Why it was thought that women would be put off by surnames only was not explained. It doesn’t stop them wearing Chanel, or going to Shakespeare. The habit is patronising to the occasional viewer, and downright infuriating for the faithful.. “On Derby day,” the journalist George Augustus Sala wrote in 1892, “London transports itself bodily to Epsom downs Belgravia jostles south Lambeth Capel Court and Pall Mall rub shoulders. A contingent from Bermondsey comes down in the same train with a cohort from Highgate. All ranks and conditions of men and women are jumbled together on the course.” Charles Dickens, writing 40 years earlier, believed that “a population rolls and surges and scrambles through the place that may be counted in millions.”
A century and a half later the Derby is still there, but in recent years there has been no need for anyone on the downs to jostle, surge or scramble. Just a decade ago, crowds of up to half a million continued to overrun the hills to watch the world’s most famous race for nothing, while the course’s infield was an impenetrable mass of bodies, every last one of them, apparently, queueing for the bar.
Yet even then the crowds had already started to trickle away.
By last year the downs were all but empty, and on the infield there was more space than people. Gone with the deserters was the riotous party atmosphere which had always given Derby day an addictive and almost dangerous edge. Spectators who had been noting the decline for several years suddenly began to use a new word in their discussions. Irreversible.Such was the depressing trough in which Edward Gillespie found the Derby 11 months ago. He had just been appointed managing director of United Racecourses, the company which owns Sandown and Kempton in addition to Epsom, after several innovative and highly successful years as the general manager at Cheltenham.The National Hunt Festival had prospered so grandly under Gillespie’s stewardship, in fact, that some critics awarded him the ultimate accolade, describing it as “too successful”.If the Derby is ever to regain a similar level of popularity, Gillespie is probably the only person who can make it happen, and since last July he has set about the task with typical zest Quite simply, he gets things done. For years there had been talk of shifting Derby day from Wednesday to Saturday.
Within months of Gillespie’s arrival, vague aspirations had become fact.There had been justifiable criticism of the overall standard of racing at the four-day Derby meeting, and on the big-race undercard in particular. This year, the meeting has been trimmed to three days, with the Group One Coronation Cup to be run two races before the Derby on Saturday.Next, he addressed the long-standing problem of the paddock, situated half a mile away from the stands down a narrow path. It was solved so simply – by installing a new paddock behind the grandstand – that you can only wonder why no one considered it before.It is typical of Gillespie that as he looks forward to the race in which he has invested so much effort, he is more concerned with what remains to be done. “I tend to be frustrated by what we haven’t achieved,” he says, “but by God we have achieved a lot in the last few months, and it feels like something is going on.”Typical too that he describes the likely absence on Saturday of Celtic Swing as “a blessing, as it’s made people realise that they really care about the race.”The essence of Gillespie’s approach is “to make it more accessible.