Observer archive: A New Yorker’s Derby

Mr Liebling is an habitual contributor to The New Yorker who began to be puzzled by British customs during the Second World War. Mr Liebling, who is equally puzzled by the French, considers himself a neutral observer at Derbys.

THE ways of Epsom on Derby Day take a good deal of knowing, and since I get there only at seven-year intervals, I don’t suppose I shall ever know them well.

This is all the more likely because I began in 1948, when I was already a fair age. I have learned, however, that it is always wise, on entering Tattersalls, to rent binoculars at the booth behind the big stand.

They guarantee no prospect more interesting than the backs of grey top-hats whenever you level up the horse.

But the five-pound deposit you are required to leave on the binoculars assures the means of dignified retreat if your calculations go amiss.

It is the best of savers. It is of course essential not to retrieve the deposit before the last race. In 1948 I hauled myself back to London by my -binocular straps.

I have learned also that a French horse always wins when I am -present, and the Volterra stable owns at least part of the horse.

The late Monsieur Volterra had one-and-a-half of the first two past the post in 1948 – a half-share in My Love, the winner, and all of Royal Drake, the runner-up.

Mme Volterra owned only one of the first two horses Wednesday, but it was the right one. It would therefore be madness not to back a French horse, particularly when a Volterra owns even a cutlet. I am not mad.

A THIRD Epsom commonplace is that the English are a deeply kind nation, and that Derby favourites are often a creation of sentiment.

Last Wednesday morning, for example, I read pages by experts who really know quite a lot about racing, evoking the probability of a Derby in which Acropolis, an untried colt would prove himself one of the great racehorses of all time.

Their reason for believing he would win a stiff race at a mile and a half was that he had run a fast time trial at a mile and a quarter.

The emotional basis of it all, I an sure, was that Acropolis was owned by a noble-woman, 93 years old, who had selected him as a yearling.

The poetic fitness of a win for such a combination had proved first attractive, then irresistible to the hardened professionals. In 1948, as I remember it, the favourite’s chief qualification was that the Maharajah of something or other had named him after his infant son.

Another factor which improves the odds is the British tendency to underrate invaders. I am sure that Harold the Saxon had information from Chantilly that William the Conquerer was very ordinary and couldn’t act uphill. As a result a French horse is always likely to be what we transatlantics call an over-lay.

I failed to convert the night porter at my hotel to this doctrine. He said, “I don’t trust them.”

The most important Derby Day truth for me is that I have more fun there than at any other race I know.

On one side of the course there are the decorative people, consciously and happily picturesque, exercising the English talent for being dressed up and enjoying it.

It is a very great talent, whose effects I had no chance of appreciating during the khaki-and-Utility war, when I lived here longest.

On the other side of the track there is the endless Crazy Gang routine of the touts:— “I said the ’orse wouldn’t stay, but ’e did stay, in one place.”

“You couldn’t find a better soldier in the British Army than I was – when you could find me.” This is the self-deprecating Tout, who wins his public’s confidence by the establishmen of his own human frailty.

“I didn’t get this motor-car from Godfrey Davis, the ’ire car man, to impress you for the day. I’ve always ’ad a car. I’m a responsible business-man. In the tel-e-phone book. can look me up. I don’t go racing so often nowadays, but when I do go I ’ave a reason for it.” This is the Successful Tout, who sells by dynamism. I suppose he would call it the American method.

In the last seven years, I think there has been a falling-off in the Grotesque Tout. Prince Monolulu, older and mellower , did not shout when he saw me this year. “I’ve got a ’orse!” He said deferentially, “Could you use a ’orse?”

The Rocket Man was similarly subdued. He had discarded his Mae West for a coachman’s hat like the doorman at Hatchett’s in Piccadilly. The American method seems to get the half-crowns.

WITH a Press badge you can slip back and forth between the two forms of entertainment, regulating the dosage, as if you were producing your own revue.

Ten minutes of comedy and then down to the paddock for a touch of “Florodora” flash with the crinoline girls and the Moss Bros. men’s chorus.

One of the things I haven’t learned about Epsom – shall I pick it up in 1962 or 1969? – is how to get fed properly

On the grandstand side of the course I found when I had my first intimations of malnutrition in 1948 that the only visible antidote consisted of wide white expanses of flaccid bread agglomerated around panes of what I took to be cellophane.

The vendeuse explained it was “Ham, love. We have rationing, love.”

I attributed the ignominy, like all others, to Mr Attlee. Last Wednesday I perceived that three years of free enterprise had not thickened the ham in buffet sandwiches by an eight of a millimetre, and the elegantly draped elbows one receives in the ribs on the way to the buffet are as hard as they used to be in utility garments.

In quest of something more in keeping with the costumes, a mayonnaise de langouste and a pheasant, perhaps with a magnum of sirop de cacao, I climbed two winding flights of stairs into a kind of belfry marked “Luncheons”.

Here with the glow of nostalgic pleasure, I found again my old love, the wartime queue. The racegoers luncheon, stood in Indian file in a passageway leading, as I supposed to the luncheon, although from their faces it may well have been the guillotine.

If I had tagged on at the end I would have been lucky to emerge in time for the St Leger, so I dashed back to the common folk and lunched on a bison — “a bison of eels,” was the full title the garde manger at the barrow gave the dish, and I followed by a red hot bag of cold fish and chips, a mystery, of the British cuisine comparable, but not in many ways, to a baked Alaska.

WHEN I had finished I understood why fish and chips is not served in the enclosures. Had I been wearing appropriate headgear I should not have been able to doff it without greasing the brim.

(My early suspicion that the toppers contained vacuum jugs or chafing dishes had been dispelled by observation of the luncheon queue. It was obvious the incroyables were as faminous as I.)

I was therefore on the qui vive, as the invaders say, for the tip which I eaves-dropped from the lips of Mme Volterra herself on the way over from the walking ring to the paddock before the Derby.

(It merely confirmed my resolution to do Phil Drake, but without such ante-post support resolutions have been known to waver.)

I was not with, but near, Mme Volterra, and, quite naturally, looking at her, when I heard her say to one of her chevaliers du chapeau gris: “Une chose qui est certaine, c’est que mon cheval a bien mangé.” (Another Epsom axiom is that it is well to understand the raiders’ language.) Mme Volterra looked like a woman who doesn’t joke about food.

And if, as she said, her horse had eaten well, I knew he was the only living being on Epsom Downs who had done so.

I dashed off to put a fiver on his lovely dark nose, and when he turned loose that run in the stretch – from 17th place to first – I knew where he got the stamina.

It was a triumph for French cooking as well for as for French cunning.