RUNNING ON EMPTY

Rolf Johnson mourns the 'lost souls' of the Downs on Derby day

- Rolf Johnson

Twenty-seven thousand five hundred souls attended this year's 245th Derby. To repeat, 27,500.

I'd have kept schtum about the number; it's not good propaganda broadcasting how unloved you've become.

For my 50th Derby I was on The Hill, in the centre of the track from where, famously, the Epsom Downs slope to the running rail. Infamously, the slope was becoming the launch pad for streakers - rebels without clothes; and rebels with a cause - Just Stop Oil, Animal Rights, fully clothed but nothing to show for it.

Nowadays the Epsom rail is dotted with a cordon surely recruited from the firm that guarded the Berlin Wall without the Kalashnikovs but with no Checkpoint Charlie for 'loose ones'.

Though the view from The Hill has never cost spectators, it used to be very expensive. Charles Dickens was a mid-nineteenth century regular though he didn't actually call the scene 'Dickensian'. We do - did - until, like the streakers, the lucky white leather ladies, 'find the lady' card sharps, thimbleriggers, pickpockets, duff tipsters, welshers 'by appointment' to the gullible hoi polloi, were all 'moved on'.

Artists over the centuries captured this essential moment of the British at play but today there are no easels on the Downs or the army of evangelists who'd congregate in the certainty that there'd be sinners to be saved, somehow reconciling that message with the messianic, 'the end is nigh'. They've given up the ghost the Holy Ghost. Likewise the absent crowds racing's lost souls.

Epsom Derby Day used to be a treasure trove for observers of class division. Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood still segregate and discriminate but the Derby did so in a subtler fashion, channelling the hoi polloi away from the grandstands and on to The Hill.

In the 19th century horse-drawn carriages, Broughams, Landaus, weaved between gypsy caravans.