Discover how the need to support people through the pandemic brought Newmarket together. The Jockey Club’s Margo Walsh tells TRC how townspeople, the Jockey Club and the town council formed a united front to deliver three community projects – a helpline, a ‘Bridging The Gap’ initiative and a hot meals delivery scheme – which culminated with Father Christmas giving out presents from float travelling around the town.
Newmarket, the small market town in Suffolk, England, has an equine pull like no other in Europe, perhaps the world. Steeped in Thoroughbred history, it has two racecourses, acres of iconic gallops and the National Horseracing Museum, and it is home to breeding operations the envy of the world.
Nothing epitomises this closeness more than the roads - named after racing figures of yore and giving right of way to the racehorses.
It might, as a result, be easy to forget that many Newmarket residents see the sport and the multitude of racing fans who swarm to the town through the summer as a disruption to their rural idyll.
There can be a divide in the town, and racing is to some that metaphorical line in the sand.
Community spirit
It is perhaps more to do with misunderstanding than a real divide. The Jockey Club, together with many others, including prosperous stud owners, gives much back to the town by supporting philanthropic causes. This generosity and community spirit has been, and still is, at the forefront of racing’s actions throughout the pandemic, a time when the finest and foulest of humankind rose to the fore.
At the start of 2020 - long before the pandemic altered everyone’s lives - Jockey Club Estates, the Jockey Club Rooms, the racecourses and the National Stud were all independently doing a little bit of community and charity support.
The reality of this, according to Margo Walsh, operations manager at Newmarket Racecourses, was “people asking for a couple of tickets to help with fundraising and us obliging”.
This wasn’t enough for senior Jockey Club officials Amy Starkey, Nick Patton and Tim Lane, who wanted to “consolidate their efforts and really get into the community in Newmarket”.
“At this point,” says Walsh. “There was quite a big split between the racing community and the town community, for various reasons. Where racing is such a lifeblood of the town, if you weren’t in that group there was a growing sense of feeling that there were these two distinct groups.”
Walsh was appointed chair of a new group, with representatives from all the Jockey Club’s Newmarket-based organisations, which had its inaugural meeting the week after the Cheltenham Festival, the final major British sporting event to have a mass attendance before coronavirus restrictions were implemented the world over. Needless to say, the meeting’s agenda was drastically altered and “as a committee, we looked at what our part would be and what we could do to help”.
All across Newmarket other activity was under way. The Newmarket Coronavirus Volunteer Network Facebook page was set up by residents and worked with the town council to bring in over 300 volunteers to assist in the early stages of the pandemic.
Residents in need
The council quickly set up a steering group to oversee the delivery of a 24-hour telephone helpline for local people. Chaired by current Mayor Mick Jefferies with representation from councillors, council employees, benefactors and organisations from across the town, the group worked quickly and collaboratively to ensure there would be help available for residents who were in need.
The then-Mayor, Rachel Hood, wife of multiple champion trainer John Gosden, who was on the group, and local district councillor and former Mayor Andy Drummond told TRC that the project was “proactively conceived and implemented as a town council helpline to help, support and protect shielding and vulnerable residents, providing them with shopping, prescriptions, dog-walking and the like, as well as the capability for telephone calls from volunteers to combat loneliness”.
Throughout the first lockdown, Hood and Drummond “manned this helpline for two hours every day, along with other councillors who volunteered”.
The helpline proved a key conduit for other community projects and an example of how the various parts of the town worked in concert, such as when the ‘shielding hour’ at Tesco attracted around 800 people, which was impossible to control safely.
“We ran a next-day service,” Walsh explains. “Where people could call with their shop and we would offer a Tesco shop, which would be delivered in Discover Newmarket busses by Jockey Club volunteers, of which there were about 47. These were mainly Jockey Club employees, but people like Victoria de Sousa [wife of three-time champion jockey Silvestre].
“It was a real meeting of public and private sector.”
As the situation in the UK rapidly became graver, there was an increase in calls about hardship and the many repercussions inflicted by the virus. Bill Gredley, local property developer and owner of such horses as 1992 Oaks and St Leger winner User Friendly and 2017 Ascot Gold Cup champion Big Orange, responded by giving via Andrew Appleby (father of Godolphin trainer, Charlie, and a town councillor) £50,000 to help residents.
“The issue we then had was that we couldn’t administer it,” Walsh says. “So, Newmarket Festival, which is not a charity but a community group that is collaborating with the town council with local figures sitting on it, then agreed to administer the money.
“There were people who didn’t understand the systems put in place by the government or couldn’t survive on the 80 percent [wage given on the furlough scheme], and were asking for help too late. I remember one lady called up after the weekend and admitted that she hadn’t eaten for over 48 hours.
“Our remit became more about us supporting government and local services, while systems caught up, as it had all happened so quickly. The funds from Bill Gredley meant that we could make decisions to assist people – not just give them a box of food, but we would signpost them on our system.”
Rallying over free school meals
The phoneline was manned from 8am to 8pm, seven days, during the bleak days of high demand but has since been reduced to a five-day service to reflect the reduced needs.
When free school meals became a hot topic across the UK, magnificently brought to the attention of the Prime Minister by footballer Marcus Rashford, Newmarket responded accordingly. Restaurants and hotels offered their services to cook food, provided by donations to the Newmarket Festival, for local children and the elderly in need. This was coordinated with the church and delivered once a week.
“We did four and a half thousand hot meals,” says Walsh. “That started in April and stopped when the kids went back to school in September. It hadn’t occurred to me, before this, but we had to deliver hot meals to certain people at specific times because they had no way of heating it up again.
“They either couldn’t afford the gas or electric or didn’t have a cooking appliance. These are people with children and it really made me sit back and think: God, this is their only hot meal per week.”
‘Bridging the Gap’
Another committee member, Frances Stanley - a Director of Newmarket Racecourse, Deputy Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and whose husband Peter runs his family's New England Stud, called Walsh and said that her and many of her friends wanted to help. “Usually, it comes across as if we are supporting the racing industry rather than anyone else. So, we thought that we would basically reach out,” confirms Stanley.
Although Walsh’s projects have been Jockey Club-led or had Jockey Club involvement, they have “been very much working within and alongside the community”.
The Racing Centre - despite its name, it’s a community centre for all residents of Newmarket - has taken on some of these projects under the chairmanship of the Stanleys, who not only came up with the idea but are still heavily involved in the ‘Bridging the Gap project’.
Stanley says: “We called it Bridging the Gap because these are families that weren’t on Universal Credit before and it is very alien to them to be asking for anything. We didn’t want the sponsors to be meeting the families. That said, it is not anonymous, as I think some degree of feedback is important, but [the Jockey Club’s] Donna Loades is the link with the families.”
Choosing whether to eat or get warm
A triage system, which works by the schools suggesting the local families that are in need, was put in place. “We took a few weeks to set it up, as we wanted to get it absolutely right.” Stanley credits Loades, who spends a “huge amount of time talking with the families and working out whether they qualify. She is very compassionate and kind.”
This enabled families to receive much-needed short-term relief from the hardship – in some cases they were having to decide between heating their house or buying food for their children. “This seemed, to me, to be an unreasonable choice to be making,” says Stanley.
This financial relief was £70 per week for three weeks.
“In the early days, the sponsors actually received the list from the families and actually did the shopping for them,” says Stanley. “We have since refined it, where they give money to the Racing Centre, which sends it along with a list to Tesco, who in turn does the shop and delivery. It is much less personal now than it was to start with and is very smoothly run indeed.Many of the donors for Bridging The Gap have come from the racing industry and most of the recipients are not in the industry.”
Many of the donors for Bridging The Gap have come from the racing industry and most of the recipients are not in the industry.
‘Help without judgement’
As Walsh says: “Ultimately, it was not our job to worry about the selection process of who got help, it was to provide the help without judgement.”
As we all remember, by September, the R-rate across the UK began to drop and a return to the freedoms that we took for granted were slowly becoming a reality, coupled with a promise of family Christmas. Of course, a third lockdown was soon implemented, and it led to many people spending the seasonal period alone.
Remembering a Santa float from her youth in Somerset, Walsh had in the back of her mind that “we all needed something that just feels good, that isn’t just about helping those in need, more just giving a mental health lift”.
The idea - which Walsh “knew how to do, but not on my own!” - was taken to the newly formed Newmarket Community Network, which was set up when the Council Steering Group came to an end
“In the meantime,” she says, “research showed that we had about 3,000 children under the age of 13 in Newmarket. We thought, not only would we build a float and drive it round the town – for one night – but we would also deliver presents to every child of school age.
“We only had three weeks to plan it and execute. We worked with Public Health England, Environmental Health for West Sussex, and the local police - who were really helpful and supportive, as well as pointing out things that had to be done because we had to make it safe.
‘Magical night’
“We did a bit of further fundraising and ended up with nearly 4,000 presents and sweets, which came from various community groups. A local tow-truck company gave us the vehicle, and local interior designers and electricians gave their time to help make it into a float that would have Santa on it. Santa was the heath medic dressed up!
“We had stewards lining the route, people were delivering the gifts in fishing nets and they electrostatically fogged all the presents. We didn’t tell anybody or put out a press release because we couldn’t afford [non-residential] people to come to the town.”
A few social media posts reached more than 10,000 people, but, according to Walsh, the public “behaved beautifully” and stayed in their respective bubbles. A live tracker meant that individuals only left their houses when the float was approaching on the 12-mile, five-hour round trip.
“It was an absolutely magical night,” says Walsh. “It was the only time in delivering something as an operator when there were no negative comments on social media. One of my colleagues was wearing a branded Jockey Club jacket and someone said to him: ‘This is why we need the Jockey Club in the town because there is nowhere else this would be pulled off’.
“I hasten to add that there were so many more companies involved, but it showed [what can be achieved] when we work together.”