Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  At the races, it goes without saying that nothing can be accomplished without a full complement of pleases, thank-yous, excuse mes and endless apologies – but the courtesy code goes much further. Racegoers routinely open doors and hold coats and bags for each other; they automatically offer help or directions if someone looks a bit lost, as well as consolation on unsuccessful bets and congratulation on winners; and they always apologise if they inadvertently jostle or inconvenience you in any way. In my ‘bumping’ experiments, racecourses scored highest, with nearly 90 per cent of my victims being first to apologise when I accidentally-on-purpose bumped into them; in fact, at the races, even a ‘near-miss’ almost invariably elicited a ‘sorry’ (usually mumbled in the standard, barely audible English fashion, but sometimes even accompanied by brief eye-contact and a smile).

  If you find you do not understand the complicated numbers and symbols printed in your race-card, you can go up to any fellow racegoer and ask for an explanation, which will almost always be patiently and politely given. If the person is as ill-informed as you, he or she may well apologise profusely – and, if possible, attempt to find someone who can help. I am not exaggerating: this was one of my favourite ways of getting into conversation with racegoers during my research, and it rarely failed.52

  It even worked when my ‘targets’ were trainers, stewards, clerks and other busy officials, for whom my novicey questions were highly inconvenient interruptions to their work. Trainers would say, ‘I’m really sorry, but I must just go and saddle this horse. The owner is waiting for me and he’s a dreadful fusser. I do hope you don’t mind . . .’ Stewards would apologise for having to hold enquiries, jockeys for having to go and ride in races, and so on.

  Like the modesty rule, the courtesy rules pervade every aspect of racing-talk. In most cases, these rules are merely an exaggeration (though at times almost a caricature) of ‘mainstream’ English politeness principles. In one area, however, racing-talk courtesy is diametrically opposed to its ‘mainstream’ equivalent. Sports journalists are usually, in print, among the least polite people in English culture. Their style is generally highly confrontational, and they frequently attack and condemn players, coaches and managers who turn in sub-par performances or otherwise fail to meet their standards, accusing them of incompetence or corruption. Insulting headlines and cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Disgrace!’ are commonplace. Racing journalists, by contrast, are unfailingly polite in their reports and commentary, carefully avoiding any censure of the jockeys and trainers whose doings they record, and always very generous with praise.

  When a much-hyped favourite trails in well beaten, its performance is almost always described as merely ‘disappointing’. The explanations and excuses of jockeys and trainers are accepted and quoted with due respect. The courtesy rules dictate that blame should never be attributed directly, but only conveyed using the most diplomatic of euphemisms. Thus, racing journalists will not accuse a trainer of running a horse too often; instead, they will say that the animal’s ‘disappointing’ performance ‘was perhaps due to the effects of a long and tiring season’. Jockeys will not be directly accused of riding badly or adopting inappropriate tactics; rather, the journalists will say that a natural front-runner ‘did not seem suited by being held up’. (Of course, everyone knows what these euphemisms really mean – in racing as elsewhere among the English, courtesy and hypocrisy tend to go hand in hand.)

  And this strict observance of courtesy rules extends to other areas of racing celebrities’ lives as well. Racing journalists have to report on horse-doping scandals or official enquiries into other forms of cheating or malpractice. But when the news and gossip pages of all the newspapers were full of salacious headlines about a ‘sex scandal’ in the racing world, the racing correspondents remained resolutely silent on the subject, continuing calmly to report on the week’s runners, including those of the trainer in question, and politely ignoring all the unseemly fuss over his domestic difficulties. Although I found this restraint both extraordinary and admirable, it was not unexpected. In fact, I won some money by betting my friends that the racing-talk courtesy rules would prevail, and the racing correspondents would not be tempted to join in the fray. (My bets on social matters during the racing research were always much more successful than those on horses.) And when the mainstream newspapers started asking me, as racing’s official anthropologist, to comment on the scandal, I obeyed the courtesy rules and politely declined. I still can’t seem to bring myself to name those involved.

  Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, I found that observance of the courtesy rules is common where one would least expect it: among racegoers who, in their ‘other lives’, are aggressive football supporters and disruptive Saturday-night revellers of a type all too familiar to me from previous research on violence, disorder, ‘lager-louts’ and football hooligans. At the races, these very same young males are high-spirited and lively, but without the belligerence and anti-social tendencies that characterise their behaviour in other sporting and social contexts.

  Their relatively decorous behaviour at the races defies all popular theories about the causes of violence and disorder, providing proof that it is entirely possible for hordes of young males to congregate, gamble and drink large amounts of alcohol at an exciting sports event without getting into fights or, indeed, causing any trouble at all. At the races, they may be extremely noisy and demonstrative, but they are not aggressive – in fact, they are remarkably well behaved. They open doors for women, they say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and if they drunkenly lurch into you, they apologise.

  When I interviewed them, these young males freely admitted that their behaviour at football matches and on Saturday-night binges was quite different from their relatively good-mannered conduct at the races – although they could not provide a coherent explanation for this, beyond saying that ‘Everyone knows you don’t cause trouble at the races,’ or ‘It’s just a fact, right?’ In other words, there is an unspoken rule that everyone instinctively obeys. This seems to me to be largely a matter of expectation: where young males are treated as responsible, decorous adults, they will generally behave as such; where they are treated like children, criminals or wild beasts, they will also conduct themselves accordingly.

  The Moaning Rules

  Lest you start to think that the racing world is all sickly sweetness and light, I should point out that racegoers have their grumps and disgruntlements just like anyone else – and so do jockeys, trainers, journalists, officials and so on. The English predilection for quiet, Eeyorish moaning is as much in evidence at the races as anywhere else – and the rules and conventions governing talk about racing’s irritations and discontents are much the same as those involved in the weather-speak ‘moaning rituals’ described earlier.

  The subjects of complaint vary, although here, as elsewhere, the weather is a frequent source of dissatisfaction – and at the races it has the added power to affect the state of the ‘going’ (ground, turf) and thus ruin the chances of a horse that would otherwise have been a dead cert to win the three-thirty. Everyone moans about the weather, and the normal weather-hierarchy rules do not always apply, as sunshine can be as much of an evil as rain, for those whose horses prefer soft going.

  Otherwise, different members of the racing tribe each have their own favourite whinges. Punters moan about lousy odds, greedy bookmakers, incompetent jockeys and inexplicably slow horses. Jockeys complain (quietly) to each other about ‘pointless’ stewards’ enquiries, and about the unreasonable expectations of trainers and owners of slow horses (including my all-time favourite overheard moan: ‘Guv’nor’s complaining I didn’t keep in touch with the leaders. Keep in touch! I told him I’d’ve needed an effing postcard!’). Owners whine about miserly prize money and the extortionate fees charged for this, that and the other. Everyone – even journalists – moans about the sport’s governing bodies, the Jockey Club and the British Horseracing Authority (BHA). And then there are always temporary
fads and fashions for ritual moaning on specific issues: during the period of my research on the racing tribe, a favourite whinge was ‘The Derby Has Lost Its Atmosphere.’ This kind of nostalgic moaning is typically English, and not confined to the elderly or conservative: one of my favourite examples is a homemade sign spotted at Glastonbury Festival, which read “Queue here to complain festival is not as good as it used to be’.

  The rules of moaning ensure that, whatever the subject of the lament, all these conversations take much the same form. There must be some token disagreement on the causes of the evil in question, and on what the BHA (or ‘someone’) should do about it (or, rather, what they should have done about it ten years ago, if they’d had any sense). But the rules also require a great deal of fervent nodding and enthusiastic agreement on the key issues at stake. Minor differences of opinion on details are necessary to keep the conversation flowing, but the consensus on principles is the real point of the ritual. By ensuring expression and reaffirmation of shared values in this way, the rules of moaning help to reinforce solidarity and social bonding among racegoers.

  Suggesting a practical solution to the problem under discussion (as I did on a few occasions, as an experiment) undermines this socially therapeutic function, by effectively bringing the subject to a close. This is therefore not allowed (my attempts were either frostily received or treated as a joke). The rules of moaning prohibit all attempts to introduce an element of reason or pragmatism into the debate, as this is likely to inhibit the bonding effect of the moaning ritual. As usual, social etiquette triumphs over logic. Or perhaps we should say that a different sort of logic applies. Participants in moaning rituals do not want to be given reasonable advice on how to solve their problems: they want to enjoy moaning about them. Reasonable advice is therefore, quite reasonably, forbidden.

  Moaning is, of course, not an activity peculiar to the English. Woody Allen once said, in response to Noam Chomsky, ‘Language may be innate, but whining is acquired.’ Actually, whining is innate or, at least, certainly universal. But there does seem to be something distinctively English about the kind of whining involved in both weather-speak and racing-talk moaning rituals – a sort of grumpy and apathetic stoicism; complaining endlessly about unsatisfactory states of affairs, but in a resigned manner, without any real expectation that things could be improved, and certainly without any attempt to find means of improving them. I mentioned earlier that someone once said that the English have satire instead of revolutions (or something to that effect): we complain bitterly, and often wittily, but we do not actually do anything about it.

  Post-mortem Rules

  After each race, the trainers, owners and other ‘connections’ of the also-rans conduct a form of verbal ‘post-mortem’, in which the race is minutely dissected and the causes of failure diagnosed.

  The unwritten rules governing such conversations express the tacit understanding that a horse very rarely loses a race because it is not fast enough. If you eavesdrop on a few post-mortem conversations (a most amusing pastime, I recommend it), you will soon find out that horses lose races because they get a bad draw, get upset in the stalls, miss the break, get boxed in, get bumped, can’t act on the going, fail to settle, lose their action on a sharp bend, run wide, need the race, have got jaded from too much racing, should have gone for the gap, should have taken the outside, saw daylight too soon, didn’t get a run until too late, might try him over a mile, might try him in blinkers and got bags of stamina and sure to improve next time out and ran a great race, really, considering.

  You may have some difficulty keeping a straight face, but what you must not do, ever, is even to hint that an owner’s horse might possibly have been beaten by twenty lengths and come fourteenth because it was up against thirteen better horses.

  The post-mortem rules require jockeys riding also-rans to start mentally rehearsing their post-mortem speeches for the owners before they pass the post (or even earlier, in the case of obvious no-hopers: one jockey told me, ‘I had a ride last week where the trainer told me exactly what to say the night before’). Jockeys may give their honest uncomplimentary opinion to the trainer, but this must be tactfully rephrased in more optimistic tones for the owner. The jockey’s breathless comment to the trainer as he returns to the unsaddling enclosure, ‘One-paced, and believe me it’s a bloody slow one!’ will, by the time they are joined by the owner, have become, ‘Stayed on well, he’s a real trier – a step up in distance might suit him.’

  There is an element of self-interest in all this polite smoothing, in that brutal honesty about a horse’s lack of talent could result in an empty box and loss of training fees – as the owner might decide to sell the ‘dud’ horse, or send it to a different trainer. But it is not really in a trainer’s long-term interest to have a stable full of unsuccessful horses, and trainers are usually deluding themselves as much as the owners when they indulge in the customary post-mortem optimism. There is always a degree of courteous collusion in these conversations, whereby the owner and the trainer conspire to convince each other that the horse was unsettled in the stalls, or found the pace too fast or too slow, or the ground too soft or too hard, or was suffering from springtime hormonal mood-swings, or was unfairly handicapped, or hampered, or something.

  The post-mortem prescription of polite optimism is also a subset of a more general rule to the effect that it is considered rude to bad-mouth a horse to its owner, or even to speak slightingly of a horse in public. Irate owners have been known to ring up racing journalists and broadcasters with heated complaints following a tactless comment about their horse in print or on air. The result is that journalists, and anyone speaking within earshot of an owner, tend to resort to gracious, diplomatic euphemisms. You do not tell an owner, or the world, that his horse is ‘ungenuine’ (a dire insult): you say that the animal is ‘a bit of a character’. Everyone knows exactly what you mean. (I found that every racing enthusiast carries a mental glossary of these euphemisms, and, when pressed hard enough, could always tell me their real meanings.) But honour is preserved; face is saved. More of that delightful English hypocrisy.

  The Money-talk Taboo

  Although financial concerns pervade every aspect of racing, it is not done to talk about them – or, at least, not in any direct or straightforward fashion.

  There is an interesting contrast here with Irish racing. It starts with the signage. In Ireland, the betting ring is called the betting ring; in England, it is called ‘Tattersalls’ or some neutral made-up name such as ‘The Gordon Enclosure’. In Ireland, the corporate hospitality boxes are boldly signposted ‘Corporate Hospitality’; in England, this ‘business’ function is disguised with discreet signs to anonymous box numbers or the such-and-such suite or room. In Ireland, sponsors’ logos are brazenly displayed around the inside fence of the parade ring; in England, the parade ring is sacred territory, where such a shameless exhibition of commercial interests would be considered crude and improper.

  English squeamishness about money matters is equally evident in conversation codes. Where Irish racegoers enquire after your betting success with a brash ‘Are you making money?’, English racegoers say, ‘Had any winners yet?’ In both countries, the result of a race cannot be officially declared until the jockeys have ‘weighed in’, and the clerk of the scales has checked that they did not shed or add a few pounds since ‘weighing out’ before the race. At Irish racecourses, however, the announcements over the loudspeakers confirm the result of a race with the punter-friendly cry ‘Winner all right!’, meaning that if you backed the winner, your money is safe. The equivalent English announcement is another euphemism, repeated in a monotone: ‘Weighed in, weighed in.’

  Even in England, the money-talk taboo permits racegoers to exclaim loudly over their winnings – especially as it is universally understood that money won on the horses is not ‘real money’, and can therefore be spent on whims and luxuries (such as bottles of champagne, lavish ice-creams for the children, a new hat o
r dress), rather than saved to pay the mortgage or the gas bill.

  But I found that other forms of money-talk, including conducting ‘business’ at the races, are strictly forbidden by the unwritten laws – particularly, and this is perhaps surprising, in exactly the places one would expect to hear business-talk: the corporate hospitality boxes. Almost all parties of ‘suits’ (as corporate racegoers are known) observe a complete ban on money-talk. It is understood, although rarely stated explicitly, that clients or potential clients have been invited to enjoy a pleasant day at the races, not to engage in discussion of business matters – or, worse, the ultimate heresy, to be subjected to any sort of a sales-pitch.

  This is an unwritten, unofficial taboo, but it was observed by all of the corporate parties I studied over the course of a year’s research on the racing ‘suits’ (a project referred to disparagingly by my SIRC colleagues as ‘Kate’s gatecrashing study’, as it involved attending rather a lot of corporate-hospitality lunches and parties at race-meetings). When asked, the ‘suits’ told me that, yes, there was an unspoken understanding that one should not engage in ‘shop-talk’ (they couldn’t even bring themselves to use the word ‘money’) at the races. A few corporate hosts operate a somewhat modified version of the taboo, whereby ‘shop-talk’ is occasionally allowed, if and only if the conversation on such topics is initiated and ‘driven’ by the client – in other words, where it would be rude to interrupt and change the subject. Even if the client insists on hearing about some new product or service, however, hosts must refrain from lengthy disquisitions, and remain alert to the slightest sign of fading attention, whereupon they must immediately steer the conversation back to what will win the next race.

  The ‘suits’ I interviewed maintained that the severe constraints imposed by the taboo do not hamper the function of corporate hospitality as a means of generating or retaining business. They insisted, on the contrary, that the taboo allows hosts and guests to get to know each other better, and to build closer, friendlier relationships, which in turn is good for business. Not one could provide any hard financial evidence to show a return on their hospitality ‘investment’, and I read later about a survey showing that my sample was entirely typical in this respect: the overwhelming majority of English firms do not ‘measure’ the results of hospitality expenditure in any sort of systematic way, or indeed at all (and reading between the lines of the survey report, I got the impression that the respondents rather objected to being questioned too closely on the subject).