THE NOSTALGISTS AND THE VAMPIRE AT HEREFORD'S WAKE

“2012 promises to be an exciting year at Hereford”, the Come Racing page of its website still enthuses.  Ouch.  Words committed to XML or Dreamweaver or somesuch in good faith, presumably around this time last year when all still appeared well enough with Hereford Racecourse (outwardly, at least), now jar with a dull clang of hopeless, superannuated optimism. 

Three days on from Sunday’s poignant final act of Rules racing worship for the foreseeable future, that website might just as well be making giddy predictions as to the previous night’s Lottery numbers.  At around 3.47pm on December 16^th, the venue whose interests it represents changed from racecourse present to racecourse past in the blink of any eye.

I was there.  I wasn’t originally meant to be there, but my commitment to Alnwick’s Point-to-Point fixture fell through when the Northumberland sward obligingly failed to prove absorbent enough to pass an inspection the afternoon before.  I imagined that the Hereford car park, notionally all turf, was pulling off a pretty passable impersonation of Alnwick, being a black shade of green before racing and surely the chosen playground of nobody and no-one but Flanders and Swann’s hippopotami after.  The groundstaff at Alnwick have until the January 20^th meeting of the West Percy to return the racing surface to a useable condition.  Those to have been kept on to continue to do similar at Hereford have, regrettably, rather more time available to do likewise to the car park.

Other people were there.  2,600, in fact, although for the purposes of Levy Board attendance statistics (source: http://aes.hblb.org.uk/index.php/attendances/summaries) only the 1,100 of us that paid to get in will count as attendees.  A few returns for the first two and a half weeks of December are still awaited, but at the time of writing that latter figure is bigger than that for all bar one Flat fixture so far (the December 1^st night meeting at fellow Arena Racing Company venue Wolverhampton, eventually called off three races in before the risk of Polytrack-induced concussion became genuine), yet smaller than for every jumps fixture in the same period apart from a Kempton “jumpers’ bumper” afternoon and a Leicester card which few thought would beat a temporary cold snap.

1,100 isn’t actually a big total in the context of Hereford’s 2012 attendance figures for recorded-as-paying customers.  Seven of the eight meetings to survive the weather between April and November drew more, albeit none topped the total of 3,062 relieved of £14 or more at the turnstile for arguably the course’s final surviving cash cow fixture on a late June Sunday afternoon. 

Further delving into Hereford’s performance data reveals that October 21^st 2007 was the last time it attracted more than 4,000 combined paying public, Annual Members and complimentary badgeholders to a single meeting.  It’s also the only time the course has done that since 5,920 such punters attended the last-ever running of the much-missed Grand National Day fixture in 2005 (previous years had attracted 6,488, 5,898 and 3,249, in answer to the next question you were going to ask), the transfer of which to Chepstow - where using the same criteria attendances have never yet hit the 5,000 mark in seven years of trying - is frequently cited as the point where ARC's lack of confidence in Hereford switched from merely presumed to writ large.

Couched solely in terms of getting proverbial cheeks on plywood, however, Hereford is not by any means a uniquely poor performer for the ARC Group.  It may not even the worst.  Sedgefield has yet to attract more than 2,000 paying customers to a single meeting in 2012 and has not breached the 3,200 mark for any meeting other than that on Boxing Day since May 2005; Worcester likewise hasn’t pulled more than 3,400 for any fixture not on Derby Day since September 2006; and the May 2004 renewal of the United Hunts evening is the only Folkestone jumps fixture since 1994 to have enticed over 3,000 paying public, Members and badgeholders. 

Something’s keeping the likes of Worcester (the course that refuses to sink) and Sedgefield (surely as Teflon-coated as the town’s ubiquitous former MP, having shrugged off two mooted closure threats in the 1960s/1970s and the specific ire of an array of characters from Animal Aid to Clement Freud) out of the line of fire for at least the time being, one that neither Hereford nor Folkestone could avoid any longer. 

Yet at the same time the recurring mantra from ARC has been one of the now closed courses' financial non-viability; but in the case of Hereford in particular, how so?  It isn’t conspicuously cheap as Rules racecourses go, so it can’t be due to outdoing itself where accumulating gate money is concerned.  The course only has as many fences to maintain as Worcester (nine), two fewer than either Chepstow or Doncaster, and consists of a shorter circuit than all of these three, so the husbandry costs ought not be unusually high for an ARC jumps track. 

Race sponsorship revenue is unlikely to be at fault, either, given the sourcing of commercial companies, betting firms (also the suppliers of the media rights monies which continue to seep into the coffers) and families of the dearly departed who were collectively prepared to stump up for each and every one of the 107 contests to beat the elements and take place at Hereford in 2012 (at an average of 10.07 runners per race at the final declaration stage, incidentally).

So what does that leave – too few businesses availing themselves of the conference facilities trumpeted on the website but less so, if at all, on the signage outside the course?  Too little raised, perhaps, from food and drink takings on raceday without the assistance of the ghastly beer rucksacks (omnipresent at certain other ARC Group courses) to bolster turnover?

Maybe Greg Wood of the Guardian is nearest the truth in asserting that this week’s brace of fallen racecourses is less likely to be non-viable in the true sense of running at a loss, but rather has been simply ticking along at the sort of gently rising rate of profit which was all well and good in the recent past but – as the Reuben Brothers’ expectations of their portfolio’s revenue-generating potential heightens - all of a sudden isn’t.  Being a slow-burning, steady little earner no longer cuts the mustard.

One man who might conceivably have been pressed for answers on this matter on Sunday afternoon, and in general on his degree of complicity (real or imagined) in the decision to call time on Hereford and Folkestone, was ARC Group chairman Lord Michael Howard of Lympne, scoring points for audacity if nothing else in making an appearance.

A man, of course, quite prepared to fail to answer a direct question 14 times if once isn’t enough, Howard escaped any sort of impromptu Paxmanesque grilling this afternoon on Hereford or any other, non-racing matter.  What a shame: expanding on his £17,000 expenses claim for gardeners, or his assertion on Radio 4 in August that enforcing the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act hadn’t made him any less down wid da kidz, innit bruv, would have whiled away a few minutes before the selling hurdle just as nicely as racing talk.

Instead, the man with something of the night about him was on this day at least permitted to move among his pippurl – sorry, people, unchallenged, perhaps safe in the knowledge that the extra security drafted in to prevent last-day trophy-hunters making off with the winning post or other mementos could have stepped in at any point.

Am altogether less contentious presence trackside was racing historian Chris Pitt, whose otherwise absolutely peerless survey of the 20^th century’s defunct racecourses A Long Time Gone now predates the closure of four British and Irish Rules venues even in its updated 2006 incarnation (several chapters of which were supplied by Stewart Nash, chairman of the West Berkshire Racing Club and also present today).

Brought along especially for the occasion, Pitt produced an original copy of the racecard from the course’s “evening” meeting of May 1^st, 1975; a fixture which finished at 8pm, as may have been expected, but which started 1.30pm, as most certainly wouldn’t.  As much of a window on a time when the framing of races didn’t err towards an endless succession of Dirk Vennix-appeasing handicaps as anything else, no fewer than 12 of the (count them) 14 races were non-handicaps – seven 4yo 2m novice hurdles (two divisions split again several times over), one 3m hunter chase and four divisions of a 2m4f novice chase. 

Never mind the BHA’s recent engineering of novice chases to force bigger fields and greater participation – this card instantly recalled a time when the connections of 61 animals were still prepared to enter their horse in the same novice chase at scale without any coercion whatsoever. 

Pity that day’s duty commentator Graham Goode, required to call 219 horses without recourse to a monitor or – as is permitted nowadays when an overnight entry tops 125 runners – a second commentator to spread the burden.  Impeccably delivered as it was today, David Fitzgerald’s task from the commentary box wouldn’t have been half as exhausting.

No ARC jumps venue can, of course, welcome as many as 219 horses on any given day any more – limiting final declarations according to the number of racecourse stables on site guarantees that.  Potentially around 1,000 runners per season will take their chances in the fixtures moved from Hereford to other ARC courses from here on, however, placing an additional burden on surfaces in some instances arguably already pressed into action more often than they can necessarily withstand.

Herein lies one further madness of ARC’s decision.  In addition to producing a safe surface for some pre-existing non-Rules activities, such as Arabian Racing Organisation racedays (of which there were two in 2012), Hereford – perfectly honest racing surface, and all - is to be kept sufficiently well maintained in 2013 to be able to step into the breach as a locum National Hunt venue if meetings elsewhere within the Group are abandoned with enough notice. 

Yet during the same year, the drainage and irrigation issues at Uttoxeter which have already required a decade’s worth of spare time to work on (even The Fast Show's Ted and Ralph didn't need that long...) will almost certainly once again impinge upon racing at the Staffordshire track.  Those are issues which, whilst never prompting an abandonment, do require frequent recourse to dolling off of racing lines and omissions of jumps (steeplechase fences in particular).

In light of which, and with the strictures regarding the production of decent summer jumping ground already well understood at Hereford following several years of June and August fixtures, it seems like a tricked missed not to have moved all of Uttoxeter’s summer and autumn meetings 93 miles southwest just for one year – long enough, at last, to complete the necessary excavations once and for all, whilst simultaneously keeping Hereford’s name officially on the fixture list against a backdrop of ARC and the course’s aspiring future owners (two consortia in particular) continuing to talk turkey.

“We guarantee a day at the races with us will get your hearts pounding and leave you wanting to come back for more!”, the Come Racing page of the website additionally gushed, and at the time of writing this gushes still.  Granted a little more foresight, the opportunity to sate that desire back at Hereford next summer would have been very possible.  Barring unforeseen disasters elsewhere within the ARC Group, however, it must now be odds against.