FullReads

As we go over these stories of plot and counterplot, it is hardly possible to avoid thinking what a singularly high-souled set of gentry we have got amongst. What ambitions! To trick money out of somebody’s pocket! To wager when you know that you have made winning certain! The outcome of it all is that, in the unequal battle between the men who back and the men who lay, the latter must win; they will win, even if they have to cog the dice on a pinch; and, moreover, they will not be found out officially, even though their “secret” is as open as if it were written across the sky. A strange, hard, pitiless crew are these same bookmakers. Personally, strange to say, they are, in private life, among the most kindly and generous of men; their wild life, with its excitement and hurry, and keen encounters of wits, never seems to make them anything but thoughtful and liberal when distress has to be aided; but the man who will go far out of his way to perform a charitable action will take your very skin from you if you engage him in that enclosure which is his battle-ground, and he will not be very particular as to whether he wins your skin by fair means or foul.

About two years ago, an exasperating, soft-headed boy brought a colossal fortune into the Ring. I never pitied him much; I only longed to see him placed in the hands of a good schoolmaster who knew how to use a birch. This piteous wretch, with his fatuous airs of sharpness, was exactly the kind of game that the bookmakers cared to fly at; he was cajoled and stimulated; he was trapped at every turn; the vultures flapped round him; and there was no strong, wise man to give the booby counsel or to drag him by main force from his fate. There was no pity for the boy’s youth; he was a mark for every obscene bird of prey that haunts the Turf; respectable betting men gave him fair play, though they exacted their pound of flesh; the birds of Night gave him no fair play at all. In a few short months he had poured a quarter of a million into the bursting pockets of the Ring, and he was at last “posted” for the paltry sum of L1,400. This tragic farce was not enacted in a corner; a hundred journals printed every act as it was played; the victim never received that one hearty flogging which might have saved him, and the curtain was at last rung down on a smug, grinning group of bookmakers, a deservedly ruined spendthrift, and a mob of indifferent lookers-on. So minutely circumstantial were the newspapers, that we may say that all England saw a gigantic robbery being committed, and no man, on the Turf or off, interfered by so much as a sign. Decidedly, the Ethics of the Turf offer an odd study for the moralist; and, in passing, I may say that the national ethics are also a little queer. We ruin a tradesman who lets two men play a game at billiards for sixpence on licensed premises, and we allow a silly boy to be rooked of a quarter of a million in nine months, although the robbery is as well-known as if it were advertised over the whole front page of The Times day by day.

In sum, then, we have an inner circle of bookmakers who take care either to bet on figures alone, or on perfectly accurate and secret information; we have another circle of sharp owners and backers, who, by means of modified (or unmodified) false pretences, succeed at times in beating the bookmakers; we have then an outer circle, composed partly of stainless gentlemen who do not bet and who want no man’s money, partly of perfectly honest fellows who have no judgment, no real knowledge, and no self-restraint, and who serve as prey on which the bookmakers batten.