By 9 a.m. the trams were crowded and along the roads to Aintree lumbered
busses filled with girls nibbling chocolate bars, clerks in their
Sunday suits, gentlemen with binoculars who made notes on the margins
of their form charts. By 11 a.m. the bookmakers were on their
platforms shouting odds soon to be changed: “Fifty to one against the
field except Easter Hero!” All morning there were long lines of
bettors at the windows of the new “tote”
machines. The sky, which had been misty, brightened before the
trippers opened their sandwich baskets. On a barge moored in the
Leeds & Liverpool Canal near Valentine’s Brook, the Duke of
Westminster and his friends quaffed scotch & soda. They were
watched, from the Royal stand built several years ago for the Prince
of Wales, by a wide-eyed group of Swedish excursionists. The
grandstand and enclosure were nearly filled toward noon, when an
agitated hare came humping down the home stretch, crossed the finish
line and dodged into the paddock. . . . In the paddock, the horses
stood easy and quiet. Cyril R. Taylor’s Grakle, a brown gelding nine
years old who had run in the Grand National four times and only
finished once, nibbled wisps of hay in comparative obscurity; he was
a 100-to-6 shot. Gregalach, the chestnut gelding who won in 1929, pawed
the ground without enthusiasm while his fanciers flocked around.
Thickest of all was the crowd looking at John Hay
Whitney’s Easter Hero, favorite at odds of 8-to-1. The warning bell
rang and the horses danced slowly through a lane in the crowd from the
paddock to the track—Easter Hero first, then Glangesia, Ballasport,
Kakuskin and 39 others. Watched by 300,000 people they stood for a few seconds jostling at the line, then broke
in the confusion of a false start. A moment later the field broke
again, this time gathering speed and narrowing together as they went
past Sefton Yard. Every horse went over the first fence. At Becher’s
Brook, Swift Roland fell and was killed when the horse behind him
landed on his head. The first time past the stands, Easter Hero was
ahead, with Gregalach second and Grakle, Shaun Goilin
