Royal Ascot in person, the late monarch was still a presence at her favourite course during the biggest week of its year. “Even though she wasn’t here last year, she was still at Windsor Castle and watching the whole affair,” Nick Smith, Ascot’s director of racing and public affairs, said this past week. “She did still feel very much part of the event.”
The Royal meeting was often said to be the first – and most sacrosanct – engagement in the former Queen’s private diary each year, and she did not miss a single day at Royal Ascot during her long reign until Covid sent the meeting behind closed doors in 2020.
Even in 2017, when Theresa May rather thoughtlessly engineered a clash between the state opening of parliament and the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, commandeering the horses for the royal procession in the process, Queen Elizabeth II rattled through her speech like an auctioneer with a plane to catch and still got to Ascot in plenty of time for the opener.
So the first Royal meeting since her death last September, which opens on Tuesday with a card that includes three Group One events, will look much the same on the surface. It always does, which is a big part of its appeal. But it will also, inevitably, feel a little different, too.
Smith, who is bound by protocol and security considerations, can say only that there will be a “significant” royal presence throughout the five days, including in the royal procession before racing, which also took place without the queen last year. How many days will have either King Charles, Queen Camilla, or both, in attendance remains to be seen.
There is a good deal more to Royal Ascot, though, than totting-up of the seniority of the family members in the carriages. And while it appears from the outside to have been pickled in aspic from its earliest days, it is in fact an event that has emerged over time. No one came up with the Royal Ascot brand and traditions in a brainstorming meeting. It has, instead, evolved over the centuries and will continue to do so.
“It’s an interesting concept because it was never really invented and no one can work out when it was first called Royal Ascot,” Smith says. “Back in the day, the racecards just said ‘Ascot Races’ and that was up until fairly recently. In the 1950s, you’d still have that on the cards, but there was a royal enclosure and so on.
“You can probably take the first royal procession under George IV [in 1825] as the first time that Royal Ascot was Royal Ascot in something like the form it has now, but it was never created as a brand or marketing entity. It was colloquial, like Glorious Goodwood. Royal Ascot became what the public called it, and then it became officially Royal Ascot.
“The royal enclosure started in the Edwardian era, when morning dress would have been what people were wearing anyway. It just happened that the tradition continued when morning dress basically disappeared. All the traditions came at different points of its history and then all came together. Royal Ascot built itself rather than being created.”
As with any event that is so steeped in tradition, it will take a few years to gauge whether the loss of the Royal meeting’s most devoted and longstanding fan will affect its long-term popularity. Attendance is likely to be slightly down this year, but the drop is principally in the entry-level Windsor enclosure, which the track suggests is due solely to belt-tightening amid cost-of-living concerns.
“If we wanted to have more people on site than last year, we could do it immediately,” Smith says, “because we’d just sell more tickets for the enclosures that are sold out.”
One unshakeable Ascot tradition that will remain untouched, along with the royal procession and a sing-song around the bandstand after racing, is its dress code. The Jockey Club announced this year that it was abandoning dress codes at its 15 courses to make the sport more “accessible and inclusive”, but the rules at the Royal meeting will remain rigid.
“It’s embraced from top to bottom. It’s strict and compulsory in the royal enclosure but it’s not actually enforced at all in the Windsor enclosure, but everybody there comes dressed very smartly anyway, because that’s what they want to do at Royal Ascot.”
If Royal Ascot were pitched as an idea for a new sporting event by a team on The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar would probably fire them all on the spot. But it is the meeting’s many foibles and eccentricities that keep the fans coming back, monarchists and even – whisper it – republicans alike.
“Royal Ascot isn’t like Cheltenham, which is a racing event for racing people,” Smith says of the March Festival. “Royal Ascot is a national event and a social event for the vast majority of people who come, so they don’t necessarily come every year. Our repeat rate tends to be that people come once every three years, or every other year, and another year they might go to Glastonbury or Wimbledon.
“All these things, if you tried to replicate them [from scratch] in 2023, they wouldn’t work, but they do work, because they’re rooted in tradition and love.”
- Greg Wood
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