‘I could not agree more, Lord Rosebery,’ replied the Major General.
By now there was an air of great consternation in the Committee Room. The Duke of Devonshire, a former Commonwealth Minister of State in his Uncle Harold’s Government, was mentioning that he was quite sure that his former Tory Party colleague Christopher Soames was to become Britain’s next ambassador to Paris, which would probably carry with it a peerage.
The Duke of Norfolk, sitting forward at the table with his natural magisterial authority, observed that as a result of ‘this damned blackballing’ there were certain people he was not absolutely dying to encounter. He knew beyond all doubt that trouble involving a statesman is apt to be ten times more awkward than that involving anyone else. As seconder to Mr Soames’s candidature, Jakie Astor, himself a former Member of Parliament, was very, very angry.
The previous year’s Senior Steward Tom Blackwell, Brigade Major to the 5th Guards Armoured Division in the Second World War, was now on his feet. It was this former Coldstream Guards officer who had proposed Mr Soames in the first place. He also was not pleased. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I support every word Lord Rosebery said. It is pointless going on with this. We would not have put Christopher Soames up if we had not understood that people approved. If they have changed their minds at the last minute, they might have let the Senior Steward know.’
Major General Feilden declared helplessly, ‘What Mr Blackwell says is absolutely correct. I advised them there was no doubt Mr Soames would be elected to the Club. It must be that people have changed their minds … They should have let me know, I think. My Lords and Gentlemen, do I take it that the Club wants to go back to the original method of election?’
‘The original what?’ asked Lord Rosebery grumpily.
‘The old method of election,’ said the Major General.
‘Oh, yes, that,’ replied his Lordship. ‘We’d better get a sub-committee or something to go into it, rather like they did after the First War. They’d better present it to the Club at the Summer Meeting. Because if it goes on like this people will refuse to be put up for Membership.’
‘And I’, stated the still-irritated Earl Marshal of England, ‘am quite prepared to second Lord Rosebery’s suggestion.’
‘Would that be the wish of the Club?’ asked Sir Randle. The members muttered ‘Agreed’, with each man glancing sideways to see if there was a dissenting voice – perhaps belonging to the men who had embarrassed them all so utterly by ‘blackballing’ the Rt. Hon. Christopher Soames.
The meeting droned on for another hour, discussing a modernization plan for the racecourse at Newmarket. But nobody’s heart was really in it. This packed formal gathering of the great, the landed, the titled and the highest officer classes, was nervous. ‘Damned nervous’, in the words of Tom Blackwell. ‘Because this is not going to reflect at all well on us – and it’s made a damned sight worse because even we do not know who blackballed Soames. We should have listened to Harry Rosebery two years ago and scrapped the blackballing system once and for all.’
The Duke of Norfolk, was widely reputed to be an organizational genius, having masterminded the arrangements for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and managed an England Cricket Tour of Australia. Now, as he walked slowly back to the more comfortable morning room, there gathered about him a group of fellow members seeking not only comfort from his great wisdom, but also some guidance as to how to explain the aberration which had just taken place, should the news become public.
Lord Rosebery was not among them. Still furious, he stumped out of the Jockey Club Rooms and headed for his car, uttering only the words: ‘Absolutely ridiculous. Like some bloody secret society. This has to stop …’ Lord Rosebery, who in his prime was properly recognized as a truly formidable orator and a man of serious intellectual power, was oblivious to the fact that, on this black night, the blackball had been deliberately dropped by one of his closest colleagues.
Back in the morning room, Andrew Devonshire was at the Duke of Norfolk’s side, as were John Derby, Jakie Astor, Gerry Feilden, Jocelyn Hambro, Tom Blackwell, and Major General Sir George Burns, who privately thought someone might have merely ‘got a bit muddled up’ and blackballed Soames by sheer carelessness. His Grace did not share this view.
They all stood beneath George Stubbs’s near-priceless oil of the immortal racehorse Eclipse, painted outside the old ‘rubbing house’ on the nearby heath in the less stressful times of the late eighteenth century. ‘Well,’ said Bernard, sipping boldly from a large tumbler of J&B Scotch and soda, ‘this is a real bugger’s muddle. There is someone here with a clear feeling against Christopher Soames. We’ll meet again tomorrow morning and I think we can count on Harry Rosebery to put forward a proposal which will at least prevent this happening again. For the moment I suggest we say nothing, but perhaps make it clear to Mr Soames that such a ‘technicality’ will not happen again, and that he may look forward to becoming a full member at the very next opportunity.’
There was no argument with such a sure-footed course of action, but the members with strong Tory Party connections – Devonshire, obviously, Astor (close friend of the next Prime Minister Edward Heath), and Hambro (friend of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling) – were bitterly unhappy. No less so was Gerry Feilden who had chaired this disastrous meeting.
On the Newmarket racecourse that afternoon, the day had held such promise. Royal Palace, a grand-looking bright bay colt owned by Jockey Club member Jim Joel, had won the first English classic, the 2000 Guineas, without even a warm-up race as a three-year-old. In a dramatic, driving finish he had held off the French challenger Taj Dewan by a short head. The joy that always pervades the Jockey Club Room at Newmarket racecourse when an English classic race is won by a member was both sincere and sportsmanlike. Mr Joel, heir to a gigantic South African diamond fortune, was a popular owner-breeder, and his colt had carried a few sizeable wagers on behalf of several of the members. Three hours ago everything had seemed very pukka. And now this … The possibility of open, hostile, national ridicule loomed tiresomely upon the horizon.
As Lord Rosebery had gruffly phrased it: ‘This has to stop.’
At II o’clock the following morning, they all gathered once more at the Jockey Club Rooms in Newmarket High Street. A couple of glasses of port and a good night’s sleep had done precisely nothing for his Lordship’s mood. Harry Rosebery was still furious. ‘Good morning, m’lord,’ a member of staff greeted him as he walked through the main door.
‘I can think, offhand, of nothing, absolutely nothing’, he replied, ‘that is good, or even remotely acceptable about this particular morning.’
He walked steadily along the corridor to find the Senior Steward. They spoke for several minutes together and then joined the meeting in the Committee Room. Above the fireplace hung another magnificent oil by George Stubbs, which was, in fact, shortly to be removed in favour of a large portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, whose son-in-law the Club had just irrevocably humiliated. Major General Feilden called the members to order, which was not a difficult task. This was a very subdued gathering, since, even now, no one had the slightest idea which members had perpetrated the blackballing. The High Tory group were still extremely embarrassed and there was a dignified silence from them.
But there was a deafening silence from the corner occupied by one of the most popular sportsmen in England, the twentieth Baron Willoughby de Broke. For it was he who had blackballed Christopher Soames. Lord Willoughby, with the deadly subversiveness the system encouraged, had registered a secret and decisive protest to the proposed membership.
Major General Feilden proceeded. ‘My Lords and Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘Lord Rosebery has given notice to the Stewards that he wants to raise a point