Nick Robinson - Horse Trader - Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings

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.’