'Other people look at eyes and ears and fetlocks but for me it's bottoms - it all started with John Francome and it seems as good a system as any'

The Generation Game paired a Racing Post writer with a group of their own generation to find out how those of different ages view and consume racing. In part one, first published exclusively for Racing Post Members' Club subscribers on Monday, Peter Thomas joins the 'baby boomers' at Lingfield.

Members' Club Ultimate subscribers have access to all four articles from this fascinating series as our reports also took to the course with groups of Gen Xs, Millennials and Gen Zs. Sign up now and use the code MEMBERS24 to get 50% off your first three months.

The day has not begun well. To kick off our series looking at how different generations view this wonderful sport, I have assembled an elite band of 'senior' racegoers to join me at Lingfield and at 8.30am, barely late enough for All-Bran and Sanatogen to have been taken, I've received a phone call to tell me that one member of my squad has put his back out while gardening and is currently laid up on his sofa.

Now, I know he's a dyed-in-the-wool jumping man and a wet Tuesday on the all-weather might not be his thing, but I'm prepared to believe that the injury is a genuine one, and very much the kind of pitfall one must expect when dealing with the 'Silver Squadron' of the racing public.

I thank the Lord that he wasn't impaled on his own dibber, and that I still have other genuine ‘baby boomers’ (somebody who must have been born between 1946 and 1964 to qualify, so I’m told) to meet.

Simon Jamieson, for example, is just the kind of chap I need to speak to. I have no problem tracking him down, standing on the grandstand steps, white-haired and white-bearded, wearing a well-advised waterproof jacket and wondering where everybody else has got to. This is Lingfield on a wet Tuesday, as I say, and he'd struggle to get lost in the crowd, but it is a day's racing when all's said and done and he's treating it seriously.

We set off in search of a first pint of the day, chatting as we go about how a bad day at the races is better than a good day at work, although he's largely retired from his job in trade journalism. What's not to like about an afternoon at the sports, after all?

Well, when we're told by an under-employed member of bar staff that we'll have to wait in the food queue to get a beer, blocking things up for people who just want food and slowing things down for those of us who just want beer, we concur that this is one thing not to like, although not a game-changer.

Then we move into the next bar, with its unmistakable smell of blocked drains, where the first beer tap releases a splutter of foam and no beer. As does the second. All this 40 minutes before the first race. We finally track down beer in our third bar, find a table and, hardy souls both, put the early exchanges behind us.

'Friends say they never knew there was so much to racing'

Simon didn’t set out on his racing journey until he was 40. Now, aged 73, he has pepped up his day with a 48-line Placepot, to small stakes, and has put some work into the day, planning to have a fiver here and there throughout the afternoon, although if he were at Cheltenham he might bet £15 a race, and if this were a Saturday in front of the TV he'd probably have a Lucky 15 and a single or two.

"I should have enough time to look at the form and the cards these days," he shrugs, "but I don't have that application. On Saturdays, though, I'll watch it live, not recorded, because then the temptation is to skate through the build-up and the analysis afterwards, and I enjoy the whole thing."

He's driven in from West Sussex and is enjoying the racecourse, although "the big screen isn't as good as the one at Fontwell" where he got married for the second time in 2017.

Simon Jamieson: "I should have enough time to look at the form - but I don't have that application."

"A lot of people said it was the best wedding they'd been to," he remembers. "We had 70 guests for lunch in a suite overlooking the finishing line. It brought everybody together and people enjoyed it.

"We still go there with friends who don't go racing a great deal, at a small, informal, friendly course where you can get a nice lunch for not much, and they always say they never knew there was so much to it – weights, handicaps, going, distances – and they're surprised and fascinated.

"I don't think they go off and start betting every Saturday, but they have a deeper understanding of the sport and the people, what a tough life the jockeys have day to day. I'm enthusiastic along with them, explaining things they don't understand, and it's about the only time I feel knowledgeable about racing."

'I think a lot of nonsense is talked about horse welfare'

Den Mead is a younger 'boomer', aged 63, a keen cricketer and tennis player in his prime, also an advocate of the big screen at Fontwell, which he'll often choose as the venue for one of his couple of racing visits a year.

He'd go more often, he says, if he could find more people to go with. "That would make the difference, and the less well supported it is, the less likely you are to find somebody like that," he reasons, perhaps eyeing the sparse midweek crowd.

It's certainly not that he's concerned by some of the populist criticisms of the sport, although he's aware that they're voiced loudly these days and taken on board by racing's powers that be.

"You've got to be careful about horse welfare," he says, as I advise our party to watch a driving finish and see what they feel about the use of the whip on show. "I know they made changes to the Grand National – and where do you stop with that? – but it was still a fantastic spectacle this year, even if the purists may not have liked it.

"I think a lot of nonsense is spouted about horse welfare by people who don't know what they're talking about, but it's hard to ignore, I know."

Den Mead: "A lot of nonsense is spouted about horse welfare by people who don't know what they're talking about"

Whip use is observed and quickly passed over. Nobody here would be put off by another visit to the races on the basis of animal welfare, it seems.

As Simon rationalises it: "It's a bloody dangerous job being a jockey and if that's the way it's presented to people, they may start to understand, but at the moment I think what most people believe about the whip is that it's something that's just used to make horses go faster in the final furlong.

"If you don't know what the whip consists of these days, if you just see it as a whip that you can hit horses with, it's a problem."

'The jargon and mystique are part of the fun'

"I need to see some jockeys' bottoms," says Ruth Clark, a former colleague of Simon, once big in deep-sea fishing journalism before she went into office equipment PR. Posteriors have long been Ruth's first port of call for making her selections, and nothing has changed since she got her bus pass.

"Other people look at eyes and ears and fetlocks," she says, "but for me it's bottoms. It all started with John Francome and it seems as good a system as any."

The answer for the 2.25, after keen paddock inspection, is Harry Davies, who finishes third at 40-1 on Luna Dipinta, which seems like some kind of vindication for Ruth, although I'm worried we may be ejected from the course if we're not careful.

She's nothing if not enthusiastic, though – she once elicited a paddock-side 'negative' from the Queen Mother for her runner in the next at Sandown – and not at all perturbed by the supposedly arcane nature of racing and the impenetrable mystery it presents to the novice racegoer.

"The jargon and mystique are part of the fun and I think it would take away from the enjoyment for me if I knew too much about it," she explains.

Ruth Clark: "The jargon and mystique are part of the fun"

"I'd hate it to become serious. I like it when it's relaxed and social. I take 50 quid with me, knowing I'm probably going to go home with nothing, and the day is about the whole experience. If you're just going to sit inside and bet on the Tote, then why are you there?”

She adds, possibly with an accusatory glance in my direction: "I want to immerse myself in a different world of trainers and jockeys and bookmakers, and if you go with a bunch of people who think they know what they're doing and are giving you advice, that's always funny."

'The betting shop closed down three or four years ago'

Ruth and Simon are both late converts to the sport whose stories suggest racing is something that appeals more to people the older they get – and the more they learn about it.

Ruth's interest came from Simon, at an office near Hampton Court, where there was once, although almost certainly no longer, a betting shop within walking distance of the office.

"I would never have gone to a race meeting if I didn't know people who were racing fans," she says. "I always thought it was for people who were avid racegoers, somewhere people went to bet, rather than a social day, but it doesn't have to be, and for me it's much more social than it is betting.

"If you win it's the icing on the cake. If somebody else wins and they buy a bottle of champagne, even better."

Simon, meanwhile, had taken on board the enthusiasm of other colleagues when dipping his toe into the sport.

"I was 40 and I'd been to a few race meetings, but a couple of people in the office were very much into it, and I noticed there would be certain periods during the afternoon when I'd be working away and they'd be on the phone and then the phones would go down at the same time – and it took me a while to twig that they were both on to one of the racelines listening to commentaries, in the days before the internet.

A scan of the paddock at a subdued Lingfield

"They got me interested in it, took me down to Cheltenham on a press trip in 1991, I read the tips in the Independent and had a fiver each-way on Oh So Risky for the Triumph Hurdle at 16-1, and that got me hooked."

He lived near Sandown, which helped, and he soon joined the Hole in the Wall Gang syndicate in the office, started taking the kids to the races – "they got in for nothing, which was great" – occasionally getting into trouble for his imaginative parenting methods.

"I remember going to the betting shop and getting the kids to wait outside while I put my bets on," he recalls, "then getting a call from my ex-wife wondering about the stories the kids were writing at school about what they did at the weekend."

At risk of sounding too boomerish, he harks back to the good old days, when the new wave of puritanism had yet to rear its sniffy head.

"That was 30-plus years ago, all the betting was in the betting shops. In Hampton Court, we'd go to the bookies round the corner and all the Chinese waiters would be in there and the atmosphere could be great. When I moved to Arundel, the betting shop near [John Dunlop's] Castle Stables would be full of people with racing connections and tips, and you'd see [local jockey] Liam Treadwell in town [Simon was the only resident who didn't back Mon Mome when Treadwell won the Grand National on him at 100-1], but the shop closed down three or four years ago so I bet online now and the experience has changed beyond all recognition."

‘There’s a lot about racing that’s admirable’

So, how does Simon approach the racing experience now that the internet has taken over and on-course bookmakers, probably for the better, no longer give you "those cardboard tickets that had no information on them so you had to write it all on the back yourself and often ended up having a row".

He's kept up a Racing Post subscription for three years; reads Greg Wood in the Guardian and is appalled at how little space Rob Wright gets in the Times; occasionally views races on betting sites if he's had a punt; bets, pound for pound, as much as he's always done; and has ITV's Opening Show on series record.

He’s none too happy at some of the behaviour he’s witnessed at bigger racedays – "I've seen fights at Goodwood, chairs and tables flying everywhere, blokes whacking hell out of each other, which put me and my wife off” – but that certainly didn't happen on our afternoon at Lingfield, which was deemed a qualified success for many and varied reasons.

Ruth liked it because it wasn't too crowded, she could people-watch and it was very social, although she wanted wine that wasn't in cans, and "I'd be tempted to come more often if they improved the food and smartened up the bars, which isn't hard to do".

Den loves sport, especially live sport, and will still go a couple of times a year, maybe more. Simon, meanwhile, wishes he knew what he was looking at in the paddock but doesn't let it put him off.

"It's just nice to be able to see the trainers and the jockeys in the flesh, and that will never change," he says, although there’s a slight sense of bewilderment at some of the things that have changed and what it all means.

"What's the future?" he wonders. "Do younger people just want to go to Sandown to see Rick Astley [maybe that's more of an early boomer thing, but we'll let it pass], with a bit of racing beforehand and drinking all night?

"Of course racing has changed, but there's still a lot about it that I think is admirable and I understand the changes. They need to get more revenue in, like T20 did for cricket. I didn't get that when it came in and I still don't, but at least it draws in a new audience.

"Racing just needs to try harder. It's tried the Racing League, but who is that drawing in who wasn't watching already?

"It's hard to know the way forward, but I'd hate to be the one trying to sort it out."

Read more from The Generation Game series:

Generation Z: 'You can't expect people to become attached to a sport they don't understand' 

Millennials: ‘My friend left her handbag in Frankie Dettori’s car - he was driving all around Newmarket trying to find us!’ 

Generation X: 'The headmaster caught me in the bookies and just asked what was going to win the next - now it's affordability checks I have to worry about' 

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