Still furious, he stumped out of the Jockey Club Rooms and headed for his car, uttering only the words: ‘Absolutely ridiculous. Like some bloody secret society. This has to stop …’ Lord Rosebery, who in his prime was properly recognized as a truly formidable orator and a man of serious intellectual power, was oblivious to the fact that, on this black night, the blackball had been deliberately dropped by one of his closest colleagues.

Back in the morning room, Andrew Devonshire was at the Duke of Norfolk’s side, as were John Derby, Jakie Astor, Gerry Feilden, Jocelyn Hambro, Tom Blackwell, and Major General Sir George Burns, who privately thought someone might have merely ‘got a bit muddled up’ and blackballed Soames by sheer carelessness. His Grace did not share this view.

They all stood beneath George Stubbs’s near-priceless oil of the immortal racehorse Eclipse, painted outside the old ‘rubbing house’ on the nearby heath in the less stressful times of the late eighteenth century. ‘Well,’ said Bernard, sipping boldly from a large tumbler of J&B Scotch and soda, ‘this is a real bugger’s muddle. There is someone here with a clear feeling against Christopher Soames. We’ll meet again tomorrow morning and I think we can count on Harry Rosebery to put forward a proposal which will at least prevent this happening again. For the moment I suggest we say nothing, but perhaps make it clear to Mr Soames that such a ‘technicality’ will not happen again, and that he may look forward to becoming a full member at the very next opportunity.’

There was no argument with such a sure-footed course of action, but the members with strong Tory Party connections – Devonshire, obviously, Astor (close friend of the next Prime Minister Edward Heath), and Hambro (friend of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling) – were bitterly unhappy. No less so was Gerry Feilden who had chaired this disastrous meeting.

On the Newmarket racecourse that afternoon, the day had held such promise. Royal Palace, a grand-looking bright bay colt owned by Jockey Club member Jim Joel, had won the first English classic, the 2000 Guineas, without even a warm-up race as a three-year-old. In a dramatic, driving finish he had held off the French challenger Taj Dewan by a short head. The joy that always pervades the Jockey Club Room at Newmarket racecourse when an English classic race is won by a member was both sincere and sportsmanlike. Mr Joel, heir to a gigantic South African diamond fortune, was a popular owner-breeder, and his colt had carried a few sizeable wagers on behalf of several of the members. Three hours ago everything had seemed very pukka. And now this … The possibility of open, hostile, national ridicule loomed tiresomely upon the horizon.

As Lord Rosebery had gruffly phrased it: ‘This has to stop.’

At II o’clock the following morning, they all gathered once more at the Jockey Club Rooms in Newmarket High Street. A couple of glasses of port and a good night’s sleep had done precisely nothing for his Lordship’s mood. Harry Rosebery was still furious. ‘Good morning, m’lord,’ a member of staff greeted him as he walked through the main door.

‘I can think, offhand, of nothing, absolutely nothing’, he replied, ‘that is good, or even remotely acceptable about this particular morning.’

He walked steadily along the corridor to find the Senior Steward. They spoke for several minutes together and then joined the meeting in the Committee Room. Above the fireplace hung another magnificent oil by George Stubbs, which was, in fact, shortly to be removed in favour of a large portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, whose son-in-law the Club had just irrevocably humiliated. Major General Feilden called the members to order, which was not a difficult task. This was a very subdued gathering, since, even now, no one had the slightest idea which members had perpetrated the blackballing. The High Tory group were still extremely embarrassed and there was a dignified silence from them.

But there was a deafening silence from the corner occupied by one of the most popular sportsmen in England, the twentieth Baron Willoughby de Broke. For it was he who had blackballed Christopher Soames. Lord Willoughby, with the deadly subversiveness the system encouraged, had registered a secret and decisive protest to the proposed membership.

Major General Feilden proceeded. ‘My Lords and Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘Lord Rosebery has given notice to the Stewards that he wants to raise a point before we get to the main agenda.’

There was again silence as the Club’s 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.