Flat Racing and British Society, 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History (review)

In recent years Mike Huggins has become a prolific writer on aspects of British popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His articles on the social history of sport, gambling, holidaymaking and related themes have carved out a niche for him as a distinctive voice, with a particularly telling concern to reassess the nature and varieties of middle-class culture through the study of neglected occupational groups and social circumstances. Above all, he has developed a mission to challenge the still-predominant stereotypes of middle-class respectability, pointing up the propensity of middle-class men (especially but not exclusively young, single ones) to become involved in gambling and blood sports, to mix across the porous divisions between classes and definitions of ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’, and even to derive substantial incomes from ministering to the leisure economy which revolved around such activities. This book is derived from his Lancaster University doctoral thesis, in which I have to declare an interest as a supervisor; but it incorporates a great deal of subsequent work, and I am happy to minimize my own role in the outcome, whose originality, fluency and capacity for challenging and even overturning established shibboleths derives from the virtues of author rather than ostensible mentor.

Racing on the flat is the summer incarnation of horse-racing in England, focused on the small Suffolk town of Newmarket (so eponymous that a children’s horse-racing game is named after it) whose economy is dominated by racing stables and regular race-meetings, but with famous races and meetings constituting high points in the social calendar all over the country, and Royal Ascot bringing aristocrats, plutocrats, a parade of spectacular millinery and a buzz of cork-popping tailgate parties to the Berkshire racecourse of that name at midsummer. It is not the only incarnation of horse-racing: in winter (mainly) there are hurdle races, steeplechases over high fences and hedges, complete with water hazards, to replicate the obstacles of the hunting field in enclosed English countryside, and point-to-points run in association with local fox-hunts; but it is ‘the Flat’ that carries the most ostentatious aristocratic patronage, takes the title ‘the sport of kings’, and at the same time commands a remarkable level of popular interest and affection, with star jockeys acquiring personal followings and great horses taking on celebrity status. In the 1930s, for example, express locomotives of the London and North Eastern Railway were named after racehorses, presumably in the expectation of a positive recognition factor from travellers. Celebrity status can also be accorded to steeplechasers, with Red Rum, for example, becoming a much-feted character in his retirement; but the summer ‘classics’ on the flat tower over the horse-racing scene. The sport’s popularity is sustained by a betting industry, illegal in most of its incarnations until 1961, which draws in a huge working-class following and even in early Victorian times, and before most of the punters could hope to attend an actual meeting, had become firmly ensconced in urban popular culture. Huggins has tackled an important subject; and he makes the most of it.

There was already a useful historiography. Vamplew’s The Turf (1976) was a valuable introductory economic history which had more to say about transport, the regulation of the sport, investment patterns and betting than about the social dimensions of racing; and there are several complementary works on betting and bookmakers, with particular attention to the problems raised by the illegal popularity of street and workplace betting and bookmaking. Books and articles by Chinn, Clapson, Dixon, Itzkovitz and Munting (who is also the historian of racing ‘over the jumps’) stand out here. Huggins has contributed to this literature, but this book not only pulls the existing work into a coherent analysis: it sets a whole new agenda, based on extensive and pertinacious research in primary sources in twenty local and...