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