The British Horseracing Film
Representations of the ‘Sport of Kings’ in British Cinema
Stephen Glynn
De Montfort University Leicester, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-05179-2 ISBN 978-3-030-05180-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05180-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964117
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Acknowledgements
Placing a bet on a horse has three major infuences: one acts on the advice of someone respected; one studies closely the available form guides; or else one chooses purely for affective reasons like the associations of a name. This book has been shaped by similar infuences: for their expert advice throughout the commissioning and editing process, my thanks to Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman at Palgrave Macmillan; for access to relevant horseracing flm materials, my thanks to Steve Chibnall at De Montfort University and the staff at the BFI Reuben Library in London; fnally, for their unfailing support however poor my hunches, my greatest thanks to Sarah and Roz, names I will always choose frst.
list of figures
Fig. 2.1 Derby 1896—Cinema ‘Out of the Starting Gate’
Fig. 2.2 Pimple in The Whip—Newmarket’s Monty Python
2.3
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 3.3
Fig. 3.4
Fig. 4.1
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Fig. 4.3
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Fig. 4.6
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract This chapter offers a brief history of horseracing, considered to be Britain’s frst national sport, and a defnition of the distinctively British horseracing flm genre. It argues especially that, alongside aesthetic and economic factors, the horseracing flm constitutes a viable source for social history, with the on- and off-feld re-presentations of the sport and its associated gambling culture an ideological metonym for the concerns of wider British society. It sketches out the enduring preoccupations of the genre which depicts a rigidly ranked society in miniature, with individuals accepting their place in a hierarchy stretching from lordly horse-owners to lowly stable workers, and from the Royal Enclosure to the popular stands, playing out the narrative polarities of (higher class) romance and (lower class) corruption.
Keywords British horseracing · Genre life-cycle · Social history
In Warner Brothers’ My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), set in Edwardian London and everywhere displaying its unprecedented $17 million production budget, phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) looks for a suitable environment to test whether his speech training on lowly Covent Garden fower seller Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) will allow her to pass as a member of British high society. He chooses to take her to the opening day of Royal Ascot in Berkshire, Europe’s best-attended horseracing meeting, but also, more
© The Author(s) 2019
S. Glynn, The British Horseracing Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05180-8_1
pertinently, one of the most exclusive events in Britain’s social calendar, noted for its haute couture and restricted enclosures—‘everyone who should be here is here’, they sing in the ‘Ascot Gavotte’. Following Henry’s advice to restrict conversation to health and the weather, Eliza’s poise and pronunciation lead to initial acceptance, even admiration for her use of the ‘latest small talk’, until her enthusiasm during a close race fnish prompts the distinctly unladylike demotic of ‘come on, Dover, move your bloomin’ arse!’—much to Higgins’ amusement, but general consternation (one woman even faints). Although Hepburn cannot escape the impression that her Cockney accent is the one practised with an elocutionist, the scene is consummately executed, ‘a smashing, positively dashing spectacle’ as the Gavotte confdently underlines. Both Cukor’s flm and its source text, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1956 hit Broadway musical, were based on the 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw—a piece containing no comparable Ascot setpiece sequence. Nonetheless, with its intersection of rigid social hierarchies and relaxed sporting excitement, the US addition of a central horseracing meet to demonstrate the quintessence of British cultural values made perfect sense: with the flm winning eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and an international box offce of $72 million, the interpolated sequence clearly met both critical and public expectations, demonstrating how, at home and abroad, British society’s sporting passion is primarily equated with horseracing.
And not without good cause, since horseracing is widely acknowledged as ‘the frst truly national sport in Britain’ (Vamplew and Kay 2005: vi). Its long history stretches back to the Roman Empire, while the frst recorded race takes place at a Smithfeld horse fair in 1174. Its appellation as ‘the Sport of Kings’ begins with James I who, coming across amateur racing at the Suffolk village of Newmarket in 1605, became so smitten with sporting interests that he was reprimanded by Parliament for neglecting his regal duties. Royal patronage was secured as James’ successor Charles I, equally enamoured, inaugurated the Gold Cup, Britain’s frst cup race, in 1634; in 1671 Charles II became the frst (and only) reigning monarch to ride the winner of the Newmarket Town Plate, a race he founded six years earlier (and won again four years later); horse-owning Queen Anne founded the Ascot Racecourse in Berkshire in 1711 with Her Majesty’s Plate and a generous purse of 100 guineas. Until this point racing had mostly been a two horse event, motivated by large wagers between noblemen owners, who often rode
their own horses across private grounds or open land. The introduction of Arabian bloodstock from the late-seventeenth century propelled the evolution of the thoroughbred racehorse, while the publication from 1727 of a Racing Calendar, the creation of racecourses (initially open with free entry) near thriving towns, and the 1752 formation of the Jockey Club, a regulatory authority comprising racing’s elite (so not including mere jockeys), all worked to transform British horseracing into a highly organised sport, but one still frmly under aristocratic control. The establishment of the frst classic races, the St Leger in 1776, the Oaks in 1779 and the Derby in 1780, though created over dinner by gentlemen of leisure as competition for their thoroughbreds, nonetheless set the framework for modern horseracing. The latter race (apocryphally named on the toss of a coin between the 12th Earl of Derby and his party guest Sir Charles Bunbury), quickly became the pretext for a mass exodus from London, with estimates of over 100,000 gathering on Epsom Downs, some to witness the new racing spectacle, most to indulge in a traditional country fair. The popular holiday atmosphere and sheer scale of operation is impressively recreated in Wessex Films’ Esther Waters (Ian Dalrymple, Peter Proud, September 1948), adapted from George Moore’s 1894 novel, when the titular ex-housemaid (Kathleen Ryan) and her publican/bookmaker husband William Latch (Dirk Bogarde) honeymoon by joining the horizon-stretching crowds to the 1881 Derby. With an ailing William losing everything on a subsequent Derby, forcing Esther to return to domestic service, the flm offers an opposite social angle and ultimately more sombre sporting treatment to that displayed in My Fair Lady. Both flms demonstrate, though, Epsom’s continuation of the medieval tradition of Carnival, a Londonbased exception for race meetings until the arrival of the railways allowed horses to move around the country and transformed racing from sporadic and parochial events for landed gentry into a regular and nationwide entertainment open to all sections of British society and thus ripe for commercialisation (Vamplew 2016: 29–37).
The sport’s attraction to the visual arts followed a parallel trajectory (Budd 1997; Pickeral 2009). Horses have been drawn, painted and sculpted for millennia, with competitive racing frst depicted in Roman chariot scenes found on mid-frst century circus cups excavated at Colchester. Britain’s earliest (surviving) picture of horseracing is August 24 1684, The last horse race run before Charles II of Blessed Memory at Dorsett Ferry near Windsor Castle, an etching from 1687 by
the ‘father of British sporting art’, Francis Barlow. Much in the image remains familiar, with a weighing scales and clerk in attendance, the (late) monarch and his court viewing from the royal box, while trackside crowds cheer the peaked cap and breeches-clad riders towards the winning post (actually at Datchett). Barlow’s Flemish infuence continued through artists such as Peter Tillemans, who painted several panoramas of racecourses at Newmarket Heath, before depictions advanced with the mimetic accuracy of George Stubbs, a student of equine anatomy who skillfully integrated his horse subjects with a natural landscape. William Frith’s The Derby Day (all human life is here), exhibited to great acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1858—and carefully recreated in a tableau for Esther Waters—portrayed in detailed ‘widescreen’ the crowded saturnalia on Epsom Downs, with thimble-riggers, pickpockets, acrobats and courtesans all to the fore. As the sport’s accessibility increased, handwrought racing prints enjoyed a century of popularity, until superseded by cheaper reproduction techniques such as line engravings, mezzotints, photography—and then cinema. Indeed, flms about horseracing became so plentiful that, in November 1931, John Grierson, leading advocate of a socially purposeful flmmaking, decried what he perceived as the pervasive triviality of popular British cinema: ‘We need something better to build with than racing scandals and the campaigns of silly asses against impossible Bolsheviks’ (Hardy 1981: 118). Cinema featuring Grierson’s ‘silly asses’ aka the British espionage flm has received plentiful and regular academic consideration spanning Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay to James Bond and beyond (Wark 1991; Miller 2003; Burton 2016), but far less attention has been paid to the popularity of that other staple, especially of interwar cinema, those ‘racing scandals’ aka the British horseracing flm: it is an imbalance this study intends to address.
Horseracing constitutes British cinema’s primary sporting mount, a symbiotic partnership whereby both forms of mass entertainment developed in tandem. In his study of early flm Luke McKernan has stressed the seminal importance of horseracing to the British social and cinematic landscape, arguing that, much as boxing and its myths of selfimprovement had defned America and catalysed its publicly exhibited cinema, so Britain primarily ‘saw itself’ at the races on flm (1998: 97). This socio-historic re-presentation will prove a key component of the genre’s signifcance, functioning as a cohesive cultural forum wherein ‘industry and audience shared beliefs and values, helping to maintain the social order and assisting it in adapting to change’ (Feuer 1992: 145).
Any UK adapting would never be sudden: with the sport ‘naturally’ and undemocratically run by elite amateur bodies such as the National Hunt Committee, Mike Huggins notes how ‘Attitudes to power in British racing showed an acceptance of the status quo, an unwillingness to change accepted procedures, but also an expectation that power should be exercised only reluctantly, an attribute also found more broadly in British opposition to all forms of political extremism, whether from left or right. Racing was a socially ranked and ordered micro-society which made clear to individuals their place in the social hierarchy, from the Royal Enclosure, to the Club stands, or the stands and enclosures further down the rankings. But such divisions, embedded within racing, generated very little evidence of resentment or antagonism between classes’ (2003: 208). Extrapolating from this easy national coexistence of the privileged with the proletarian, the glamour of the fat and the grit of jumps racing, Christine Gledhill adumbrates the narrative permutations in horseracing’s progression to flm: ‘From nineteenth-century genre painting through popular fction, the racetrack has always held a special place in English culture as a meeting place of different classes and types of men and women. It thus provides exciting material for melodramas of classbased fnancial corruption, opposed by honest stable lads and lasses as well as the spectacle of thundering horses and nefarious attempts to nobble them’ (Gledhill 2007: 6–7). By the time of the Great War this union was so fully cemented that cinema’s early trade magazine The Bioscope could confdently predict a box-offce ‘winner’ in genre pieces such as A Gamble for Love (1917) since they treated ‘a subject which has never yet failed to commend itself to a British audience’, an audience envisaged as all-encompassing since horseracing was defned as ‘the sport of kings in which the democracy can participate’ (23 August 1917: 825).
Alongside this (perceived) inclusiveness, with horseracing an atypical shared pursuit allowing representations of the nation’s full sociogeographical gamut, resides the genre’s (at times problematic) aesthetic appeal. Britain’s cinema, seen to possess an overriding literary heritage, has been categorised as relying on plot and characterisation to forward its narrative and betraying ‘a dawdling tendency, a tendency to use miseen-scene for merely pictorial rather than dramatic effect’ (McFarlane and Mayer 1992: 140). While such hyper-generalised national defnitions are evidently contentious (Hollywood in its early CinemaScope era was not averse to slowing the dramatic action to show off widescreen’s potentialities), and here imply a hierarchy of cinematic styles (why ‘merely’?
Why not, as Andrew Higson argues, ‘a deliberate attempt at product differentiation’ from Hollywood fare (1995: 28)?), the horseracing flm, as with the paintings of Stubbs and his successors, incontrovertibly invites a picturesque aesthetic, both through ‘that most photogenic’ of animals’ inherent grace and speeding prowess—‘Cameramen like to shoot horses, don’t they’ (Bergan 1982: 66)—and particularly through a secure location in Britain’s green and pleasant rural landscape. Such visual indices further enhance the genre’s medium compatibility since horseracing can more readily jump the major obstacle to credible fctional representations sorely evident in human-centred sports such as boxing or football, namely the employment of actors lacking the requisite body shape and skill sets. David Thomson notes that masking actors’ inadequacies through heavy editing fools nobody: ‘as with Fred Astaire dancing, you have to show the whole fgure doing what he does best’ and without the requisite ‘mise-en-scene that employs spatial relationships’, every sports fan can ‘smell the fake’ (‘Playing for Real’, Sight and Sound, September 1996: 13). While there will be instances of actor-jockeys’ uncomfortable racing stance and close-up inserts of clearly modelled riding before an unconvincing back projection, the more distanced general focus on horses sprinting or jumping—doing what they do best—cogently captures a natural activity inseparable from recreation. It forges a winning combination.
Matching how the sport is inextricably woven into the fabric of British society, horseracing has remained a ubiquitous presence in British cinema. For a national flm historiography this facilitates different ‘avenues’ of methodology, presenting a key site of technological and aesthetic innovation shaped by indigenous social and international economic cultural drivers (Allen and Gomery 1985). Though this study’s home stretch will trace a post-1960s quantitative decline, three relatively recent examples can illustrate the racecourse’s enduring generic range and technological extent. In the fourteenth outing for the globally successful James Bond franchise, Eon’s $30 million A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985) (Sir) Roger Moore’s battles with psychopathic industrialist and Goldfnger-reboot Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) begin as 007 investigates Zorin’s involvement in a British horseracing scam. Early scenes at Crown-owned Ascot show the villain’s horse Pegasus suspiciously accelerate to victory, leading Bond to follow Zorin to his thoroughbred equine centre at Chantilly where, discovering his horses have an adrenaline implant activated by the jockey’s whip, the pair race around
a booby-trapped training track. These expensively engineered and visually spectacular scenes work (almost parodically) to establish Bond’s own English thoroughbred credentials: frst, socially at home in top hat and tails at Ascot’s exclusive enclosure where his horseracing knowledge allows him unerringly to pick winners during MI6’s day at the races; later, physically showing his prowess in the saddle (Bondian double entendre intended) as when evading Zorin’s moving fences and murderous henchmen. All this is achieved under the alias of racehorse owner James St John Smythe, an upper-class infection reinforced by his close partnership with fellow secret service agent and horse-expert Sir Godfrey Tibbett, signifcantly played by Patrick Macnee, best known as Major the Hon. John Steed, doyen of well-groomed English gentlemen spies in The Avengers (6 series, ITV 1961–1969).1 As with (Royal) Ascot itself, Bond equals British equals horseracing.
Dropping down the criminal/racecourse/cinematic food chain, MGM-British Studio’s £750,000 gritty cult thriller Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) follows (Sir) Michael Caine’s London mob enforcer John Carter back to his Newcastle homeland as he seeks to avenge his brother’s recent killing. Carter’s search for information soon leads him to Newcastle Racecourse at Gosforth Park, where he encounters an old enemy and crime-boss chauffeur Eric Paice (Ian Hendry). Swapping Bond’s privileged glamour for provincial gangsterdom, this early scene at a dour trackside and paddock utilises horseracing as a known site for underworld activity, while Hodges’ long-lensed ‘grabbed’ authentic spectator backdrop to his race footage illustrates the sport’s popularity with working-class punters. A subplot to Get Carter features the UK’s insalubrious porn flm industry, which also has regular recourse to a horse-riding setting with the full social gamut on (explicit) display. In Roldvale’s The Playbirds (William Roe, 1978), a ‘sexploitation’ vehicle for porn star Mary Millington shot in four weeks for just £120,000 (and a blatant rip-off of Terry Bishop’s 1959 psycho-thriller Cover Girl Killer), the serial murder of centrefold models draws horse-loving Inspector Jack Holbourne (Glynn Edwards) and undercover WPC Lucy Sheridan (Millington) into the Soho-based world of glamour photography. Harry Dougan (Alan Lake), millionaire proprietor of the titular topshelf magazine (allowing product placement for the flm’s porn-magnate producer David Sullivan), also owns a racehorse named Mr Playmate, and several scenes forsake the (nonetheless plentiful) naked photo shoots and bedroom romps to attend (chaotically edited) race meetings
at Leicester Racecourse and the ‘home’ of British racing, Newmarket’s Rowley Mile in Suffolk, juxtapositions that implicate new and ‘dirty money’ in the sport—the pornocracy seeking to join the racing elite for social respectability. In all three flms, the racecourse scenes are brief— though telling—components of their respective vehicle and, throughout its existence, the British horseracing flm will offer fuller examples of bigbudget colour spectacle, mid-budget crime thrillers, and bottom-budget exploitation.
These examples demonstrate how horseracing presents an encompassing British social and physical topography, but also raise the thorny issue of categorisation: just as one can ask how many songs are needed for a flm to become a musical, how much racing coverage is needed to qualify as a horseracing flm? The question lays bare long-standing tensions within flm taxonomy. Denis Gifford, pioneer of British cinema’s encyclopaedic classifcation, divided the nation’s flm content into 23 categories and defned the sports flm as ‘a dramatic flm, usually involving crime, in which the central theme is a sport such as boxing, football, horseracing etc.’ (1973: 12). Though roughly half of these inclusions are centred on horseracing, Gifford’s generic apportioning results overall in relatively small numbers for sport (the highest annual total reaching but 3%). However, as Stephen Shafer points out, an examination of Gifford’s flm synopses uncovers how ‘a large number of flms in other categories (such as comedy, crime, musicals and adventures) also deal with various sports such as English football or racing or at least with aspects of sports such as gambling. If such flms were included, this category would have been substantially larger’ (1997: 28–29). This genre investigation pointedly includes many such flms: for instance, Gifford categorises Come On George! (1939) as a comedy, but it also features criminal/musical acts— and is a horseracing flm; he labels The Rocking Horse Winner (1949) as a fantasy, but it is equally a supernatural thriller—and a horseracing flm. The applied ‘rule’ for generic inclusion in this study evaluates flms where horseracing constitutes a signifcant narrative momentum, though even this prescription must function at a qualitative before quantitative level. The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1965) is a composite flm following three very different owners of the titular motor car. Only the frst story is set in the horseracing world, again featuring scenes at Ascot: however, while the triumphs and betrayals of the Marquess of Frinton (Rex Harrison) may strike as parochial and overprivileged, they occasion the flm’s subsequent, more sober narratives, and offer resonant parallels for both
gangster adultery in Italy and wartime altruism in Trieste. Frinton thus receives detailed treatment in this study, while Bond, Carter and Dougan will not; in horseracing (if not academic) parlance, you win some, you lose some.
Nonetheless, as with all sporting rules, empirical parameters must be applied. Though Christine Gledhill (sensibly) counsels that genres abjure ‘rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion’ since they ‘are not discrete systems, consisting of a fxed number of listable items’ (2008: 254, 259), even or especially with a pliable, ‘unfxed’ defnition pragmatic assumptions need to operate and this study will examine the treatment of British horseracing at ownership, training/racing and betting levels in flms made for theatrical release. Thus, bar the briefest comparison or context, it omits television-made fare such as the Dick Francis-inspired The Racing Game (6 episodes, ITV November 1979–January 1980) since such ‘small-screen’ texts possess distinct economic, stylistic and exhibition dynamics necessitating discrete and therefore more diffuse investigations. Nor will it feature horseracing documentaries such as Dark Horse (Louise Ormond, April 2015), telling how a mining-town syndicate’s Dream Alliance won the Welsh Grand National, or Being A.P. (Anthony Wonke, November 2015), which follows the fnal season of Northern Ireland’s famed jump jockey A. P. McCoy. Alan Williams has categorised flm’s three ‘principal genres as being narrative flm, experimental /avant-garde flm and documentary’ (1984: 121–125), and The British Horseracing Film limits its focus to narrative i.e. fctional flms, partly because of the paucity of avant-garde work with a horseracing setting or subject, and partly because, like television, documentaries necessitate a different set of generic criteria rehearsed elsewhere (Renov 1993; Ward 2005), but mainly because the frequency of fctional treatments— this book features a feld of 100-plus investigations of the ‘Sport of Kings’—points to the importance of horseracing not only in the quotidian rhythms of national life but also, and especially, its immutable place in Britain’s social and cultural imaginary landscape.
The British Horseracing Film, functioning primarily as a genre study, traces its included flms’ distinct narrative patterns and secure iconography while teasing out the overarching development of a generic ‘life cycle’. Williams’ inter-generic categorisations chime with theories of intra-generic development which is also commonly adjudged a three-part process, codifed by Thomas Schatz as ‘experimental’, before the genre has a discernable self-identity, ‘classical’ when its conventions are stable
and most coherent, and ‘mannerist’ when its original purpose has been outlived and its conventions are openly cited, even subverted (1981: 36–41)—Richard Dyer, labelling flm genres as successively ‘primitive’, ‘mature’ and ‘decadent’, offers an equivalent if more biological-infected trajectory (1992: 61). While aware of the dangers in any rigid delineation of development—excluding flms that realise a precocious selfidentity or remain unstable when the genre has cohered, the paradigm retains a broad relevance to the horseracing flm and will be employed here, though with differing methodological emphases. Thus, Chapter 2 explores the representation of horseracing from its earliest motionpicture footage through to the late-1920s, analysing in particular how the drive to convey a meeting’s excitement drove technological experimentation in the new medium. Chapter 3 surveys the ‘long 1930s’ when British horseracing and its cinematic representations were at the apogee of their popularity and stability, offering regular re-presentations of the era’s social structures and concerns. Chapter 4 investigates how, postwar, the sport’s declining hold on the national imagination (and purse strings) leads to more diverse if infrequent cinematic representations of horseracing, culminating in an uncertain aesthetic self-consciousness. Each chapter is itself split into three sections, with each section featuring a flm deemed ‘frst past the post’, a fuller case study exploring an indicative and/or infuential contributor to the genre through its production history, the flm ‘text’ itself (including a plot summary since many remain backmarkers in Britain’s cinematic memory), and its consumption, both critical and commercial.
In referencing the ‘British’ horseracing flm this study adds to ‘genre’ the equally contentious parameters of ‘national cinema’. Raymond Durgnat, for instance, begins his pioneering account of postwar cinema A Mirror for England (sic) by admitting that, in selecting flms for discussion, ‘our criterion has had to be rather arbitrary and subjective: is it about Britain, about British attitudes, or, if not, does it feel British?’ (1970: 5). Here, though, one can attempt a frmer prescription. With the sport’s inextricable overseas involvement, the avowed focus of this monograph is less on flms presenting exclusively British-based horseracing content than those possessing nation-defning contribution levels to cast-and-crew and production fnance. Two examples should illustrate these additional ‘entry requirements’. One might expect a full treatment of National Velvet (Clarence Brown, January 1945), a double Oscarwinning thoroughbred with its story of intrepid British 14-year-old
Velvet Brown training up her high-spirited lottery-won steed and then riding it to victory at the Grand National. In its favour, the flm is narratively centred on Aintree’s world-famous steeplechase and made London-born Elizabeth Taylor into an international flm star; it is not proscriptive that its horseracing scenes were shot by the California coast (with Pebble Beach Golf Course’s holes visible in the background), nor that US-based Taylor is surrounded by an A-list Hollywood cast featuring Mickey Rooney and Anne Revere—but this high-budget project was produced, marketed and distributed by MGM, thus making it from head to hoof an (industry-defned) American flm (Mark Glancy places it with Hollywood ‘British’ flms, US-made eulogies that ‘are “British” rather than British’ (1999: 2)), and so, rather like Velvet herself at Aintree, National Velvet must ultimately be disqualifed.2 Conversely, Velvet’s ‘profound identifcation with the animal Other’s oppressed position’ (Smith 2012: 54) is more sombrely replayed in 2018’s Lean on Pete where troubled US 15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) fees with the titular quarter horse to save it from the slaughterhouse. This flm is entirely set in America’s big country and explores America’s precariat with a largely American cast—but it was directed by Yorkshireborn Andrew Haigh and, crucially, was fnanced by Film4 Productions with contributions from the British Film Council and National Lottery: it therefore runs under British colours and thus will be examined here.
A further caveat is needed on viewing restrictions and ‘competition’. Lean on Pete can be seen, admired and analysed on multiple platforms—much like National Velvet, an early selection for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. By contrast, while all flms’ production and reception contexts are predominantly researched from written records, the same approach must hold for the textual reading of most British horseracing flms released up to 1939. The historical disregard for moving-image media is legendary and lamentable, and the list of lost resources is lengthy—around 80% of silent flms are thought to have perished, while the situation does not markedly improve when sound cinema arrived—of the ‘cheap-and-cheerful’ support features mass-produced under the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, over 60% are currently considered lost. Such percentages are replicated in this genre study, rendering much aesthetic assessment a ‘second hand’ procedure (cautiously) complied from press reviews and interviews, publicity material and participant memoirs. Furthermore, current academic exegesis is as meagre as extant early exempla and the British horseracing flm
‘form guide’ makes for distinctly thin reading. In broad generic treatments, Bruce Babington’s The Sports Film offers a single paragraph to summarise how, ‘Whether American, British or Australian, horse racing narratives often tend to social panorama’ (2014: 15); the two-page entry on ‘Film and Drama’ in Wray Vamplew and Joyce Kay’s Encyclopedia of British Horseracing illustrates how ‘Homegrown racing flms tended to be escapist rags-to-riches stories of punters winning against all odds and stable lads training Derby winners’ (2005: 125); Ronald Bergan’s early Sports in the Movies contains a chapter entitled ‘Movies on Hooves’, but this ironised overview—‘It must be said at the outset that most horse-racing pictures are more pedestrian than equestrian’ (1982: 66)—is almost entirely US-centric, devoting just two short paragraphs to early-1950s British fare that demonstrated how ‘“The Sport of Kings” not only brings out the best in man and horse but the worst of English snobbery’ (1982: 77). Studies of horseracing flms thus constitute a small card. However, the genre’s ubiquity means that single flms, directors and studios are regularly name-checked (and occasionally examined) in disparate academic studies, with cinema’s efforts from 1896 to 1939 repeatedly featuring in Rachael Low’s ground-breaking fve-volume History of the British Film series, a work regularly cited here: none, though, place their exegesis within the informative diachronic context of the horseracing genre. For discrete and periodic examinations of British horseracing on flm, two impressive front-runners present themselves. The silent era’s fare is concisely and cogently discussed by Judith McLaren in her chapter ‘Trainers and Temptresses: The British Racing Drama’: demonstrating ‘some of the genre’s representative features, and also the range of flmmaking options within them’, McLaren works from two close case studies but admits that ‘a comprehensive catalogue of flms and flmmakers is outside the scope of this essay’ (2007: 57). The interwar racing flm receives a similar length of treatment in Mike Huggins’ sociocultural history Horseracing and the British 1919–39: offering a broad sweep of examples, Huggins argues in a chapter headed ‘Horesracing, the media and leisure culture’ that, in cinema and beyond, the period’s ‘racing and betting images had become allpervasive throughout Britain, part of a cohesive common culture’ that ‘provided a cumulative cultural validation of the sport in Britain’ (2003: 64). In this small academic feld The British Horseracing Film thus presents itself as the frst full-length study devoted to the representation of a seminal British sporting practice in British cinema, a study that proposes
a detailed and nuanced counter-argument to existing largely reductive or (as with Bergan) largely ridiculing views of the genre.
One last (and important) counsel while under starter’s orders. A jockey knows to look both front and rear, and this genre study is undertaken by a similarly Janus-faced creature, a flm historian and a horseracing follower. The historian’s goal, through precisely referenced contextual and (where possible) textual analysis, is to establish a viable British subset of the sports flm genre; the follower, craving indulgence if occasionally aping the critical press’s penchant for horseracing metaphor, aims to convey the enthusiasm—and occasional embarrassment— experienced in viewing these flms, recognising that the majority’s foremost function was, and will remain, affective fun and entertainment. And they’re off!
notes
1. Steed exposed a betting syndicate’s horse ‘nobbling’ and murderous jockeys in The Avengers’ series 3 episode ‘Trojan Horse’ (ABC tx., 8 February 1964).
2. Mark Glancy sees the Hollywood ‘British’ flm, where National Velvet lines up alongside fare like A Yank in the RAF (Henry King, 1941) and Mrs Miniver (William Wyler, 1942), as popular often propaganda-slanted wartime productions which ‘are essentially American flms, and they are not to be confused with actual British flms’ (1999: 2). The same determining ‘rule’ on flm fnance—plus a shift of equine sport—holds for MGM’s 1978 sequel, International Velvet, directed by Britain’s Brian Forbes and starring Tatum O’Neil as Velvet’s teenage niece Sarah, an Arizonan orphan who wins an Olympic gold medal with Britain’s three day eventing team.
references
Allen, R. C., & Gomery, D. (1985). Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Babington, B. (2014). The Sports Film: Games People Play. London: Wallfower. Bergan, R. (1982). Sports in the Movies. London: Proteus. Budd, G. (1997). Racing Art and Memorabilia: A Celebration of the Turf. London: Philip Wilson Publishers.
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CHAPTER 2
The Silent Age—1896–1926
Abstract This chapter explores the cinematic representation of horseracing from its earliest motion-picture footage through to the inception of the quota system, tracing how the drive to capture the sport’s excitement encouraged artistic and technological innovation. It traces how horseracing proved the catalyst for perfecting and popularising the new medium, while early shorts, comic in tone but moral in conclusion, established enduring criminal tropes, from welshing bookmakers to nobbled horses. Alongside such fxed textual templates, the genre was secured by a contextual consistency, featuring a ‘stable’ of studios, writers, actors and directors, most notably in the aspirational turf pictures of the prolifc Walter West.
Keywords Silent cinema · Sporting comedy · Walter West
2.1 shorts And PimPles
The origins of public cinema and spectator sport were largely coeval—the Lumière brothers’ frst commercial flm screening in Paris on 28 December 1895 was closely followed by the inaugural modern Olympics, held in Athens on 6–15 April 1896. The subsequent progress of both practices was inextricably connected: Luke McKernan emphasises how ‘Cinema widened people’s views of the world, and certainly their view of the sporting world. It was the beginning of sport as a world-wide phenomenon, something that went hand in hand with the rise of flm through the twentieth
© The Author(s) 2019
S. Glynn, The British Horseracing Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05180-8_2
century’ so that, ‘looking back, we see the birth of twins: motion pictures and mass appeal sport’ (1996: 115). Horseracing was a particular catalyst for perfecting and popularising the new visual medium. When Californian industrialist Leland Stanford sought to solve the enduring mystery of whether a horse’s legs left the ground when galloping, he commissioned British-born motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge who, after initial (lost) work in 1873, devised a system whereby a set of aligned cameras were operated via successive shutter releases to capture the movement gradations of the horse passing in front of them. This series of live-action sequence/series photographs taken in 1878 at Palo Alto, California, known as Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, created to resolve a conundrum primarily of interest to turf enthusiasts, not only conclusively demonstrated the racehorse’s four-beat stride but would also impress and directly impact on the development of cinematography by Thomas Edison and Co. (Prodger 2003: 150–152).
In southern England, the 1895 recordings by Britain’s pioneer flm-makers Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul of two key events in the nation’s sporting calendar, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (won by Oxford) and the Derby Stakes (won by Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s horse, Sir Visto), examples of ‘instantaneous photography’ individually viewable through a peephole-window Kinetoscope, prepared the ground for Paul’s recording of the Epsom horseracing Derby on 3 June 1896, won by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII)’s horse, Persimmon. Shot from a cart positioned right-side and close to the fnish line with the packed grandstand in the background, the Lumière-like diagonal axis conveys both depth and movement as the leading horses gallop past before excited crowds start to cover the course (Fig. 2.1). With public projection now viable, this 38 feet of actuality footage (approximately 30 seconds of flm) was rushed back to London and processed overnight at Paul’s Animatograph Works so it could be shown the next day in two of the capital’s music halls, Leicester Square’s Alhambra Theatre of Varieties and the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The reception surprised even Paul: replicating Epsom’s post-race euphoria, the expectant audience cheered wildly at the flm, stood on their seats and demanded several re-runs, while theatre orchestras fed the patriotic atmosphere by playing ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ (Barnes 1976: 110–112). Here, freshly memorialised and constantly relivable as a shared experience was the sport of (future) kings.1 The work’s reputation quickly spread: it toured British and Commonwealth theatres for several
months and the illustrated monthly Strand Magazine devoted an entire section to the flm’s production, featuring 17 still-frame illustrations of ‘the most popular win the turf has ever known’ and declaring that ‘the great race, as depicted by Mr. Paul’s Animatograph, is a veritable marvel of modern photography and mechanism’ (‘The Prince’s Derby – Shown by Lighting photography’, 12 August 1896: 140). Much as the combination of technological innovation and royal celebration would kickstart television as a domestic purchase with Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 (Marwick 1996: 105–106), Paul’s ‘Original Theatograph’ had an equivalent effect on public cinema attendance: in short, ‘its ecstatic reception announced the arrival of moving pictures in Great Britain’ (McKernan 2005: 875).
As topical newsreels grew in popularity, the increasing employment of camera teams from dedicated companies such as Pathé’s Animated Gazette and Gaumont Graphic saw the flming of horseracing quickly develop beyond Paul’s single-shot perspective. Notwithstanding this
Fig. 2.1 Derby 1896—Cinema ‘Out of the Starting Gate’
burgeoning sophistication and comprehensiveness of coverage, horseracing, unlike team sports such as association football, remained singularly conducive to cinematic coverage due to its comparative brevity and spatially defned conclusion, facilitating full coverage of the dramatic climax while economising on expensive flm stock. Keeping pace with its increasing factual recording, fction flm would quickly leap on the back of horseracing’s proven popularity: henceforth the practical necessities in capturing a national sport ‘on the hoof’, plus the generic imperative to provide variations in representation, encouraged the symbiotic development of the medium of cinema and the horseracing flm. Moreover, largely parallel with the progress of moving pictures the late-nineteenth century had seen the commercialisation and rationalisation of British horseracing. The growth of a national rail network and the Saturday afternoon leisure time increasingly accorded from the early-1870s to the UK’s urban workforce had facilitated the establishment of sport as a mass entertainment—both for watching and wagering. This applied especially to horseracing as courses were increasingly enclosed and enforced admission charges, while new publications such as The Sportsman and Sporting Chronicle, selling over 300,000 copies daily, disseminated nationwide information about runners and starting prices. The nature of the sport itself was modifed as long-distance staying events ceded to sprints, twoyear-old and handicap racing, changes allowing both a fuller card and a greater unpredictability to attract (especially working-class) punters. This new revenue potential was accompanied by a rigorous drive towards greater social respectability: while specifc races such as the ‘Blue Riband’ Epsom Derby retained a carnivalesque atmosphere, elsewhere legislation soon curbed the country fair dynamic and ‘suburban saturnalia’ long associated with the nation’s race meetings (Holt 1989: 179–182; Vamplew 2016: 38–48).
Nonetheless, early fction flm, like stage and page representations, retained—and has largely retained to this day—the sport’s attendant louche and disreputable air. The Bakhtian idea of ‘carnival’ as a popular folk-based culture that (temporarily) reverses social and behavioural norms (Bakhtin 1984 [1965]) is literalised in the trick photography of Warwick Trading Company’s How Jones Saw the Derby (Charles Raymond, June 1905): here, exploiting the alcoholic consumption regularly accompanying racecourse attendance, the inebriated Jones (and audience) see the famous race run backwards; a ‘one-trick pony’ perhaps, but Charles Urban’s Neil Gow Mad (June 1910) repeats the trick in what
the trade press found ‘a good laughter-raising flm’ (Bioscope, 2 June 1910: 37). The numerous early shorts with a racing setting are invariably comic in tone but moral in conclusion featuring, whatever their class, a gallery of rogues, crooks and kidnappers. All do exactly what it says in the title, and follow a quickly established narrative trajectory— though catalogue descriptions evidence an incremental stylistic innovation. Betting was an immediate focus, with several flms portraying a turf accountant aka bookmaker who reneges or ‘welshes’ on honouring successful wagers. In Gaumont’s Welshed A Derby Day Incident (Alf Collins, June 1903) cinema’s frst opening pan shot follows the Derby’s conclusion—shown subjectively through binoculars—before the diegetic viewer, the bookmaker (Collins) who refuses to pay up, is chased by the Epsom crowd. In Cricks and Sharp’s Father’s Derby Trip aka Father and the Bookmaker (Tom Green, May 1906) father backs a winner but (again) the bookmaker welshes—and is chased. In Hepworth’s The Curate at the Races (Lewin Fitzhamon, May 1909) a tract-declaiming clergyman (Harry Buss) is framed by welshing bookmakers—and chased. In London Cinematograph’s Simple Simon at the Races (S. Wormald, July 1909) a dupe stands in for a welshing bookmaker, and is chased. In Hepworth’s Hubby Goes to the Races (Frank Wilson, October 1912) a henpecked husband (Harry Buss) goes to the racecourse, is mistaken for a welshing bookmaker, and is chased. The template is clear: set up with a welsh, sort out with a chase. It proved a winner: Bioscope, reviewing Wormald’s flm where Simon is additionally stripped and thrown into a duck-pond, thought it ‘an exceptionally fne comic subject, which is sure to meet with the approval of the great bulk of picture-show audiences’ (22 July 1909: 21).
The other swiftly secured generic plot staple, centred on those working within the racing business, consisted of trying to ‘nobble’ the favourite or intimidate its owners for fnancial gain. This strand at least offered greater variations on a theme, and gradually added romance to the mix. In Cricks and Sharp’s The Attempted Nobbling of the Derby Favourite (Tom Green, May 1905) a gang of crooks are thwarted in their attempt to dope a racehorse. In Hepworth’s An Episode of the Derby (Lewin Fitzhamon, June 1906) a horse-owning couple foil a plot to kidnap their daughter. In Clarendon’s The Stolen Favourite (Percy Stow, October 1909), a stableboy rescues the purloined horse from the crooks’ pantechnicon and rides it to victory. In Walturdaw’s Rogues of the Turf (unknown, April 1910) another brave lad foils the bookmaker
and tout trying to bribe a jockey. In Barker’s A Ride for a Bride (Charles Raymond, December 1911) a jockey overcomes crooks to win the Grand National and—the title denoting a signifcant move to generic hybridity—a wife. A rerun in Martin Films’ A Race for Love (Lewin Fitzhamon, May 1913) has an army lieutenant, though shot in the arm by his rival, win both the race and the girl. The trade press again approved the template, notably Raymond’s ‘excellent tale of the turf’ which ‘is full of excellent racing scenes and should command much popularity’ (Biograph, 7 December 1911: xxix).
Venturing further afeld, the (largely extant) British and Colonial short The Favourite for the Jamaica Cup (Charles Raymond, May 1913) has heroine Doris (Dorothy Fane), hiding in the colonial bushes, overhear unscrupulous (and foreign) gambler Miguel Lopez (Harry Lorraine) plotting to wreck the train transporting her sweetheart’s horse; Doris is kidnapped but escapes and rides with her brother (Percy Moran) to the railway points where Lopez has overpowered the signalman; in the subsequent struggle the villain is fung from a high railway bridge into the river, Doris saves the train and her sweetheart’s horse wins the race—all in 11 minutes. Though the genuine location shooting, concluding at Kingston’s Knutsford Park racecourse, historically extends Britain’s earliest cinema of attractions, aesthetically evidences the national flm’s ‘dawdling’ pictorialist use of mise-en-scene (McFarlane and Meyer 1992: 140), and economically purveys a burgeoning tourist angle (the opening titles acknowledge sponsorship from passenger steamers Elders and Fyffes), any ‘witting’ ideological focus eschews race and Britain’s imperial history—Jamaican characters appear only incidentally working at the stables and train station (one could argue they do not even signify suffciently to portray the villains), all of which, of course, offers strong ‘unwitting’ testimony—while the flm instead explicitly foregrounds gender with its narrative centred on an imperilled but strong and newly independent woman. Nonetheless, as with contemporary football fare such as Harry the Footballer (Lewin Fitzhamon 1911), female agency merely facilitates male sporting success (Glynn 2018: 23), and the setting on a runaway train furthers this ambivalent portrayal of social modernity as an ultimately contained site of both excitement and instability. Such later efforts, offering (in broadest terms) a cross-gender appeal with their combination of male-centred roguery and female-rewarding romance, would prove a new constant when flms expanded to feature length during the 1910s. However, the frst effort at a longer distance,
Hepworth Pictures’ 59 minute Kissing Cup aka The Gift (Jack Hulcup, August 1913), stayed predominantly with the duplicitous and dastardly. At a relatively leisurely pace the flm follows race-loving Squire Heatherington (Harry Gilbey) whose twenty-frst birthday present to his daughter Chrissie (Chrissie White) is a thoroughbred foal named The Gift; three years later and their millionaire neighbour Richard Cardew (Alec Worcester), vengeful because Chrissie has rejected his advances, forecloses on his stable-saving loan to Heatherington and, prior to The Gift’s big race entry, arranges for the squire’s jockey Arthur (Bobby Ingram) to be kidnapped; Arthur eludes his captors and, via airplane, reaches Sandown Park in time to win the race and save the Heatheringtons. From written records Kissing Cup can be adjudged a successful advance in cinematic scope with its greater intricacy of plotting and chase/race spectacle and an incipient rounding of character portrayal: much like Paul’s Derby its import was editorially signaled, here with an eight-page picture-spread in the expanding popular flm press (Illustrated Film Monthly, November 1913: 80–87).
Kissing Cup was also trade lauded as ‘A stirring British racing drama’ (Bioscope, 2 October 1913, xv), but the enduring short flm format was nonetheless quick to lampoon its perceived feature-length hubris, evidenced in one of the topical skits of clown-faced ‘Pimple’ turned out almost weekly by the music-hall-formed brothers Fred and Joe Evans. A brisk lampoon of Hulcup’s flm, Folly Films’ How Pimple Saved Kissing Cup (Fred Evans, December 1913) (the fnal 90 seconds survive) portrays the kidnapping of a Lord’s ‘champion racehorse’, only for Pimple (Fred Evans) to save the day, entering the nefarious baron’s house and untying the chair-bound horse—clearly an actor in a pantomime suit— which, of course, then wins the race: ‘A weird and wonderful drama, and enacted (according to Pimple) in true pseudo-sporting style’ enthused Bioscope (18 December 1913: 1261). Pimple, a hugely popular and ‘signifcant feature of the middle silent period of British cinema’ (Hammond 2000: 58), found his penchant for the chase format and topical parody well served by horseracing: having started with Two To One On Pimple (June 1913), he soon revisited the sport in How Pimple Won the Derby (May 1914)—answer, in a taxi, a short the trade press found ‘in popular parlance, simply a “scream”’ and ‘quite certain to prove a great deal more entertaining than the legitimate event itself’ (Bioscope, 28 May 1914: 983). The best, though, was yet to come.
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F . 136. Portion of the radula of Gadinia peruviana Sowb., Chili. × 250 Type (c)
(c) Radula with an indefinite number of marginals, laterals (if present) merging into marginals, central tooth present or absent, inconspicuous, teeth all very small. This type of radula, among the Nudibranchiata, is characteristic of certain sub-genera of Doris (e.g. Chromodoris, Aphelodoris, Casella, Centrodoris), of Hypobranchiaea and Pleurophyllidia; among the Tectibranchiata, of Actaeon, many of the Bullidae, Aplustrum, the Aplysiidae, Pleurobranchus, Umbrella and Gadinia (Figs. 136 and 137, C).
In the Pteropoda there are two types of radula. The Gymnosomata, which are in the main carnivorous, possess a radula with a varying number (4–12) of sickle-shaped marginals, central tooth present or absent. In the Thecosomata, which feed on a vegetable diet, there are never more than three teeth, a central and a marginal on each side; teeth more or less cusped on a square base.
Pulmonata.—The radula of the Testacellidae, or carnivorous land Mollusca, is large, and consists of strong sickle-shaped teeth with very sharp points, arranged in rows with or without a central tooth, in such a way that the largest teeth are often on the outside, and the smallest on the inside of the row (as in Rhytida, Fig. 139). The number and size of the teeth vary. In Testacella and Glandina, they are numerous, consisting of from 30 to 70 in a row, with about 50
rows, the size throughout being fairly uniform. In Aerope they are exceedingly large, and only eight in a row, the outermost marginal being probably the largest single tooth in the whole of the Mollusca. The central tooth is always obscure, being, when present, simply a weaker form of the weakest lateral; in genera with only a few teeth in a row it is generally absent altogether.
F . 137. Portions of the radula of Opisthobranchiata, illustrating types (b) and (c); A, Scaphander lignarius L.; A´, one of the teeth seen from the other side, × 40; B, Lamellidoris bilamellata L., Torbay, × 60; C, Hydatina physis L , E Indies, × 75
The first family of jaw-bearing snails, the Selenitidae, is distinctly intermediate. The possession of a jaw relates it to the main body of Helicidae, but the jaw is not strong, while the teeth are still, with the exception of the central, thoroughly Testacellidan. The central tooth is quite rudimentary, but it is something more than a mere weak reproduction of the marginals. There are no true laterals. The
Limacidae show a further stage in the transition. Here the central tooth has a definite shape of its own, tricuspid on a broad base, which is more or less repeated in the first laterals; these, as they approach the marginals, gradually change in form, until the outer marginals are again thoroughly Testacellidan.[326] This is the general form of radula, varied more or less in different genera, which occurs in Nanina, Helicarion, Limax, Parmacella, and all the sub-genera of Zonites. It is certain that some, and probable that all of these genera will, on occasion, eat flesh, although their usual food appears to be vegetable. The jaw is more powerful than in the Selenitidae, but never so large or so strongly ribbed as in Helix proper.
F . 138. Portion of the radula of Glandina truncata Gmel. × 40.
F . 139. Portion of the radula of Rhytida Kraussii Pfr., S. Africa. × 25.
When we reach the Helicidae, we arrive at a type of radula in which the aculeate form of tooth—so characteristic of the Agnatha— disappears even in the marginals, and is replaced by teeth with a more or less quadrate base; the laterals, which are always present, are intermediate in form between the central and the marginals, and insensibly pass into the latter. In size and number of cusps the first few laterals resemble the central tooth; in the extreme marginals the cusps often become irregular or evanescent. As a rule, the teeth are set squarely in the rows, with the exception of the extreme marginals, which tend to slope away on either side. In some Helicidae there is a slight approximation to the Zonitidae in the elongation of the first marginals.
The above is the type of radula occurring in the great family Helicidae, which includes not only Helix proper, with several thousand species, but also Arion, Bulimus, Ariolimax, and other genera. The jaw is almost always strongly transversely ribbed.
In the Orthalicidae (Fig. 140, C) the teeth of the radula, instead of being in straight rows, slope back at an angle of about 45 degrees from the central tooth. The central and laterals are very similar, with an obtuse cusp on rather a long stem; the marginals become bicuspid.
In the Bulimulidae, which include the important genera Placostylus, Amphidromus, Partula, Amphibulimus, and all the
groups of South American Bulimulus, the jaw is very characteristic, being thin, arched, and denticulated at the edges, as if formed of numerous narrow folds overlapping one another. The radula is like that of the Helicidae, but the inner cusp of the laterals is usually lengthened and incurved. In Partula the separation between laterals and marginals is very strongly marked.
The remaining families of Pulmonata must be more briefly described. In the Cylindrellidae there are three distinct types of radula: (a) Central tooth a narrow plate, laterals all very curiously incurved with a blunt cusp, no marginals (Fig. 140, D); (b) radula long and narrow, central tooth as in (a), two laterals, and about eight small marginals; (c) much more helicidan in type, central and laterals obtusely unicuspid, marginals quite helicidan. Type (c) is restricted to Central America, types (a) and (b) are West Indian.
Pupidae: Radula long and narrow; teeth of the helicidan type, centrals and laterals tricuspid on a quadrate base, marginals very small, cusps irregular and evanescent. This type includes Anostoma, Odontostomus, Buliminus, Vertigo, Strophia, Holospira, Clausilia, and Balea
Stenogyridae, including Achatina, Stenogyra, and all its subgenera: Central tooth small and narrow, laterals much larger, tricuspid, central cusp long, marginals similar, but smaller.
Achatinellidae: Two types occur; (a) teeth in very oblique rows, central, laterals, and marginals all of the same type, base narrow, head rather broad, with numerous small denticles (Achatinella proper, with Auriculella and Tornatellina, Fig. 140, E); (b) central tooth small and narrow, laterals bicuspid, marginals as in Helix (Amastra and Carelia).
F . 140. Portions of the radula of A, Hyalinia nitidula Drap., Yorkshire, with central tooth, first lateral, and a marginal very highly magnified; B, Helix pomatia L., Kent, showing central tooth, laterals, and one extreme marginal, the two former also highly magnified; C, Orthalicus undatus Brug , Trinidad, with three laterals highly magnified; D, Cylindrella rosea Pfr , Jamaica, central tooth and laterals, the same very highly magnified; E, Achatinella vulpina Fér , Oahu, central tooth (c) and laterals, the same highly magnified
Succineidae: Central and laterals helicidan, bi- or tricuspid on a quadrate plate, marginals denticulate on a narrow base; jaw with an accessory oblong plate.
Janellidae: Central tooth very small, laterals and marginals like Achatinellidae (a).
Vaginulidae: Central, laterals, and marginals unicuspid throughout, on same plan.
Onchidiidae: Rows oblique at the centre, straight near the edges; central strong, tricuspid; laterals and marginals very long, falciform, arched, unicuspid.
Auriculidae: Teeth very small; central narrow, tricuspid on rather a broad base; laterals and marginals obscurely tricuspid on a base like Succinea.
Limnaeidae: Jaw composed of one upper and two lateral pieces; central and lateral teeth resembling those of Helicidae; marginals much pectinated and serriform (Fig. 141, A). In Ancylus proper the teeth are of a very different type, base narrow, head rather blunt, with no sharp cusps, teeth similar throughout, except that the marginals become somewhat pectinated (Fig. 141, B); another type more resembles Limnaea.
F 141 Portions of the radula of A, Limnaea stagnalis L , with the central tooth and two first laterals, and two of the marginals, very highly, magnified; B, Ancylus fluviatilis Müll., with two of the marginals very highly magnified; C, Physa fontinalis L., with central tooth and two of the marginals very highly magnified.
Physidae: Jaw simple, but with a fibrous growth at its upper edge, which may represent an accessory plate; radula with very oblique rows, central tooth denticulate, laterals and marginals serriform, comb-like, with a wing-like appendage at the superior outer edge (Fig. 141, C).
Chilinidae: Central tooth small, cusped on an excavated triangular base, marginals five-cusped, with a projection as in Physa, laterals comb-like, serrations not deep.
Amphibolidae: Central tooth five-cusped on a broad base, central cusp very large; two laterals only, the first very small, thorn-like, the second like the central tooth, but three-cusped; laterals simple, sabre-shaped.
Scaphopoda.—In the single family (Dentaliidae) the radula is large, and quite unlike that of any other group. The central tooth is a simple broad plate; the single lateral is strong, arched, and slightly cusped; the marginal a very large quadrangular plate, quite simple; formula, 1.1.1.1.1 (Fig. 133, B).
Cephalopoda.—The radula of the Cephalopoda presents no special feature of interest. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about it is its singular uniformity of structure throughout a large number of genera. It is always very small, as compared with the size of the animal, most of the work being done by the powerful jaws, while the digestive powers of the stomach are very considerable.
The general type of structure is a central tooth, a very few laterals, and an occasional marginal or two; teeth of very uniform size and shape throughout. In the Dibranchiata, marginals are entirely absent, their place being always taken, in the Octopoda, by an accessory plate of varying shape and size. This plate is generally absent in the Decapoda. The central tooth is, in the Octopoda, very strong and characteristic; in Eledone and Octopus it is five-cusped, central cusp strong; in Argonauta unicuspid, in Tremoctopus tricuspid. The laterals are always three in number, the innermost lateral having a tendency to assume the form of the central. In Sepia the two inner laterals are exact reproductions of the central tooth; in Eledone, Sepiola, Loligo, and Sepia, the third lateral is falciform and much the largest.
F 142 Portion of the radula of Octopus tetracirrhus D Ch , Naples, × 20
In Nautilus, the only living representative of the Tetrabranchiata, there are two sickle-shaped marginals on each side, each of which has a small accessory plate at the base. The two laterals and the central tooth are small, very similar to one another, unicuspid on a square base.
F . 143. Alimentary canal of Helix aspersa L.: a, anus; b.d, b.d´, right and left biliary ducts; b.m, buccal mass; c, crop; h.g, hermaphrodite gland; i, intestine; i.o, opening of same from stomach (pyloric orifice); l, l´, right and left lobes of liver; m, mouth; oe, oesophagus; r, rectum; s.d, salivary duct; s g, salivary gland; st, stomach; t, left tentacle (After Howes and Marshall, slightly modified )
Salivary glands are found in most Glossophora. They occur in one or two pairs on each side of the pharynx and oesophagus, the duct usually leading forwards and opening into the anterior part of the pharynx (see Figs. 143, 144). They are exceptionally large in the carnivorous Gasteropoda. In certain genera, e.g. Murex, Dolium, Cassis, Pleurobranchus, the secretions of these glands are found to contain a considerable proportion (sometimes as much as 4·25 per cent) of free sulphuric acid. This fact was first noticed by Troschel, who, while handling a Dolium galea at Messina, saw the creature spit a jet of saliva upon a marble slab, which immediately produced a brisk effervescence. A number of the genera thus provided bore through the shells of other Mollusca and of Echinoderms, to prey upon their soft tissues, and it is possible that the acid assists in the piercing of the shell by converting the hard carbonate of lime into sulphate of lime, which can easily be removed by the action of the radula.[327] In the majority of the Cephalopoda there are two pairs of salivary glands, one lying on each side of the mouth, the other on the middle of the oesophagus.
F 144 Alimentary canal, etc , of Sepia officinalis L : a, anus; b d, one of the biliary ducts; b m, buccal mass; c, coecum; i, ink-sac; i d, duct of same; j, jaws; l.l, lobes of the liver; oe, oesophagus; p, pancreatic coeca; r, rectum; s.g, salivary glands; st, stomach. (From a specimen in the British Museum.)
F 145 Gizzard of Scaphander lignarius L : A, showing position with regard to oesophagus (oe) and intestine (i), the latter being full of comminuted fragments of food; p, left plate; p ´ , right plate; p.ac, accessory plate; B, the plates as seen from the front, with the enveloping membranes removed, lettering as in A. Natural size.
F . 146.—Section of the stomach of Melongena, showing the gastric plates (g.p, g.p,) for the trituration of food; b.d, biliary duct; g.g, genital gland; i, intestine; l, liver; oe, oesophagus; st, stomach. (After Vanstone.)
3. The Oesophagus.—That part of the alimentary canal which lies between the pharynx and the stomach (in Pelecypoda between the mouth and stomach) is known as the oesophagus. Its exact limits are not easy to define, since in many cases the tube widens so gradually, while the muscular structure of its walls changes so slowly that it is difficult to say where oesophagus ends and stomach begins. As a rule, the oesophagus is fairly simple in structure, and consists of a straight and narrow tube. In the Pulmonata and Opisthobranchiata it often widens out into a ‘crop,’ which appears to serve the purpose of retaining a quantity of masticated food before it passes on to the stomach. In Octopus and Patella the crop takes the form of a lobular coecum. In the carnivorous Mollusca the oesophagus becomes complicated by the existence of a varying number of glands, by the action of which digestion appears to begin in some cases before the food reaches the stomach proper.
4. The Stomach.—At the posterior end of the oesophagus lies the muscular pouch known as the stomach, in which the digestion of the food is principally performed. This organ may be, as in Limax, no more than a dilatation of the alimentary canal, or it may, as is usually the case, take the form of a well-marked bag or pocket. The two orifices of the stomach are not always situated at opposite ends; when the stomach itself is a simple enlargement of the wall of one side of the alimentary canal, the cardiac or entering orifice often becomes approximated to the orifice of exit (pyloric orifice).
The walls of the stomach itself are usually thickened and strengthened by constrictor muscles. In some Nudibranchs (Scyllaea, Bornella) they are lined on the inside with chitinous teeth. In Cyclostoma, and some Bithynia, Strombus, and Trochus there is a free chitinous stylet within the stomach.[328] In Melongena (Fig. 146) the posterior end of the oesophagus is provided with a number of hard plate-like ridges, while the stomach is lined with a double row of cuticular knobs, which are movable on their bases of attachment, and serve the purpose of triturating food.[329] Aplysia has several hard plates, set with knobs and spines, and similar organs occur in the Pteropoda. But the most formidable organ for the crushing of food is possessed by the Bullidae, and particularly by Scaphander
(Fig. 145). Here there is a strong gizzard, consisting of several plates connected by powerful cartilages, which crush the shells, which are swallowed whole.
Into the stomach, or into the adjacent portions of the digestive tract, open the ducts which connect with the so-called liver. The functions of this important organ have not yet been thoroughly worked out. The liver is a lobe-shaped gland of a brown-gray or light red colour, which in the spirally-shelled families usually occupies the greater part of the spire. In the Cephalopoda, the two ducts of the liver are covered by appendages which are usually known as the pancreatic coeca; the biliary duct, instead of leading directly into the stomach, passes into a very large coecum (see Fig. 144) or expansion of the same, which serves as a reservoir for the biliary secretions. At the point of connexion between the coecum and stomach is found a valve, which opens for the issue of the biliary products into the stomach, but closes against the entry of food into the coecum. In most Gasteropoda the liver consists of two distinct lobes, between which are embedded the stomach and part of the intestine. In many Nudibranchiata the liver becomes ‘diffused’ or broken up into a number of small diverticula or glands connecting with the stomach and intestine. The so-called cerata or dorsal lobes in the Aeolididae are in effect an external liver, the removal of which to the outside of the body gives the creature additional stomachroom.
The Hyaline Stylet.—In the great majority of bivalves the intestine is provided with a blind sac, or coecum of varying length. Within this is usually lodged a long cylindrical body known as the hyaline or crystalline stylet In a well-developed Mytilus edulis it is over an inch in length, and in Mya arenaria between two and three inches. The bladder-like skin of the stylet, as well as its gelatinoid substance, are perfectly transparent. In the Unionidae there is no blind sac, and the stylet, when present, is in the intestine itself. It is said to be present or absent indifferently in certain species.
The actual function performed by the hyaline stylet is at present a matter of conjecture. Haseloff’s experiments on Mytilus edulis tend to confirm the suggestion of Möbius, that the structure represents a
reserve of food material, not specially secreted, but a chemical modification of surplus food. He found that under natural conditions it was constantly present, but that specimens which were starved lost it in a few days, the more complete the starvation the more thorough being the loss; it reappeared when they were fed again. Schulze, on the other hand, believes that it serves, in combination with mucus secreted by the stomach, to protect the intestine against laceration by sharp particles introduced with the food. W. Clark found that in Pholas the stylet is connected with a light yellow corneous plate, and imagined therefore that it acts as a sort of spring to work the plate in order to comminute the food, the two together performing somewhat the function of a gizzard.[330]
5. and 6. The Intestine, Rectum, and Anus.—The intestine, the wider anal end of which is called the rectum, almost invariably makes a bend forward on leaving the stomach. This is the case in the Cephalopoda, Scaphopoda, and the great majority of Gasteropoda. The exceptions are the bilaterally symmetrical Amphineura, in which the anus is terminal, and many Opisthobranchiata, in which it is sometimes lateral (Fig. 68, p. 159), sometimes dorsal (Fig. 67). The intestine is usually short in carnivorous genera, but long and more or less convoluted in those which are phytophagous. In all cases where a branchial or pulmonary cavity exists, the anus is situated within it, and thus varies its position according to the position of the breathing organ. Thus in Helix it is far forward on the right side, in Testacella, Vaginula, and Onchidium almost terminal, in Patella at the back of the neck, slightly to the right side (Fig. 64, p. 157).
In the rhipidoglossate section of the Diotocardia (Trochus, Haliotis, etc.) the rectum passes through the ventricle of the heart, a fact which, taken in conjunction with others, is evidence of their relationship to the Pelecypoda.
F . 147. Ink-sac of Sepia, showing its relation to the rectum: a, anus; d, duct of sac; i.g, ink-gland; i.r, portion of the sac which serves as a reservoir for the ink; o, orifice of ink-gland; r, rectum; sp, double set of sphincter muscles controlling upper end of duct (Modified from Girod )
In nearly all Pelecypoda the intestine is very long and convoluted, being sometimes doubled forward over the mouth. Towards its terminal part it traverses the ventricle of the heart, except in Ostrea, Anomia, Teredo, and a few more. The anus is always at the posterior
end of the animal, adjacent to and slightly above the adductor muscle.
Anal glands, which open into the rectum close to the anus, are present in some Prosobranchiata, e.g. Murex, Purpura. In the Cephalopoda the anal gland becomes of considerable size and importance, and is generally known as the ink-sac (Fig. 147); it occurs in all known living genera, except Nautilus. The ink-sac consists of a large bag generally divided into two portions, in one of which the colouring matter is secreted, while the other acts as a reservoir for its storage. A long tube connects the bag with the end of the rectum, the mouth of the tube being controlled, in Sepia, by a double set of sphincter muscles.
The Kidneys
The kidneys, nephridia,[331] renal or excretory organs, consist typically of two symmetrical glands, placed on the dorsal side of the body in close connexion with the pericardium. Each kidney opens on the one hand into the mantle cavity, close to the anus (see Fig. 64, p. 157), and on the other, into the pericardium. The venous blood returning from the body passes through the vascular walls of the kidneys, which are largely formed of cells containing uric acid. The blood thus parts with its impurities before it reaches the breathing organs.
The kidneys are paired in all cases where the branchiae are paired, and where the heart has two auricles, i.e. in the Amphineura, the Diotocardia (with the exception of the Neritidae), the Pelecypoda, and all Cephalopoda except Nautilus, which has four branchiae, four auricles, and four kidneys. In other Gasteropoda only one kidney survives, corresponding to the left kidney of Zygobranchiate Gasteropods.
Besides their use as excretory organs the kidneys, in certain groups of the Mollusca, stand in very close relation to the genital glands. In some of the Amphineura the generative products, instead of possessing a separate external orifice of their own, pass from the genital gland into the pericardium and so out through the kidneys
(see Fig. 61 C, D, p. 154). In the Diotocardia it is the right kidney alone which serves, besides its excretory functions, as a duct for the emission of the generative products, the left kidney being at the same time greatly reduced in size. Thus in Patella the left nephridium is small, the right being much larger; both function as excretory organs, but the right serves as a mode of conveyance for the seminal products as well. In certain Pelecypoda (e.g. Yoldia, Avicula, Modiola, Pecten, Spondylus) the genital glands communicate directly, and with a similar object, with the renal pouch on the same side of the body, but in the majority of cases the orifices are distinct.
The following memoirs will be found useful for further study of this portion of the subject:—
D. Barfurth, Ueber den Bau und die Thätigkeit der Gasteropodenleber: Arch. Mikr. Anat. xxii. (1883), pp. 473–524.
Th. Behme, Beiträge zur Anatomie und Entwickelungsgeschichte des Harnapparates der Lungenschnecken: Arch Naturges iv (1889), pp 1–28
R. Bergh, Semper’s Reisen im Archipelago der Philippinen; Nudibranchiata: Theil ii. Band ii. (1870–78), Band iii. (1880–1892).
W. G. Binney, Terrestrial Air-breathing Mollusks of the United States: Bull. Mus. C. Z. Harv. iv. (1878), 450 pp.
„ On the Jaw and Lingual Membrane of North American Terrestrial Pulmonata: Proc Ac Nat Sc Philad (1875), pp 140–243
J. T. Cunningham, The renal organs (Nephridia) of Patella: Quart. Journ. Micr. Sc. xxiii. (1883), pp. 369–375.
„ „ Note on the structure and relations of the kidney in Aplysia: Mitth Zool Stat Neap iv (1883), pp 420–428
R. von Erlanger, On the paired Nephridia of Prosobranchs, etc.: Quart. Journ. Micr. Sc. xxxiii. (1892), pp. 587–623.
H. Fischer, Recherches sur la Morphologie du Foie des Gastéropodes: Bull. Scient. France Belg. xxiv. (1892), pp. 260–346.
C. Grobben, Morphologische Studien über den Harn- und Geschlechtsapparat, sowie die Leibeshöhle, der Cephalopoden: Arb. Zool Inst Wien, v (1884), pp 179–252
„ Die Pericardialdrüse der Gasteropoden: ibid. ix. (1890), pp. 35–56.
B. Haller, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Niere der Prosobranchier: Morph Jahrb xi (1885), pp 1–53
A. Hancock, On the structure and homologies of the renal organ in the Nudibranchiate Mollusca: Trans. Linn. Soc. xxiv. (1864), pp. 511–530.
A. Köhler, Microchemische Untersuchung der Schneckenzungen: Zeits Gesamm Naturw viii (1856), pp 106–112
Ad. Oswald, Der Rüsselapparat der Prosobranchier: Jena. Zeits. Naturw. N.F. xxi. (1893), pp. 114–162.
R. Perrier, Recherches sur l’anatomie et l’histologie du rein des Gastéropodes prosobranches: Ann. Sc. Nat. Zool. (7), viii. (1889), pp. 61–315.
C. Semper, Reisen im Archipelago der Philippinen; Land Pulmonata: Theil ii Band iii (1870–77)
C. Troschel, Das Gebiss der Schnecken: Berlin, 1856–1892.
W. G. Vigelius, Ueber das Excretionssystem der Cephalopoden: Niederl Arch Zool v (1880), pp 115–184
