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.
The emotional layout of the newly blended Mayson-Dorling household is harder to gauge. Initially there were eight children under 8 crammed into the house. The four children on each side matched each other fairly neatly in age, with Henry Mayson Dorling just the oldest at 8, followed by Isabella Mayson, a year younger. At the outset of the marriage Henry Dorling had promised that ‘his four little Maysons were to be treated exactly the same as his four little Dorlings’ and, in material terms, this certainly does seem to have been the case. There were no Cinderellas at Ormond House. The Mayson girls received the same education as their Dorling stepsisters and, as soon as he was old enough, John Mayson was integrated into the growing Dorling business empire along with Henry’s own sons. On Henry’s death in 1873 his two surviving stepchildren, Bessie and Esther, were left £3,000 each, a sum that allowed them to live independently for the rest of their very long lives.
The new Mr and Mrs Dorling quickly went about adding to their family. Charlotte’s birth, an intriguing seven and a half months after their marriage, was followed by another twelve children in all, culminating with Horace, born in 1862 when Elizabeth was 47. In total the couple had twenty-one children between them, a huge family even by early Victorian standards. People didn’t say anything to their faces, but there must have been smirking about this astonishing productivity which Henry, a touchy man, did not find funny. By 1859, 13-year-old Alfred Dorling was clearly feeling embarrassed by his parents’ spectacular fertility. As a joke, the boy sent his papa a condom anonymously through the post. Henry Dorling was not amused: condoms were the preserve of men who used prostitutes and were trying to avoid venereal disease, not of a paterfamilias who wished to limit the size of his brood. In effect, Alfred Dorling was calling his mother a tart and his father a trick. His punishment was to be sent to join the Merchant Navy where presumably he learned all about condoms and a great