Goodwood provides a gloriously unique style of racing
Genteel too other than when the football supporters from nearby Portsmouth and Southampton instigate a brawl as happened earlier in the year. Not this week thankfully.
The Goodwood track is perched atop the hillside which affords panoramic views but does make you wonder who on earth decided it would be the ideal site for a racecourse. The course wends its way up and down hill and this provides, as my English friends would say, a ‘stiff’ test.
That’s one reason why we could not replicate this remarkable racing event in Australia. Another is that we cannot mimic any one of the hundreds of years old, charming pubs in the equally charming surrounding villages which welcome racegoers either before – given the civilised 1.50 pm start – or after the races.
I sampled the Earl Of March, The Partridge Inn and The Fox Goes Free (don’t you love that) from my temporary home in Singleton which gorgeously signposts not the nearby villages, but the nearby inns.
The racing attracts a crowd large enough to provide atmosphere, not so large as to descend into a bunfight. Getting set and getting a drink is readily done.
It remains very different to Australia in so many aspects. Of course, as at Flemington or Randwick, not everyone there is for the racing but for many it’s probably more a case of being seen than partying wildly.
The first thing that struck me, right from the off, is the ownership of the horses and for many it’s still a case of having a runner rather than winning being the imperative. In the first race of the week, 11 of the 15 runners are owned by either one or two people and they weren’t all sheikhs.
As to the racing action (over the first three days) I was struck by three impressive two-year-old winners – Dark Vision, Watan and More Than This, with the first named especially eye catching.
The victories of three-year-old fillies Wild Illusion and Pilaster further enhanced the standing of this female crop whereas the jury is very much out on this season’s three-year-old males.
The August 23 Yorkshire Oaks promises to be an outstanding race, possibly bringing together Laurens, Forever Together, Sea Of Class, Lah Ti Dar and Wild Illusion. Then there’s Alpha Centauri, who is arguably the best horse in Europe right now, and the talented French trained filly With You, so we have a great female class of 2015.
You’d fancy now that putting your money on one of them to win the Prix de L’arc de Triomphe would be a smart play given their record in the race, the lack of an older superstar and the fact that we are yet to see Enable this season.
Suffragettes honoured at Goodwood
As the Suffragettes were honoured at Goodwood this year, I was reminded of the remarkable story told by popular Melbourne racing identity John Dow of his grandmother Dora Thewlis.
Thewlis was just a 17 year-old mill worker when she became known as the Baby Suffragette after she was arrested for marching on Parliament and demanding the right to vote.
Her story and later whereabouts was much forgotten but has been well explored in several English newspapers – especially this year as it was 100 years ago that the The Representation of the People Act was finally passed on February 6, 1918, giving women in Britain the vote for the first time.
Thewlis’ actions showed that the suffragettes’ struggle was much more than the whim of a few well to do ladies as it was sometimes portrayed at the time. She was lauded by many after her arrest and imprisonment as she refused to kowtow to a magistrate.
Many of the suffragettes were extremely well know with campaign leader Emmeline Pankhurst a household name, but Thewlis was not in the spotlight after emigrating to Australia.
Granddaughter Kerrie Bartholomew told the Daily Mail: “It is such a shame Nanna has been forgotten in Britain after being so involved in the suffrage movement. She never bragged about her achievements. She was a feisty and opinionated woman who instilled in all her children and grandchildren a sense of social justice.”
Dora was born in 1890, the fifth of seven children of weavers James and Eliza Thewlis, and grew up in the Yorkshire mill town Huddersfield.
On March 20, 1907, she joined a contingent of Yorkshire women as they travelled by train to London to march to Parliament Square and she was one of 75 women arrested for disorderly conduct before being sent to Holloway prison.
Thewlis arrived in Melbourne on October 9, 1912, with her elder sister Evelyn and was to meet Jack Dow, a racehorse trainer.
“She was a remarkable woman and you could say she had quite an influence on racing here,” said John Dow. “She married a trainer, bred a jockey and produced a grandson who was a bookie. All born and bred in Flemington. She died in 1976 in Ascot Vale on the estate that used to be the Ascot racecourse.”
The suffragettes did make their mark on horse racing. Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ran out in front of the King’s horse, Anmer, during the Epsom Derby on June 8, 1913.
Camila Swift, in the Goodwood magazine, wrote: “Horse-racing was arguably the Suffragettes’ most targeted sport, and 1913 was the year they really took aim. Ayr, Cardiff and Kelso racecourses were all attacked that year, with Kelso’s grandstand burnt to the ground by a firebomb. At Hurst Park racecourse, the Suffragettes’ arson attack left the grandstand “a fantastic medley of charred wood, twisted iron, broken and melted glass”. And just after Davison’s Epsom protest, a similar incident happened at the Gold Cup at Ascot, when a young man carrying a Suffragette flag ran onto the course and caused a collision.”