Soho Man Ventures South

Where possible, I try to correct mistakes. I don’t mean factual errors so much as mood or overall background. The other day, troubled by a recently fractured right arm, I was caught somewhere between the sporting years 1964 and 1982 and an assessment of Soho drinker and writer Jeffrey Bernard.

I admit it’s a tenuous link but it’s far from non-existent. He toured the boxing booths as a young man (you wouldn’t have wanted to take him on) and made the most of boxing on television with Cassius Clay, as he was then, dominating headlines and Japanese boxers coming to the fore as Tokyo showed that Asia was finally ready to take on the West at the highest sporting level.

Jeffrey Bernard became famous through his Low Life column in the Spectator and the stage play or monologue which followed. In the end the drink killed him; by then pancreatic cancer and half a leg missing meant he needed help every day. People said it served him right and what a waste but he could turn an elegant phrase more easily than most of them.

He was sacked now and again but editors knew his strengths. When the arguments about the Grand National distance, fences etc first began, you stepped into a space occupied by one of his heroes. “Didn’t seem to bother Fulke Walwyn on Reynoldstown in 1936,” he mused. “12 stone 2lbs and the fences were bloody great big black things.”

That kept one or two publications happy but he saved a bit of pure Bernard for Low Life. “What on earth has happened to the Adelphi?” he spluttered. “That was the very lifeblood of the National. Jockey races on tin trays down the spiral staIrcase, Irish trainers on the toot until the small hours but still beating you down in the morning.

“Now it’s just like a convention centre, a corporate facility for sharp boys to get together and slips of girls with clipboards making sure of coffee next time round. And this is the Adelphi! Apparently we only drink at certain times these days so I was a bit surprised to see Fred Rimell at breakfast in the corner on his own with a bottle of champagne. Didn’t seem to do him any harm, though; Rag Trade won the National a few hours later.”

The big mistake I made in the earlier piece was in not connecting the two years in terms of racing memories. It wouldn’t have been difficult, with Lionel Holliday’s Hethersett winning the 1962 St Leger and thereby making up for his fall in the Derby. As a 13-year-old only child old you have a keen sense of fairness and the inner belief that all will turn out well in the end. Somewhere in that line of reasoning I think Hethersett would have won the Derby and Larkspur, Epsom hero but unplaced on Town Moor, was jolly lucky.

Earlier that year, on a very warm day at Salisbury, a middle-aged lady, generously endowed, went topless on the grass in the cheap ring. She was urged on by her friends (male), whom I took to be farm stock and there was laughter all around. I looked, as you do, and then felt sad for her.

Apart from the mild vulgarity it was essentially Thomas Hardy, though nothing like as serious as Henchard’s fall from grace in The Mayor of Casterbridge. The publishers Penguin had a way of capturing these bucolic scenes, even at their harshest, and I could never bear to part with any of their covers. That incident at Salisbury instantly reminded me of Hardy, the way a fly-blown African colony complete with pink knees and petty officialdom can only be Graham Greene.

We went to Goodwood one day, Bernard and I, and I remarked how well he’d scrubbed up. Still good-looking but frayed around the edges. “What’s that line about easing off? You know, from the one who wasn’t Hemingway?”

“F Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy. ‘In the morning you were never violently sorry but if your heart was slightly out of order you went on the wagon for a few days and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.’”

“Wow. That won’t happen today, will it?”

“No, no. Not at Goodwood on a Tuesday.”

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