Bloodline

‘She just walked out without another word,’ he’d said miserably. ‘She didn’t even say goodbye to your mother. I followed her outside telling her not to be so bloody stupid, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at me. She got in her car and drove away without a backward glance.’ He had sobbed again. ‘I feel so guilty.’

Join the club, I’d thought.

It was only about twelve o’clock when I turned in through the gates of Stratford racecourse and parked in one of the spaces reserved for the race-day officials. Terence Feynman, the judge for the day, pulled in beside me.

‘Hello, Terence,’ I said, climbing out of my car.

‘Hi, Mark. I’m so sorry about Clare.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not great.’

‘No. And just as she had made the breakthrough into the big time. Funny old world.’

I didn’t feel like laughing.

‘Are you commentating or presenting?’

‘Commentating.’

‘See you later then, up top.’ He rushed away across the car park as if he was late, even though there was nearly two hours to pass before the first race.

The judge’s box was alongside the commentary position at the top of the grandstand, his being directly in line with the winning post to enable him to accurately call the winner, assisted, if necessary, by the photo-finish camera that sat immediately above him.

Prior to 1949 there were no photo-finish cameras, and the judge was the sole arbiter of who had won and who hadn’t.

Infamously, in the 1913 running of the Two Thousand Guineas, the judge, Charlie Robinson, announced a horse called Louvois as the winner when every single other person at Newmarket that day believed that Craganour had passed the post in front and had won easily, by a length.

Nevertheless, Louvois was declared the winner because the judge said so.

There was speculation and rumour at the time that Robinson had been influenced by the fact that he’d had friends who’d died on the Titanic the previous year. Craganour was owned by C. Bower Ismay, younger brother of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, the company that had owned the Titanic. And it had been widely reported at the time, albeit wrongly, that J. Bruce Ismay had saved himself by securing a place in one of Titanic’s lifeboats disguised as a woman.

But, whatever anyone else might think, the judge’s decision is final and Louvois remained the official winner, and his name is still in the record books.

Not until 1983 were photo-finish cameras used at all British racecourses, and the first colour images were not available until 1989.

And it hasn’t been just the judge’s role that has changed due to modern technology.

The very first racecourse commentary in England was at Goodwood on 29 July 1952. For the previous eight hundred years, since the first documented racecourse at Smithfield in London in the twelfth century, races had been run in silence, the only sounds being the thudding of the horses’ hooves on the turf, and the cheering of the crowd.

Even as late as 1996, races at Keeneland, one of America’s premier racetracks in Lexington, Kentucky, were run without any public address, other than a bell being rung when the race began. At Ascot, they still ring a bell to alert the crowd when the runners enter the finishing straight even though there has been race commentary there since the mid 1950s.

I walked into Stratford racecourse through the main entrance only to come face to face with Toby Woodley from the Daily Gazette.

‘Have you seen my piece today?’ he asked in a loathsome, self-satisfied manner.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I never read your rag.’

‘You ought to,’ he sneered. ‘You might learn something. Especially today.’

He walked off towards the bar and I watched him go. I wondered if he could have been Clare’s secret boyfriend. No, surely that was impossible?

I walked round behind the stands to the Press Room, which was fortunately deserted so long before the first. In common with most racecourses, Stratford looked after members of the press pretty well, providing them with tea and coffee facilities, a tray of sandwiches and, occasionally, a supply of hot soup. However, I was in search of the newspapers that they regularly left in a stack by the door. In particular, I was looking for a copy of the Daily Gazette, which I spread out on one of the wooden desks.

My blood ran cold.

CLARE SHILLINGFORD WAS A RACE FIXER ran the headline in bold type across the back page.

However, the story beneath was speculative at best and related to a race the previous April when Clare had ridden a horse called Brain of Brixham into second place on the all-weather Polytrack at Wolverhampton. It had been at an evening meeting under lights and Clare claimed she had mistakenly thought that a pole used to support a TV camera on a wire had been the winning post. Hence she had stopped riding some twenty yards short of the finish and had been subsequently overtaken and beaten by another horse right on the line.