End of trackside bookies?
NEW gambling rules would make life so complicated for bookies that race courses could close.
This is the warning from Ben Keith, owner of Star Sports bookmakers, as the Government consults on controversial proposals from the Gambling Commission.
One suggestion is that gamblers’ losses could be capped at £100 a month in a bid to combat addiction. However, this has prompted a political backlash in Parliament.
And Mr Keith said: “I would have to check where the money is from, if the money is straight, are they having too many bets and feeling OK. I will be expected to be a banker, money laundering expert, psychologist... I’m a bookie but would have to do all these other jobs in between.” He said the new rules were aimed at regulating the giant betting companies which, he claims, are more interested in pushing punters on to playing online casino games than making sports bets on the horses, dogs or football.
He said online gambling has a different pace, designed to encourage people to bet far more.
But Mr Keith warned that smaller race courses, which “already only run on air”, would be forced to close if the revenue from gambling dries up.
He said the commission should instead look at “rebelling against automation”, as online gambling supports very few jobs.
He said: “Horse racing has bets, horse trainers, stable laddies, jockeys, people who serve food – it’s a community. If you start attacking betting on horses, that vindictiveness attacks not just a community but the fabric of our society.”
He added that lockdown had driven people to online gambling and a return to going to the horses or dogs would be “healthier”.
Some MPS, including Conservative Shipley MP Philip Davies, have described the Gambling Commission suggestions as “idiotic”. He said: “It’s clear the only people who do not understand gambling are the Gambling Commission.”
He said having to hand over banking details to make a bet of more than £100 would be an invasion of privacy. He added: “This is a question of personal responsibility and freedom.”
WHEN the end came, nobody even asked Richard Vaughan to give his uniform back.
It had been two and a half years since he had first worn it.
Back in November 1960, the 22-year-old accountant from Bromley embarked on a journey that had by that point become extremely familiar to more than two million British males since the end of the Second World War – he was conscripted for peacetime National Service.
“I didn’t come across many who said, ‘If I wasn’t in here I could be this, that or the other’,” Vaughan later said. “That didn’t come into it. Most of our guys said, ‘Well we’re lumbered, we’ve got to make the best of it – let’s enjoy it as best as we can’.”
Like so many men, Vaughan completed his conscription in Germany. After flying back to Gatwick in 1963, he was interviewed on TV in his newfound role as “the last serviceman”.
Historian Richard Vinen, author of A Generation In Uniform, an immense book on National Service, said it was the end of an era for the institution.
It seems National Service is looked back upon by those who survived it with extremes of emotion – pride, anger and hatred.
Introduced in 1948, the same year as the NHS, 80 per cent of British men who reached 18 in the early 1950s were forced to abandon life and join the Army, Air Force or, more rarely, the Navy for up to two years. Those men included Michael Caine,
David Bailey, Bob Monkhouse, Michael Aspel, Don Mccullin, Des O’connor and David Lodge.
“National Service didn’t end when the Second World War came to an end,” says Helen Parr, professor of history at the University of Keele. “The British were quite stretched at the end of the war. There was a real sense that the Soviet Union was going to pose the next great threat and Britain needed the manpower.”
Young men from across the class system were conscripted to serve. But few survivors believe National Service did anything to improve understanding or break down the rigid social hierarchy.
“People say National Service was very good at letting you learn how the other half lived. I have to say nuts to that,” said Tony Howard, an infantry regiment officer during postwar conscription, in a BBC interview he gave in the 1990s.
“My experience was everyone who was considered potential leader material was, after a single week, plucked out, taken to another depot and put together.
“There was a kind of social apartheid inflicted from the very beginning. The welleducated middle classes would become officers and the working
classes were to stay in the ranks. If anything, the Army actually reinforced the barriers of society.”
Legendary photographer David Bailey found the class divide even more baffling.
He noted: “It was the first time I’d really experienced the class system as in the East End there was only one class, us, and there was no snobbery.
“When I got in the Air Force I found there was a different size toilet for me, for sergeants and for officers. I was
kind of shocked that you weren’t allowed to talk to officers’ daughters.”
Ten weeks of basic training, where conscripts were “sheared like sheep” and given a “total annihilation of personality”, according to Michael Aspel, were followed for some by exposure to real danger in conflict zones in Malaya, Korea and Palestine.
Many men grateful to be too young to serve in the Second World War were dispatched to far-flung corners of the world, to fight in battles erupting across Britain’s fast vanishing empire.
Many more were stationed to Germany, waiting for a Soviet invasion that never materialised.
More than 60 years on from the last servicemen being called up, the institution is a relic that is still invoked, particularly in arguments about the nation’s youth.
Did we, as a nation, learn anything at all from National Service? And is it feasible, or even desirable, to see its return in modern Britain, particularly as we rebuild after the pandemic?
“They didn’t keep National Service to give the nation’s youth something to do or to improve their morals,” says Professor Parr. “They needed manpower to fight in overseas wars.”
Interestingly, despite the links between Conservatism and the idea of recalling National Service, it was a Tory government that abolished the scheme in 1960, with ministers like Ian Macleod openly stating their hatred of a system that took skilled men away from manufacturing and managerial jobs in the UK.
The reduction of the Armed Forces and the use of more sophisticated weapons requiring less manpower were the real reasons service was stopped.
So, with a series of gentle thuds rather than one loud bang, it was permanently put to sleep.
And as one anonymous veteran once said: “They couldn’t go into the labour exchange and say, ‘I’ve just come back from Malaya and I’m good with a gun, is there anybody you want killing?’ They were mostly uneducated guys who went back to two up-two downs with outside toilets and their packets of Players Medium, a couple of pints of black and tan and a girl if he was lucky. That’s all they came back to.”
● National Service: A Generation In Uniform, by Richard Vinen, is published by Penguin (Paperback £10.99)
WATER chiefs have been accused of “virtue signalling” by giving the go-ahead to a dramatic mini-forest instead of planting hedges.
Conservationists say the Japanese Miyawaki-style planting of 1,200 trees close together to drastically increase carbon capture and cut pollution will do more harm than good.
The project in Highgate Village, north London, home to numerous celebrities including Sting and the late George Michael, has left some locals “utterly bewildered”.
They accused Thames Water of pandering to the “trendy ideas” of the Dreams for Trees charity, despite warning them that the local soil would not be able to support the dense forest of birch, holly, hazel, dogwood and bird cherry trees.
Now the Highgate Society, which claimed it had an agreement with Thames Water to introduce new sustainable hedges on the banks of Highgate reservoir instead, is hoping to see the scheme dropped.
Michael Hammerson, who chairs the society’s planning committee, said: “Thames Water has fallen prey to wanting to appear to be doing the right thing instead of actually doing the right thing. It rather looks like
virtue signalling, I’m afraid. We are utterly bewildered by this decision.
“What we were proposing is ecologically more appropriate because the soil will not support that number of trees. They will not survive on that subsoil in a dry area with the dry summers we are having.
“All that is needed are a few more trees and more hedges, which is in keeping with the local environment and is sustainable.”
Mr Hammerson, a retired chartered surveyor, archaeologist and planning consultant, has written two books on the history of the area.
He said the society has spent 10 years trying to persuade Thames
Water that land around the 4.5 million-litre reservoir should be used to improve biodiversity.
He said members met a Thames Water ecologist 18 months ago and reached an agreement that they would manage it as a wild meadow with hedgerows and trees.
Thames Water said it bought the trees jointly with a local business and gave the go-ahead to the scheme by the local charity Dreams For Trees after considering a number of ideas for the reservoir.
It also denied any formal agreement had been made with Highgate Society. A Thames Water spokesman said: “It is disappointing when someone is unhappy with plans to improve sites but the project has received overwhelming support.
“On this project we are working with a charity who share our passion for increasing biodiversity, reducing pollution and capturing carbon.
“We have a long history of managing the landscaping of our reservoir sites and employ experienced ecologists to ensure any plants and trees are suitable for each site.”
Dreams for Trees founder Ben Cooper said he had seen the dense Miyawaki technique used in French and Belgian cities.
The mini-forest approach was pioneered by botanist Akira Miyawaki, now 93, who specialises in restoring natural vegetation on degraded land.
Mr Cooper said it could capture up to six times more carbon than other planting. He added: “There is a lot of pollution and congestion in the village and this will help. The response has been positive – people want to be involved.”
But Mr Hammerson said: “Not only do we believe Thames Water have got this wrong, they didn’t have the courtesy to tell us they were going to do it even when we were talking to them about how to clean up the local air.”
Boris Johnson has promised to more than double tree planting in the UK to 30,000 hectares a year by 2025 to help absorb carbon.
IT WAS 2018 (doesn’t that seem like a long time ago?) when all the stars turned up at the Golden Globe awards wearing black in support of the Metoo movement. So very noble of them.
This year, in a mostly virtual ceremony because of the pandemic, a marvellous what-the-hell spirit took over. The ceremony itself was an embarrassing car crash as these streamed events tend to be.
But at long ruddy last some of the celebs opted to have some fun. Rosamund Pike, above, wore a crazy red dress with bovver boots, and Jane Fonda, right, arrived in an old white trouser suit she’d picked from her wardrobe. Both looked fabulous.
In fact everyone looked fabulous, wearing their clothes rather than being worn by them.
IT’S TIME to ask yourself – have I ever been photographed sitting on a dead horse? Think carefully before you answer. Could you have absentmindedly sat on one while taking a phone call as trainer Gordon Elliott did? After all people on mobile phones do stupid things. They walk into bollards. They crash cars. They shout on trains. But sit on a dead horse? Perhaps not.
The photographic evidence showing Elliott sitting on the horse which had died of a heart attack emerged last week. Then another picture appeared of a jockey sitting on a dead horse. Curiouser and curiouser. The world of racing may never recover from this rolling PR disaster. Elliott, a three-time Grand National-winning trainer, described his action as a “moment of madness” and says he is prepared for whatever punishment comes his way.
To date he has been temporarily banned from British races and the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board has begun an investigation.
I’ve no interest in racing. I know horses are said to love it but that they sometimes die of heart attacks under a jockey. If they break a leg then I know they usually have to be put down. Sometimes I watch the Grand
National and put my hands over my eyes when a horse falls at a fence. It seems a cruel and dangerous race but then I may have put a few quid on. So who am
I to judge?
But the sight of a beautiful racehorse, dead, with a fat man sitting on it taking a phone call, is revolting. I think we can all agree on that.
It’s as bad as one of those pictures of a biggame hunter with a foot on a lion’s head.
The champion jump jockey Peter Scudamore said: “We can’t say we’re looking after horses and giving them dignity when we’re clearly not.” About the damning photograph he added: “I think everybody in racing I know hoped it was fake, and then there was a slow realisation that it’s not a fake...it is just such an appalling image and I’m very sad about it.”
The photo was not a fake and had been taken some time ago. The person who put it out on social media knew that it would destroy Elliott’s reputation and career and put in jeopardy the jobs of the 80 people who work for him. It can only have been an intentional act of revenge.
A truism of journalism is that a picture is worth a thousand words. But in the age of social media it is worth so much more with farreaching consequences enabling the mob to judge and condemn and giving the accused no opportunity for defence or redemption.
Elliott must be going through hell. And presumably the person who clicked “send” on that picture is very pleased with him or herself. But I can’t imagine doing something that vindictive any more than I can imagine sitting on a dead horse. How about you?