9:11am Thursday 5th June 2008
By Kevin Barnes
The snake charmers of a century ago have given way to barbershop quartets but the £1.25m Epsom Derby appears to have lost none of its ability to provide the great British day out.
Although organisers have broken with tradition to rebrand the Friday as Ladies' Day, the spirit of our only surviving sporting event to predate the storming of the Bastille is untainted.
For 229 years social conventions have dissolved on Derby Day as the world's greatest flat race traditionally brings Gypsies and generals to 600 acres of rolling chalk downs.
Sophisticates, top-hatted and tailed, will churn up the Surrey skies in helicopters while ordinary folk on the hill feast on jellied eels, sausages and beer.
This year a captive audience also awaits in Kentucky, Zurich and Madrid, cities which have adopted the Derby name but are still striving to recreate the drama of the field thundering round Tattenham Corner.
On June 7 the spectacle will be beamed to an estimated 500m television viewers, some watching via laptop and broadband.
The high-tech dissemination of sporting drama would seem unthinkable to the men who instituted the race.
It was on May 1779 that the 12th Earl Of Derby hosted a dinner party at his lavish country house near Epsom, the Oaks, after which a new race was named.
His guests included the foremost racing man of the day, Sir Charles Bunbury, and the friends decided to establish a similar contest, for colts, the following year.
The new race was to be named after either the host or Bunbury, decided by the toss of a coin. Thus was a nation spared the ignomy of referring to contests between local sporting teams as "Bunburys".
It was Bunbury, though, whose horse Diomed triumphed.
Lord Rosebery later remarked: "A roistering party at a country house founded two races. Seldom has a carouse had a more permanent effect."
The effects rippled through the highest circles. At its pinnacle, Derby Day closed Parliament and emptied London as hundreds of thousands of working-class people trekked to the downs.
The novelists Dickens, Trollope and Disraeli were frequent visitors in the 19th century, as they sought to document the dissipation around them. Attending in the 1870s, Henry James, the American writer, was particularly taken by "the British female of the lower orders . . . too stout, too hot, too red, too thirsty, too boisterous."
As perennial as the race itself is the incidental drama.
In 1913 Emily Davison, the militant suffragette, found a lasting place in Derby history when she threw herself in front of King George V's horse, Anmer, and suffered fatal injuries.
Since the mid-19th century the name of the eventual winner has tended to appear mysteriously, handwritten in chalk, on the well outside the Amato pub in Chalk Farm Lane.
Sceptics pour scorn at the old Gypsy tradition. But it has proved remarkably profitable to follow, with the winning horse identified correctly eight times in the past 12 years.
The pub, named after a victorious Derby horse, even fields calls from people all over the world, who want to check which colt has been chosen by the anonymous tipster.
Most racegoers will perhaps be unaware of the association the one-and-a-half mile course has with the domestic goddess of her day, Mrs Beeton.
Isabella Beeton was the stepdaughter of Henry Dorling, clerk of the course at Epsom in the Victorian era.
His 21 children, from two marriages, were moved into the Grandstand and Isabella, aged nine, took on responsibility for looking after the brood.
The children had ample opportunities for hide-and-seek games, having complete access to the stand and its saloons, except on race days, when their toys were packed away and they were sent out to other families.
The glamour of the blue riband event has declined since the heyday of Mrs Beeton but the 140 seconds of racing are still seen as career-defining.
Never was this more evident than last summer when Frankie Dettori, riding the odds-on favourite Authorized, engraved his name of the high altar of the sport.
It seemed as though the whole of Surrey was roaring as the Italian showman, in his 15th attempt, won the only classic to have eluded him.
Afterwards he said: "My heart seemed to stop beating and I had to pinch myself passing the post.
"It had all been so easy. I had expected a dog fight but it was as smooth as an oil painting."
While the eyes of the world are trained on the crown of turf, people in Epsom have always adopted an ambivalent attitude to the festival that overtakes their lives for a week.
Many local residents choose to abandon their homes, fed up with parking spaces filled by emergency vehicles, litter and unsightly roadside fencing.
Others complain about the cost of policing or the trade lost by local businesses.
Shops in Langley Vale will typically close early each day amid worries about vandalism.
One retailer in the village said: "The Derby is a smashing event.
"There's nothing like watching the Downs change in the week before you know you're on the eve of something special.
"But the shame is we have to suffer for it. Some customers tell me how they are bolting down their sheds, others report having pedigree cats go missing."
There may be more acceptance this year because the official charity is Help for Heroes, a campaign to improve treatment facilities for soldiers wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Funds will go towards building a swimming pool complex and gym at the nearby Headley Court armed forces rehabilitation centre.
Nick Blofeld, managing director of Epsom Downs Racecourse, said: "We are thrilled to be able to assist Help for Heroes.
"With the spire of Headley Court visible from the Grandstand at Epsom racecourse and therefore constantly in our minds, we cannot not think of a better way to support our local community.
"We are hoping that the Derby crowds will dig deep and give generously to the bucket collectors and therefore raise plenty of funds to help these incredibly brave patients."
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