Evil consequences, unfortunately, are by no means confined to these immediate victims. Testimony as to the corruption of the police, rendered possible by the large profits of the bookmakers, and the great proportion of defaulting Post Office employees owing their ruin to the betting system, seriously supplemented the main evidence. And the inquiries since set on foot at New Scotland Yard with regard to the Metropolitan Police give a pointed significance to the revelations made. The gigantic monetary interest of the Post Office in the betting system appears in one item of the evidence of Mr. Lamb, the secretary, who said that in the previous September the department had sent 82 telegraphists to the Doncaster race meeting, who dealt with 30,000 private telegrams of persons attending the races, besides 184,000 words of racing news for the press.
Betting used to be chiefly confined to the large centres of population, but almost every town and village is now infected. A Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons, in joining the society organised to deal with the evil, stated that his doing so was owing to finding that it had penetrated to the rustic neighbourhood adjoining his Devonshire home. The strange increase in village telegrams on race days has become very noticeable, and charges of tampering with messages to cheat bookmakers are becoming quite common. Such facts, and others, incline those who have studied the subject to consider that the estimate adopted by Sir Robert Giffen at the last meeting of the British Association, in the Economic Science Section, during a discussion on the nation’s wealth, of £5,000,000 per annum as going into the pockets of bookmakers, is a very conservative one.
As to the condition of the race-courses themselves, from the ruffianism of the professional betting men and their hangers-on, interesting revelations were made before the close of the nineteenth century by the efforts of one of the great London daily newspapers. It is not needful to quote the comments drawn forth by the journals friendly to reform, as those in favour of the institution of the Turf are sufficiently pungent. A few of these will suffice. Thus The Field, August 20, 1898:—
Those unacquainted with race-courses must stand aghast as they read the extraordinary tale of misdoing that is unfolded day by day.... A body of miscreants who are prepared to stop at nothing in the way of violence so long as they attain their object, and care not the least if they leave their victim injured for life, as is sometimes the case. The scum that formerly attended the prize-ring has turned its attention to the most promising substitute.... It depends entirely upon the efficiency and vigilance of the management and those it employs by way of guardians, whether or not the rings are invaded by those who have only to be numerically strong enough to do as they please with the respectable element.
The meeting at Epsom is then criticised, but we must devote our little space to the following, also from The Field:—
The goings-on at Brighton, both on the course and in the town, have reached such a pitch that we have discontinued sending a representative to report the racing. Sad to tell, almost as much justification for such a course exists in connection with Goodwood. This has been the happy hunting-ground of the thief for very many years, but we doubt if matters ever reached the pitch they did this year, the gangs of pickpockets working with such impunity that an inoffensive visitor was bludgeoned on the head actually in the very entrance to Tattersall’s ring. Small wonder, then, when an act like this can be fearlessly perpetrated at an aristocratic gathering like Goodwood, that it should be repeated elsewhere.
Here is an extract from one of the letters which appeared at the time:—
Words fail to convey any idea of the ruffianism, robbers, and welshing which took place at the so-called Grand Stand at Alexandra Park on Saturday last. There were from two to three hundred organised professional welshers, thieves, and bullies, with few exceptions well known to the officials and police and even to an occasional race-goer like myself. Woe to the unfortunate individual who insisted on the payment of a bet—a split skull dealt from behind, a scuffle, and robbery. I have no hesitation in saying that the life of every man and woman in that enclosure was absolutely at the mercy of this organised and desperate gang, and a feeling of fear paralysed the stoutest of us.
There were scores of such public communications. One racing correspondent of a large provincial paper stated that he should never think of going to the course without a revolver in his pocket. Of course the so-called sporting and publicans’ papers tried to make out that these letters were not genuine, or were exaggerated, but without exception they bear on their face evidence of their reality. The writer of these lines, however, ascertained the fact of their genuineness from the editor who published them in one of the largest and oldest of our daily newspapers, which has been by no means otherwise conspicuous in this phase of social reform. We may be allowed to quote the following reflections, which witness to the existence of this ruffianly condition of the Turf, from Mr. George Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Rycroft (1903), pp. 43-44:—
To-day’s newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a spring horse-race. The sight of it fills me with loathing. It brings to my mind that placard I saw at a station in Surrey a year or two ago, advertising certain races in the neighbourhood. Here is the poster as I copied it into my notebook:—