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CHAPTER TWO ‘Chablis to Oysters’

ALTHOUGH EPSOM LIES only 14 miles away from the City of London as the crow flies, it could not have been more different from the cluttered streets and close courts in which Isabella Mayson had spent most of the first seven years of her life. Positioned on a ridge in the North Downs, the town manages to be both flat and high at the same time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it enjoyed an extended spell as a restorative spa, when its indigenous salts were said to work wonders on jaded digestions. Samuel Pepys took the waters there a couple of times, finding it funny to watch as his fellow sippers rushed for the bushes, caught short by the salts’ laxative effect. But by the opening of the nineteenth century, the fashionably liverish had moved on to Cheltenham and Bath, leaving Epsom to its devices as a quiet market town that turned, once a year, into Gomorrah. Dickens got the scale of the transformation best, writing in 1851 that for most days of the year Epsom was virtually dead but how ‘On the three hundred and sixty fifth, or Derby Day, a population surges and rolls, and scrambles through the place, that may be counted in millions.’

For a few short days during the summer race meeting, well-mannered Epsom became the destination of every swell, Guards officer, dwarf, clerk, tart, orange-seller, thimble rigger, prize-fighter, crook, and lady of fashion in the country. Ruskin called the Derby the ‘English carnival’ and from the breaking hours on the day itself – usually in June – a spirit of excitement and misrule began to bubble far away in London. In Clapham, Mitcham, and Tooting, not to mention Belgravia, Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge people commandeered every phaeton, gig, barouche, four-in-hand, brake, tilbury, and donkey cart for the short journey south. Alongside the shambling caravan of race-goers trundled dusty sellers of every kind of snack, novelty, and stimulant, all shouting and shoving in their attempt to turn a copper, honest or otherwise. Every public house along the route was packed with Derby-goers in various stages of tipsiness and with only a passing interest in the racing. Some indeed never got further than the Swan at Clapham or the Cock at Sutton, and Dickens reckoned that most people returned from the day unable to remember the name of the winning horse, let alone its jockey. As the chaotic column of humanity approached the Surrey Downs the sheer press of numbers meant that it started to stall. A 7- or 8-mile tailback was not unknown and it could take a whole hour to clear the final 3 miles. Local hawkers took advantage of this pooling throng to press upon it anything from a racing card to pigeon pie, lemonade to a second-hand umbrella. The mood could turn merry, but seldom sour. As the Illustrated London News advised Derby-goers briskly: ‘if things are thrown at you, just throw them back.’

From 1837, if you were modern-minded, you could make the journey from London by train. The London–Brighton line took you as far as the quaintly named Stoat’s Nest, from where it was a 7-mile tramp to the Downs. Next year came the welcome news that a rival line, the London and South-Western, was to run special Derby Day excursion trains on their Southampton line. But such was the press at Nine Elms in south London, the result of thousands of people trying to pile onto eight meagre trains, that the police were called in to disperse the increasingly desperate crowd. Even then, the train only went as far as Surbiton, which was still a good 5 miles from the course. It was not for nearly another decade that a line was built all the way to Epsom.

Once the crowds were disgorged – in 1843, the year that Isabella arrived in Epsom, it was reckoned that 127,500 extra souls poured into the town for the Derby – the party continued, helped along by liberal supplies from the temporary beer and spirit stalls. Up on the Hill, the large bank rising at the edge of the racetrack, there was a temporary funfair with swings, roundabouts, Italian hurdy-gurdy players, and acrobats who insisted on twisting themselves into impossible shapes. Winding among the crowd you could see jaunty perennial eccentrics like ‘Sir’ John Bennett, a prosperous jeweller from Cheapside who resembled a beery Father Christmas and would drink anyone’s health while ambling along on his cob. Others, who liked to think themselves fashionable, bought cheap German articulated wooden dolls and crammed them around the brims of their hats – an odd craze that no one could ever quite explain.

This gaggle of humanity was augmented by a fair number of gypsies, who had gathered the previous weekend on the racecourse for ‘Show Out Sunday’, their annual meeting of the clans. Fortunes were told, palms crossed with silver, and heather thrust under reluctant noses. The place was a petty criminal’s paradise: in the squawk and clatter it was child’s play to pick a pocket or sneak off with someone else’s lunch. Prostitutes worked swiftly and unobtrusively, card sharps blended back into the crowd at a moment’s notice. A temporary magistrates’ court was set up in the Grandstand to deal with all the extra business, and additional policing was, by tradition, partly paid for by the winner of that year’s Derby. During race week the manager of the Epsom branch of the London and County Bank kept a loaded rifle with a fixed bayonet close by his desk while Baron de Tessier, one of the local grandees and Steward to the Course, hired extra police protection for his family. Yet still it felt like a losing battle: right-minded burghers could only fume over the way their lives had been so rudely interrupted by the incomers. Unless, of course, they happened to be publicans, shopkeepers or pie makers, in which case they hiked their prices and pasted on a welcoming smile.

Artists loved the Derby, although not necessarily for its horses, which they tended to paint as little rocking creatures whose hooves never quite contacted the ground. It was the crowds they came to see. Over the next century, Millais, Degas, ‘Phiz’, Doré, and Géricault would all take their turn at trying to get the spirit of the place down on paper. George Cruikshank did a brilliant 6-foot cartoon strip called ‘The Road to the Derby’, showing every aspect of human and horsey life on the long trail down from London. But the most successful execution came from William Frith. His Derby Day of 1858 (the not very inspirational title was suggested by Henry Dorling) is a wide-screen panorama of the crowd on the Hill, consisting of ninety distinct figures. Carefully composed in his London studio in a series of artful triangles, you will find smocked countrymen, sinister gypsies, tipsy ladies, flushed punters, a sly thimble rigger, and a hungry child acrobat who watches in disbelief as a top-hatted footman unpacks a feast (the child model, hired from the circus, proved to be a menace in the studio – somersaulting into props and teasing the little Friths about their posh manners).

Derby Day was so hugely popular when it was shown at the Royal Academy that it had to be protected by a policeman and an iron railing in order to stop the admiring crowds pitching forward. On the stately world tour that followed, the painting attracted huge attention wherever it went. Since Frith was known to have been paid a whopping £1,500, Derby Day naturally spawned a whole host of flattering copy-cats. The best of these, the much engraved At Epsom Races, 1863 by Alfred Hunt, rearranges the tipsy ladies, adds an urchin and some shady tradesmen in an attempt to recreate that same sense of fluxy human life.

What pulled artists to Epsom was the fact that the racetrack was a place where the lowest and the highest met, a space outside the normal social order. Or as the Illustrated London News put it: ‘there is a sort of magic in the words Epsom Races, which arouses the hopes, recollections, anticipations, and sympathies of hundreds and thousands of people of all classes of society.’ Essentially a rich man’s hobby, the track had been dominated for decades by aristocrats who travelled around the country from course to course. They were shadowed by their grooms who, in the days before horseboxes and trains, were responsible for riding the precious beasts from Goodwood to Ascot to Doncaster in preparation for the next meeting. Behind the grooms trailed a job-lot of racing ‘types’ – bookies, gypsies, hucksters of every kind. Periodically this odd caravan trundled into well-regulated market towns, took over the taverns and local manors, tumbled the servant girls, cheeked the policemen and made an almighty mess, departing before anyone could be quite sure exactly what they had seen and heard.

Corruption was part of the weft of the sport of kings, which only added to its seedy glamour. Horses were nobbled, trainers coshed, jockeys squared, fortunes won and lost, all under the shadiest of circumstances. Epsom in the 1840s was especially rich in this kind of rottenness. In 1844 the Derby was won by a horse called Running Rein, who turned out to be a 4-year-old named Maccabeus (the Derby was strictly for 3-year-olds). The concealment had been managed by painting the animal’s legs with hair dye bought from Rossi’s, a smart barber’s shop in Regent Street. There was nothing new about the trick. With record-keeping so hit-and-miss, it was simple to lie about a horse’s age or even do a straight swap. The case of Running Rein, however, was referred to the Jockey Club. The publicity surrounding the sorry business only served to show half-delighted middle-class newspaper readers what they had always suspected: that racing was run by decadent toffs and their rackety hangers-on whose glory days could not be gone too soon.

The, by now, infamous hair dye had been traced to Rossi’s by Lord George Bentinck, the ‘Napoleon of the Turf’, and the whole incident investigated initially by his protégé Henry Dorling, the Clerk of the Course at Epsom, who swiftly declared that Orlando, the horse second past the finishing post, was this year’s official Derby winner. Over his lengthy tenure it was Dorling’s great achievement to bring to Epsom his own bourgeois brand of probity, order and storming profit. His Sporting Life obituary recalled admiringly how ‘promptitude and regularity were the order of the day in all … [his] business arrangements’, although the fact that newspaper had once been managed by his son may account for some of the fulsome tone. Even so there could be no denying that by the 1850s Dorling had managed to make a substantial change in the racecourse’s culture, turning it from a discredited and slightly sleazy club for aristocrats and chancers into virtually a family business, complete with programmes, ledgers, and a tidy moral climate. The sort of thing that Queen Victoria, had she deigned to return after her damp squib of a visit in 1840, might actually quite have liked.

This process of cleaning up and sorting out had been started by Henry Dorling’s father, William, who had arrived in the town in 1821. Family legend has him riding over the Downs from Bexhill, where he worked as a printer, and seeing Epsom spread beneath him as if it were the Promised Land. Deciding that his destiny lay there, Dorling returned to Bexhill, scooped up his wife, six children, and printing press and retraced his steps over the county border into Surrey. More practically – and the Dorlings were nothing if not practical – William had spotted that Epsom, a town full of business and bustle, did not have a resident press. Moving there would assure him brisk custom from every auctioneer, estate agent, parish officer, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the place. In addition, he would continue as he had in Bexhill to combine his printing business with a circulating library and general store. For as well as lending you the latest novel, William Dorling could sell you a shaving cake, a set of Reeves paints or a packet of Epsom Salts, hire you a piano, supply you with fine-quality tea from the London Tea Company or a copy of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns and insure your property through the Kent Fire Office. And then, when you did eventually die, it was Dorling’s job as registrar to record the fact, along with the happier news of any births and marriages that occurred within the town. In fact there was not much you could do in Epsom without running into William Dorling.

If Epsom was basically a one-horse town for most of the year, for one week every summer it was inundated with the very finest examples of the species. For a man as canny as William Dorling, the obvious next step was to insinuate himself into the racing culture. In 1826 he started printing ‘Dorling’s Genuine Card List’, colloquially known as ‘Dorling’s Correct Card’ – a list of the runners and riders for each race. It sounds a simple thing, hardly a product on which you could found a fortune and a business dynasty, but in a world as chaotic and cliquey as racing, accurate information was at a premium. The Correct Card, put together from knowledge Dorling gleaned as he walked the Heath early every morning chatting to trainers, grooms and jockeys, was a way of communicating intelligence that would otherwise lie scattered and obscured to the ordinary race-goer. Indeed, as the Illustrated London News reported during Derby week of 1859: ‘half of the myriad who flock to the Downs on the Derby Day would know nothing of the names of the horses, the weights and colours of the riders, were it not for Dorling’s card, printed feverishly through the night in the printing shed next to the family house and sold the next morning by hoarse vendors posted at every likely point.’

As William’s eldest son, Henry Dorling gradually took over the running of the business. His appointment as Clerk of the Course in 1839 was a recognition of the family’s growing involvement in Epsom’s chief industry. But there was only so much that the position allowed him to do in the way of cleaning up the moral slurry that was keeping respectable people away. To have real influence, to pull Epsom together so that it was a smoothly integrated operation, Dorling would need to take control of the Grandstand too. When it had opened in 1830 the Grandstand had been the town’s pride and joy. Designed by William Trendall to house 5,000 spectators, it had cost just under £14,000 to build, a sum raised by a mixture of mortgage and shares. The imposing building – all Doric columns, raked seating and gracious balconies – was designed to combine the conveniences of a hotel with the practicalities of a head office. According to the Morning Chronicle, which puffed the grand opening on its front page of 12 April 1830, the Grandstand incorporated a ‘convenient betting room, saloon, balcony, roof, refreshment and separate retiring rooms for ladies’. And in case any readers of the Morning Chronicle were still doubtful that Epsom racecourse really was the kind of place for people like them to linger, they were assured that ‘The whole arrangement will be under the direction of the Committee, who are resolved that the strictest order shall be preserved.’

From the moment that the Grandstand had first been mooted back in 1824, the Dorlings had been eyeing it hungrily. William Dorling had been canny enough to buy some of the opening stock, and by 1845 Henry was the single biggest shareholder. Early on, in 1830, William suggested that he might put the prices of entry on the bottom of Dorling’s Correct Card, a stealthy way of identifying the name of Dorling with that of the Grandstand. Although the Grandstand Association initially rejected the idea, by the time of next year’s Derby the prices are firmly ensconced at the bottom of the card, where they would remain for over a century. William Dorling’s hunch about Epsom’s promise had paid off after all.

But by the 1840s, and despite all that ‘strictest order’ promised by the committee, the Grandstand was not quite the golden goose that it had once seemed. Its early glamour and promise had leaked away and it was no longer turning a profit. Now that people came to think about it properly, it was not actually very well placed, being parallel to the course and unable to offer more than a partial glimpse of the race. The majority of visitors, everyone from Guards officers to clerks, preferred to follow the action from the Hill, the large high bank which offered a much better view of the entire proceedings. Having finished their Fortnum and Mason picnic (Fortnum and Mason so dominated the feasting on the Hill that Dickens declared that if he were ever to own a horse he would call it after London’s most famous grocery store), they simply stepped up onto their hampers in order to see the race. Unless a Derby-goer was actually inside the Grandstand – and increasingly there was no reason why he would wish to be – then not a penny did he pay.

In 1845 Henry Dorling became the principal leaseholder of the Grandstand, thanks to Bentinck’s strenuous string-pulling at the Jockey Club. This meant that Dorling was now in complete charge of all aspects of racing at Epsom. But in order to deliver the 5 per cent annual return he had promised the Grandstand Association on its capital, he would need to make substantial changes to the way things were done. So he came up with a series of proposals designed to make racing more interesting for the spectators, especially those who had paid for a place in the Grandstand. Horses were now to be saddled in front of the stand itself, where punters could look over their fancy (this already worked a treat at Goodwood and Ascot). And to make the proceedings more intelligible for those who were not already initiates, Dorling instituted a telegraph board for exhibiting the numbers of riders and winners. Races were now to start bang on time (Dorling would have to pay a fine to the Jockey Club if they did not) and deliberate ‘false starts’ by jockeys anxious to unsettle their competitors were to be punished. And, not before time one might think, Dorling put up railings to prevent the crowds surging onto the course to get a better view. Finally, and most controversially, he laid out a new course – the Low Level – which incorporated a steep climb over 4 furlongs to provide extra drama for the watchers in the Grandstand.

The fact that these changes were designed for the convenience of investors rather than devotees of the turf was not lost on Dorling’s critics. For every person who benefited from his innovations – the Grandstand shareholders, Bentinck, Dorling himself – there was someone ready to carp. Different interest groups put their complaints in different ways. The Pictorial Times of 1846, for instance, suggested that as a result of Dorling’s tenure of the Grandstand (only one year old at that point) ‘the character of its visitors was perhaps less aristocratic than of old; but a more fashionable display we have never met in this spacious and, as now ordered, most convenient edifice.’ In other words, the punters were common but at least the event was running like clockwork. The modern equivalent might be the complaint that corporate sponsorship of sport has chased away the genuine fans.

Within Epsom itself the opprobrium was more personal. By the end of his life Dorling had become a rich man and, according to one maligner, strode around ‘as if all Epsom belonged to him’. The obituary in which this unattributed quote appeared went on to add, in the interests of balance, that under Dorling’s reign there had been ‘no entrance fees, no fees for weighing, no deductions’ nor the hundred other fiddles by which clerks of racecourses around the country attempted to siphon off extra income. In other words: Dorling was sharp, but he was straight. Other carpers couched their objections to his dominance by attacking the new Low Level Course which, while it might provide excitement for the Grandstanders, was actually downright dangerous for the horses and jockeys. But, no matter how the comments were dressed up, the real animus was that Henry Dorling was simply getting too rich and too powerful. A letter of complaint written by ‘concerned gentlemen’ on 30 April 1850 can still be seen in Surrey Record Office: ‘we may add that it has become a matter of great doubt whether the office of Clerk of the Course is not incompatible with that of Lessee of the Grand Stand, especially as one result has been the recent alteration of the Derby Course which we hear is so much complained of.’ Henry Dorling’s gradual monopolization of power was beginning to stink of the very corruption that he had been brought in to stamp out.

The bickering rumbled on through the 1860s and 1870s, pulling in other players along the way. There were constant disputes, some of which actually came to court, over who had right of way, who was due ground rent, who was entitled to erect a temporary stand. Timothy Barnard, a local market gardener, had the right to put up a wood and canvas structure to the right of the Grandstand, which naturally narked the Association. Local grandees who disapproved of betting (and there were some) refused to allow their land to be used for the wages of sin. The overall impression that comes through the records of Epsom racecourse is that of a bad-tempered turf war, a contest between ancient vested rights and newer commercial interests. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a slice of the pie on the Downs.

By the time Charles Dickens visited Epsom in 1851 to describe Derby Day to the readers of his magazine Household Words, Henry Dorling was sufficiently secure in his small, if squabbling, kingdom to be a legitimate target of Dickens’ pricking prose:

A railway takes us, in less than an hour, from London Bridge to the capital of the racing world, close to the abode of the Great Man who is – need we add! – the Clerk of Epsom Course. It is, necessarily, one of the best houses in the place, being – honour to literature – a flourishing bookseller’s shop. We are presented to the official. He kindly conducts to the Downs … We are preparing to ascend [the Grand Stand] when we hear the familiar sound of the printing machine. Are we deceived? O, no! The Grand Stand is like the Kingdom of China – self-supporting, self-sustaining. It scorns foreign aid; even to the printing of the Racing Lists. This is the source of the innumerable cards with which hawkers persecute the sporting world on its way to the Derby, from the Elephant and Castle to the Grand Stand. ‘Dorling’s list, Dorling’s correct list!’ with the names of the horses, and colours of the riders!

But there were limits even to Dorling’s ascendancy. No amount of cosy cooperation with Lord George Bentinck–Bentinck lent him £5,000 and Dorling responded by giving his third son the strangely hybrid moniker William George Bentinck Dorling – was going to turn Dorling into anything more than a useful ledger man as far as the aristocrats of the Jockey Club were concerned. Dorling, a small-town printer, had made a lucky fortune from Epsom racecourse and that, as far as the toffs were concerned, was that. One family anecdote has Henry complaining to his new wife Elizabeth that being Clerk of the Course was not a gentleman’s job. She was supposed to have replied, ‘You are a gentleman, Henry, and you have made it so.’ But both of them knew that, actually, it wasn’t true.

The new home to which the just-turned-seven Isabella Mayson arrived in the spring of 1843 was simply the Dorlings’ sturdy High St business premises. But by the time Dickens visited Epsom eight years later she had moved with her jumble of full, step and half siblings into one of the most imposing residences in the town. Ormond House, built as a speculative venture in 1839, stood, white and square, at the eastern end of the High Street, usefully placed both for driving the 2 miles up to the racecourse and for keeping a careful eye over the town’s goings-on. A shed adjacent to the building housed the library and, initially, the printing business too. For all that Dickens described Dorling in 1851 as a ‘great man’ with a house to match, the census of that year tells a more modest tale. By 1851 there is just one 16-year-old maid to look after the entire household which includes fifteen-year-old ‘Isabella Mason’ [sic], and a permanent lodger called James Woodruff, a coach proprietor. Whatever Epsom gossips might have said, it was not until the 1860s that Dorling really began to live like a man with money.