The stable door opens
Newmarket has long been the home of British horseracing. With the revamping of its museum and opening up of its Jockey Club Rooms, life’s also-rans can now get a look-in, found Nigel Richardson
Beneath a morning sky as blue as Godolphin’s racing silks, clusters of horses and riders took the Newmarket Gallops up Warren Hill at a swinging canter. Standing by the fence on Moulton Road we caught them on the down stretch. ‘Morning!’ said my companion, Nigel Wright, to one of the riders, adding sotto voce, ‘That’s James Fanshawe, the trainer.’
Wright, a former jockey and stud farm manager, now works as a tour guide, explaining Newmarket and its arcane equine ways to non-devotees like me. I was in town principally for a preview of the revamped National Horseracing Museum, which has just re-opened as the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art in appropriately historic premises just off the High Street: Charles II’S former racing stable and what is left of his palace next door.
But the real story of Newmarket is out here on these lush acres of training grounds. Nigel Wright pointed to the crest of the hill. ‘This is where it all started,’ he said. ‘You’ll see the painting in the Jockey Club Rooms.’ The painting in question shows Charles II, who put Newmarket on the map as a racing town, and his entourage on Warren Hill watching pretty much the same scene as the one in front of me (bar the padded body protectors and bobble-topped helmets worn by the stable lads and lasses). It hangs in the private members’ club where I had managed to wangle a room for the night.
These gallops are what distinguish Newmarket from every other racing town in Britain. More than fifty towns have racecourses – Newmarket has two – but none has a heath where thoroughbreds can open their legs and show their class (to quote the late Ron Pickering in a different context).
Newmarket sits in a region of fenland on a band of well-drained chalk that rolls out in smooth, gradual hills and open valleys. This is ideal for the training and racing of horses, which is why the area has long been established as the HQ of British horseracing, with key institutions – the stables, studs and the bloodstock auctioneer Tattersalls – located in and around what is otherwise a standardissue Suffolk market town.
Racing is still the sport of kings here – it’s just that the kings with the real
clout and money tend to be from the Gulf States (the Godolphin racing stable, for example, is owned by one of modern racing’s most influential figures, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai). But in its more rarefied corners Newmarket maintains an air of patrician loucheness that befits its former status as the Merry Monarch’s country playground (he even imported his stable of mistresses for the season). And few corners come more rarefied than the Jockey Club Rooms.
Its pre-war façade, set back from the High Street behind a statue of Hyperion, the 1933 Derby winner, belies its mid18th century origins and the warren of chambers and galleries that unfolds as you step deeper inside. Charles Howard, the general manager, likened it to Narnia – ‘the door opens and it envelops you’ – but it felt to me more like a ventricle of the British Establishment: the gilt-framed paintings of horses, both in shiny repose and doing that pre-photographic rockinghorse gallop; the copies of Tatler and the
Field, fanned like hands of cards on occasional tables; the hooves, for God’s sake, gold-mounted and disguised as snuff boxes, inkwells and paperweights, but still, unmistakably, things filched from the ends of horses’ legs.
The Jockey Club Rooms is the members’ club for the oldest institution and largest commercial group in horseracing. It is every bit as exclusive as the clubs of Pall Mall or St James’s but, like the Establishment itself, has had to make discreet accommodation with economic reality in recent years. ‘On the key sacrosanct days – such as when Tattersalls are busy – we revert to being a niche members’ club,’ Howard told me over fruit cocktails next to the chequerboard lawn. ‘Outside that we have the licence to be slightly more commercial. But the H-word is never allowed to be used. The members want it to remain a little oasis for them but they’re astute in turning a blind eye to the right sort of non-member activity.’ Got that? You can have a bed for the night but it’s not a hotel; it puts on ‘fine dining evenings’ but is not a restaurant; displays priceless art (we’ll come to just how priceless) but is not a gallery. And this is the compromise by which life’s also-rans such as myself get to stay here and poke about.
I had already done a fair bit of poking – locating that painting of Charles II on Warren Hill (it’s in the Morning Room) – before Howard gave me the tour. The Morning Room, he said, is the heart of the club, where ‘the greatest art’ hangs. This includes, over the fireplace, ‘Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath’ by George Stubbs, the sister painting of which sold at Christie’s five years ago for more than £22 million.
The Dining Room is hung with paintings of Derby winners and their owners, and on a table sits the club’s hottest hoof, probably once attached to the white-stockinged right hind leg of Eclipse (eighteen starts, eighteen wins in 1769–70), which was lined with a solid gold snuff box and presented to the Jockey Club by William IV in 1832. ‘That is always placed in front of the most important guest,’ Charles Howard told me.
This evident obsession of the racing fraternity with the off-cuts and mortal remains of their champion nags extends to the new museum, five minutes’ walk away. The museum has moved from more cramped quarters and been updated with interactive and audiovisual displays, notably on the ‘biomechanics’ and genetics of thoroughbreds (all of which are descended from just three Arabian stallions). But it still contains a couple of old horse skeletons, of Hyperion and of the most ludicrously named horse ever, Potoooooooo – the clue to its pronunciation lying in its alternative spelling, Pot8os.
There is also an exhibit with a faintly Sicilian air – the stuffed, mounted head of Persimmon, winner of the Epsom Derby, the St Leger and the Ascot Gold Cup in the late 1890s, which is on loan from the Queen (then again she is the head of the firm, the capo di tutti capi you might say).
After my night in the Jockey Club Rooms I descended to the Dining Room where I found a small breakfast table set for one beneath the gaze of the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham (whose horse, Allabaculia, won the first St Leger in 1776). I was beginning to wonder if everyone had gone racin’ when a Frenchman appeared to take my order. And in the clubby silence that preceded the arrival of perfectly poached eggs I swear I heard the thud of ghostly hooves.