Tales From The Turf/Sporting Art and caricature

I discovered this book in the Oxfam charity book shop on Bath Road: Tales From The Turf by Jeffrey Bernard & Hugh Dodd. It was published in 1991 as a collection of columns Bernard wrote for the Sporting Life and the Spectator from the mid 70s until Bernard's death in 1997. Whether the articles were also illustrated in the magazines I don't know. Sadly the Sporting Life also died a print death in 1998 and now only exists as an anodyne betting news website with no features at all. I was in a school production of the play 'Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell,' so named after the line printed in the paper when fill-in writers covered for Bernard as he struggled with the alcoholism that was to kill him. I wasn't Bernard in the play, incidentally.

Bernard's stories are largely anecdotal and accompanied by full-colour paintings by Hugh Dodd, who at the time was mostly a caricaturist. He has gone on to major in Golf and now chiefly does landscapes of famous golf holes. At this stage he was clearly influenced by Degas and Lautrec whose use of pastel hatching to colour features in most of the pictures. I find his caricatures generally too unsympathetic and rather lacking in variation although the ones I have scanned here are exceptions. One could equally say that they do a good job at portraying the venality of the racing scene Bernard describes in his tales. There are also small sketches of horses done in pen that I prefer.

One suspects that an illustrator like Ralph Steadman might have done a better job illustrating Bernard given his association with the similarly self-destructive but entertaining Hunter S. Thompson. Yet for all this Dodd's pictures are not useless in conveying the familiar sights of horse racing, though he does very few horses. The interesting thing is that, really, the racing 'scene' has changed little since the early 90s and, were it not for the fact that this sort of caricature style has rather gone out of fashion there is very little that has dated about the content of the images.

This sort of sporting book - and the use of illustration in them - was quite common until the 1990s, and could be found across all sports. It is less common now, although not nonexistent. I suspect the professionalisation of contemporary sport has toned down the number and value of anecdotes that emerge from the ranks of increasingly musclebound, identikit players. Sport books are more often po-faced nowadays, either bone-crunchingly motivational or utterly depressing; there is less of the old school-boy humor. An exception might be found amongst cricket books which still produce a few of this type every other year. A contemporary illustrator who does sporting caricature is John Ireland:

More often we have variations on the graphic design theme, as with Phil Tufnell's latest offering: 

Most horse racing books feature nothing but photos; there are plenty of antique racing prints on the walls of the grandstand at Cheltenham racecourse but no contemporary illustrations. I have picked a hard nut to crack. Cricket is easier. Ex-cricketer turned journalist and broadcaster Simon Hughes' recent lighthearted cricket history book had a cover by Paul Slater, a take on Da Vinci's The Last Supper featuring famous cricketers (but, deeply inappropriately, none of them West Indian or Asian): 

I am not really in the business of doing covers for sports books just yet. But anything that is to do with sport is connected in some way to this sort of work, and the intent; to capture a familiar aspect of the sport and convey it in a way different to photography, is very much relevant, I feel.