ROYAL ASCOT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23233, 30 December 1938, Page 6

ROYAL ASCOT

AUTHOR AS CKITIC SEES THE SEAMY SIDE CONVENTION IGNORED BOOK OF SPARTAN SINCERITY OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT] LONDON, Dec. 10 Royal Ascot has at last been criticised. For generations conventional authors and -writers have used conventional phrases about its glories and its splendours. They have likened the meetings on this "brave" racecourse (Queen Anne's adjective) to a Royal garden party; they have dipped pens in the rainbow to do justice to the loveliness of the fashion parade; and some have been so lost in admiration of the rhododendrons as almost to forget the runners. Mr. Sidney Rogerson is different. For him the conventions count for nothing. He sees the real Ascot — with its seamy side. To him the "dreadful stone and stucco architecture rising in pitiless tiers" came as a shock and an eyesore. v In his book "The Old Enchantment" he speaks of the crushing, the smell of petrol, the wearisome traffic blocks—of paunchy sportsmen and of loud women with powder caking on their faces. Mr. Rogerson writes of the pilfering and "welshing" that go on at Ascot. Nor can he sentimentalise over Cockney characters on the popular side, or the gipsies offerins' "filthy bits of wood for luck." Being a realist, the writer says he refuses to invest with the clothing ol romance the fortune-teller, whose most visible covering is dirt. That kind of Spartan sincerity which refuses to gloss over the ugly spots on the landscape distinguishes his set of English j sketches.