Periscope: Beaten dockets, failed flutters, and eternal woe

100 years ago, the Cork Examiner published a serious of opinion pieces by a contributor known as 'Periscope' on social and political issues that are still relevant today

Bookmaker Richie Ryan at Bandon point-to-point races in May 1929. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive

He is a sadder and a wiser man than he was on Tuesday.

He knows now what he didn’t know before, that, what he thought he knew, he didn’t know at all, and that, what he thought others didn’t know, they did, and that what he ought to have known, he didn’t know.

Experience teaches all — but the man who bets. He was in my periscope for hours yesterday.

He was told to put his shirt on it and he very nearly did. Although he did not actually part with that undoubtedly useful and essentially necessary garment, he put his last ‘make’ on his fancy, and now for the rest of the week he will have to depend upon the courtesy and generosity of his many friends for the liquidation of his numerous and varied thirsts, otherwise than by what he gets from the domestic teapot, and maybe that will be hot and strong enough too!

But being stout of heart and fluent of tongue, he now wears an air of ‘Defiance,’ and says he does not care a continental if Steve Donoghue does go to France to live cheek-by-Joel with millionaires.

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Indeed, for the time being, he consigns that distinguished jockey to a place where the temperature is much higher than it is in Paris, hot as it is there. 

Frustrated flutterer

He does not get much consolation in the bosom of his family, this poor frustrated flutterer.

His wife, of course , says: “I told you so!” (they always say that, whatever happens), although he cannot remember that she did anything of the kind; and he has at the same time a back-thought that herself had a bit on the ‘wrong ’un’ in that shop she so often goes into without making any ostensible purchase or giving an order for goods.

However, that’s a horse (or horses) of another colour. It would be a sort of consolation to him if only he knew certainly who shared in Cork’s Donoghue debacle.

Well, “Good evening, Stephen,” it isn’t the first time a “dead cert” turned out an … “also ran”.

They all feel the ‘Pinch’ of it and many a ‘Tippler’ will reckon up his losses with anything but the feelings of an ‘Optimist’.

I am a very sympathetic person; but I cannot altogether crush my sense of the ludicrous.

“Is there a wire for me,’’ I was several times asked on Tuesday evening. “ls it from the Widow Malone, in the town of Athlone,” I asked.

“It does not matter,” I was told. ‘Twas equal, surely — equally fruitless for a lot of people.

My observations were interrupted by a shower of names and missiles. Blessed is the comforter, for he shall be pelted!

I periscoped a Righteous Man who is always highly hortative on these occasions, and who would talk the heads off a regiment of soldiers with a happy fatuousness — delightful to encounter. You have only to drop a word or two, and he goes like a gramophone.

“Betting is a foul evil,” I said sadly, just to set him going. It does so pain me to see a man bursting with eloquence for want of a lead!

“The greatest evil of the day!” he said magniloquently, with a gesture. “Sorry to say, there are men I know who would bet on two hens crossing the road, men who would leave their families without food and themselves without a drink”.

“Oh, not that, surely not that,” I said, with a shudder, “not leave themselves without a drink?”

“No, not that,” he said quickly. “They’d leave themselves without a penny for the chapel to put it on horses.

“There are men so abandoned to this craze,” continued my babbly friend, “who have fallen low enough in it to bet on the number of cars that would turn up at their fathers’ funeral!”

I wonder what he would have thought of the many bobs that in the old days used to change hands on the number of coffins at the Glasnevin Races on a Sunday?

Racing jargon

“Day or night, they are talking or dreaming,” continued my brook friend, “of nothing but horses and jockeys, and tips, and odds, and all the horrid jargon of the racing world. And, sad to say, the women are nearly as bad as the men.

“I was driving, a short time ago, in a remote, part of the country, practically in the mountains, a gorsey, stony region, when an aged woman appeared over a half door and beckoned me frantically.

“When I got to her, ‘will you tell me.’ says she, ‘what won the Lincoln?’ I nearly fell out of the car at the shock of it — and the cheek!”

“‘Tis at your beads you ought to be, you old reprobate,’” I said.

“I assure you, my friend, her subsequent remarks were so horrid that I had to put on speed to get out of earshot. And I really have a sad suspicion that even the schoolboys are involved in the betting evil.”

“Perhaps,” I said encouragingly, “they bet on the number of pictures they pester out of the passing public every.”

“It might be that,” he said, gloomily.

“There is no knowing. It is an awful state of things”

One thing I am quite sure of, my lecturing friend is so keen on making money, that if he thought he had a sure thing, I should not trust him not to have a flutter on it.

The flesh is weak.

One thing I cannot make up my mind about, and which I often philosophise and soliloquise over in the manner of Hamlet, is, “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as delivered to you through your stockbroker, “or to take arms against a sea of troubles,” and by opposing try to end them through a bookie’s office.

Well, perhaps it is this doubt that “puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others” that may be quite as bad, if not worse.

I passed yesterday through Plunge-it Street (as I have come to call it) after the race.

There was no place for Grand Joy, so many had broken wings from the fluttering. It would be a “Bright Knight” who could find anything there but faces like wet Sundays.

There was an air of “Defiance” everywhere. “‘This.” I reflected crookedly, “would be a great occasion upon which to revive the old Irish play “O’Donoghue, on the White Horse of Killarney’’.

Certainly if one had a burning desire to be lynched nothing could answer the purpose better. The worst of my particular periscope is that it hears as well as sees things.

As I passed the corner a snatch of conversation reached me — “Did he lose it all?”

“He did, and what ‘harum’ but he have a cross old faggot of a wife that won’t let him forget it in a hurry.”

“What deep domestic disagreeableness,” I reflected, “sometimes suffuses the sporting surface. Well it is no affair of mine.”

Man is a born speculator

After all, when one comes to think of it, man is a born speculator and, all said and done, what is the width of the boundary line between speculation and gambling; and sometimes how little the result differs.

I wonder how old Cork behaved when its gains and losses were not on horses, but on lotteries.

A hundred years ago there were as many lottery offices in Cork as there are now betting offices, more in fact, and the leges of that time could flutter to their hearts content.

Tickets for the State Lottery could be purchased at James Haly’s King’s Arms, Exchange and also at R Evorys, No 8 Patrick Street.

The first five drawn tickets entitled to a thousand pounds each, and there was a prize of £20,000.

And James Haly has this addition to his advertisement in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle” of 1800: “Good Bids on London, Dublin and Cork taken in payment of all lottery orders.”

What price that for gambling?

• First published in the Cork Examiner, June 1923