An Irish Diary

Horse Sense – Frank McNally on ides and idiots of March

The 2020 Cheltenham Festival. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/Inpho

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Fri Mar 13 2020 - 18:30

The approach of another Ides of March – which sounds even more ominous than usual this year, with the pandemic – sent me looking up the term again in Brewer’s Dictionary. This time, my eye was caught by its next-door neighbour – “idiot”.

Like many words, that has changed meaning over the centuries. In the original Greek, it meant primarily “a private person, one not engaged in any public office”.  Only by extension was such an individual considered “uneducated” or “ignorant”.

This explains why, according to Brewer, the Greeks use the phrase “a priest or an idiot”, in which the latter word means only “layman”. More controversially, perhaps, they also have the expression “a poet or an idiot”. In that case, “idiot” means a writer of prose.

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This reminds me of a line from Rebecca West’s epic book about Yugoslavia between the wars, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, wherein, with the Greek definition in mind, she suggested that “idiocy is the female defect”.

Her reflection was provoked by a nurse in a London hospital where the writer was laid up at the time and where she had just heard news of the assassination of the Yugoslav king. “Something terrible has happened”, she said, explaining about the king, to which the nurse asked: “Did you know him?”

When West admitted she didn’t, the nurse was puzzled: “Then why do you think it’s so terrible?” West thought this typically female (in 1934, anyway). “Intent on their private lives,” she wrote, “women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain.”

In the interests of balance, I should point out that she went on to identify the equivalent male defect – “lunacy”. Again, she was pursuing the word to its roots: “[Men] are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”

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That wasn’t the only West quotation that came to mind this week, a week in which opinion was divided on whether Britain’s decision to go ahead with the Cheltenham festival, and for thousands of Irish people to attend, was idiocy or lunacy, or both.

Whatever it was, West would not have been surprised. In a withering aside elsewhere in the book, she takes a sideswipe at the British horsey set.  The context on this occasion was a Montengrin taxi-driver, in the district Petch, giving out to her about how the area had been misruled by the Serbs. His complaint had justification, she agreed. Under the Serbs, Petch “was handed over to an old man who had been King Peter’s Master of the Horse, and he appears, like our own followers of the Belvoir and the Quorn [two English hunts], to have offered conclusive proof of the powerfully degenerative effect of equine society on the intellect.”

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Depending on whether you agree with that, it may or may not seem ironic that the Cheltenham racecourse is located alongside the headquarters of the UK’s intelligence gathering service, GCHQ.

That might also seem like mere coincidence, amusing or otherwise. But as reader Paul Bushnell informs me, it's not.

In a book by the British scientist and military surveillance expert RV Jones (1911-1997), Paul recalls reading a story about a friend of Jones from the war years who he met again one day in the late 1940s. The man was already something big in intelligence and confided that he was now applying for the job of director. Jones was surprised because his friend was a bon viveur, known for drinking and gambling. But he landed the job anyway, and later joked that they had asked if he didn't mind attending a lot of "meetings". Not at all, he said, although it was race meetings he meant. His plan now, he added, was to have the offices moved from London to somewhere more conducive to his hobby.

I haven't read Jones's book, but sure enough, the story also features in the journals of Royal Air Force Historical Society, from a lecture Jones delivered in 1986. There the man is named as Claude Daubeny, a former RAF wing commander who did indeed like a bet, even to the extent that – like many gamblers – he once thought he had a system to beat the bookmakers.

This “ultimately ruined him”, Jones said. But his love of horse-racing left one permanent memorial. When the cryptographers of Bletchley Park needed a new office, Daubeny moved them to Cheltenham for his own ends. In this version it was he who, at the interview, insisted he would need “plenty of time to attend meetings”.

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