Book description
A book about the gambling mania which gripped early 19th century
Britain, focusing on the corrupt Derby race of 1844. During the early
19th century, gambling was a grave social ill - largely uncontrolled and
corrupt. The 1830s had seen the institution of the Poor Law, the
abolition of slavery, the regulation of child labour and the
parliamentary representation of such industrial centres as Manchester.
Nevertheless as far as gambling was concerned, the beginning of 1844 saw
things much as they had been since the Regency: games of faro, hazard,
whist, and roulette could be played in houses around the West End; while
racing was ostensibly self-regulated by the Jockey Club and a vaguely
defined sense of honour. Almost exclusively aristocratic in tone, racing
was, in the days before football, the chief national sporting obsession.
However, the popularity of gambling and the turf was at odds with the
increasingly regulated tempo of life in the 1840s. Increasingly
vociferous moralists inveighed against the vice. It became evident that
the government was on a mission to clean up, if not eradicate, gambling
in Britain and it now put Britain's premier race, the Derby, on public
trial. The Derby of 1844 was expected to be a two-horse race between
Ugly Buck and Ratan each owned by intriguing characters John Gully, a
social climbing former prizefighter, and his great rival William
Crockford, the club owner. The race itself was full of drama, and by the
time it had finished it was apparent that Ratan and Ugly Buck had been
doped. Nick Foulkes brilliantly takes Frith's narrative canvas Derby Day
as the inspiration for a gripping factual story, a sort of inverted
Seabiscuit. There are strong characters, the tension of class rivalries,
the drama of the race and the trial and also the opportunity to use the
gambling of the time as a lens through which to view important social
change.
