Horse racing has been an enjoyable hobby or a pleasant day out for many people, but scratch beneath the surface and there are many links with crime.

The races was one of the few times when different social classes were packed cheek by jowl into a small space. The painting The Derby Day, which was exhibited by William Frith Powell in 1858, shows the crowds arriving at Epsom. A group of tricksters con gullible racegoers by sleight-of-hand tricks and a well-dressed gent discovers that his pocket has been picked. A racegoer had to keep his wits about him.

Frith’s picture hints at a distinct criminal fraternity, but crime at the races was not confined to a certain type of person. Often it was an insider job, appealing to those in the know by the rich pickings available through gambling.

In 1828, after the favourite for the St Leger unaccountably lost, it was rumoured that a stable lad had pocketed a bribe to slip an emetic into the horse’s food the night before the race. A jockey sometimes deliberately lost a race, or sold insider information about training runs.

An unusual deception occurred in 1863 when Catch-em-Alive won the Cambridgeshire Stakes. When the jockey weighed in after the race, he was two pounds less than he should have been. Normally, disqualification would have followed, but an investigation of the scales revealed that a lump of lead had been stuck to one side. When this was removed, the jockey was weighed again and made the required weight. Catch-em-Alive’s victory was confirmed.

Substitution of a novice animal for an experienced horse could occur. In 1867, Soiled Dove won four races for two-year-olds, prompting the owner of a defeated horse to ask how old she really was. Checking the horse’s teeth proved that she was three, and had a strength advantage.

Soiled Dove’s owner was Major General Arthur Shirley, an officer in the Horse Guards, with connections to the aristocracy and politics. Shirley claimed that they had been duped when he bought the horse, but was barred from racing for fraud, as the investigators decide that an experienced racing man would have known the horse’s age.

These scandals paled into insignificance in 1877, when the crime which became known as the Great Turf Fraud transfixed the country. During the summer of 1876, five men organised a sophisticated scam, which was designed to part French gamblers from their money. Initially conceived by petty criminal William Kurr, who dabbled in bookmaking and horse racing, the plan was put into devastating effect by Harry Benson, a convicted forger, who understood exactly how to translate an idea into reality.

The scam involved writing and printing a single edition of a sporting newspaper. Anyone unfamiliar with British newspapers would assume that it was a long-established publication. The paper included a glowing piece about a man who liked to bet on horse races but could not get fair odds from bookmakers because he was particularly skilled at picking winners. He was now looking for intermediaries who would allow him to place bets in their name. They would receive the winnings after he had deducted his commission. Several hundred copies of the fake newspaper were posted out to addresses in France, with an enclosure which translated the request for intermediaries into French.

Within days, envelopes containing thousands of francs had been posted to an accommodation address in London. In an age when banks were not required to establish a customer’s identity, it was simple for gang members to use aliases, as they exchanged the foreign bills and notes for sterling at several banks. Some intermediaries who had initially placed large bets received false cheques, apparently their reward for a winning bet, to entice them to make further investments.

This type of fraud could only last for a short time before it was discovered, but, as the victims were foreigners, there was a strong chance that it would never become known to the police. Anyone who received no return, would probably not bet again but might not realise that they had been deceived. Anyone who banked a fake cheque would discover the problem when they tried to draw the money out of a bank, but might keep quiet rather than admit their stupidity, or find it difficult to report the loss in a foreign country which spoke a different language.

Benson and Kurr had reckoned without Madame Marie de Goncourt, who had been particularly gullible and sent several cheques totalling around £30,000, believing that she had discovered a foolproof way of increasing her income. It was only when she went to her bank to arrange to draw yet another large cheque, and discovered that she was out of funds, that she realised that she was being duped. Shocked and indignant, she consulted her solicitor, who raised the alarm with the authorities in London.

By the time the police became involved, the stream of francs had almost dried up and the fraudsters had moved on from the various rooms they had briefly rented in London. Despite hiding behind false identities, a few tardy letters arrived at the accommodation address and police enquiries pieced together what had happened and who was involved.

As soon as the aliases had been penetrated, bringing the gang to justice should have been straightforward, but luck eluded the police. They traced members of the gang to a London address, but when they arrived to apprehend them, the birds had flown. Undeterred, the police found a forwarding address and pursued them to Scotland, only to arrive a few hours after they had left. Finally the fugitives were traced to Rotterdam and arrested by Dutch police.

The trial was held at the Old Bailey in the spring of 1877 and the fraudsters were jailed. Then came another sensation. Benson and Kurr turned in the senior police officers who had been tasked to arrest them, alleging that they had accepted bribes and hospitality for warning them when to expect a raid. In autumn 1877, four of the most senior police officers from Scotland Yard and a solicitor were themselves in the dock of the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

John Meiklejohn turned out to have been an associate of Kurr’s for several years and can fairly be described as a ’bent copper’. Nathanial Druscovich, who was wracked by financial problems, and William Palmer had been drawn into the criminal underworld through Meiklejohn’s corrupting influence, willing victims to the lure of easy money. All three were convicted and jailed, as was solicitor Edward Froggatt whose help to his clients, Benson and Kurr, had gone beyond what was reasonable for a solicitor to provide. A fourth policeman, George Clarke, doggedly maintained his innocence and was acquitted of the charges against him, but his career was in ruins and he retired shortly after the trial. Contemporaries considered that he was fortunate to be cleared of criminality in his ill-advised dealings with the gang. Twenty years older than the other defendants and with years of respectable service to his name, the jury possibly allowed him the benefit of the doubt.

The trial of the detectives had far-reaching implications for the police. The trial had laid bare many inadequacies. Pay was one issue as a low salary might make an honest man open to temptation. Another issue was the poor management of the detectives by Scotland Yard’s most senior officer. Soon after the scandal the force was reorganised and the Criminal Investigation Department, (commonly known as the CID) was formed. Exactly how robust these reforms were initially should be balanced against the fact that after Meiklejohn was released from jail he was retained as a freelance investigator for the force, before this was deemed to be inappropriate. He then made a living as a private detective, specialising in clients whose affairs were shady and operating at the margins of legality on their behalf. Benson and Kurr achieved a different sort of ongoing public profile when, shortly after the trials, their likenesses became exhibits at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks.

No other turf fraud ever matched this notoriety, but they continued. As the telephone speeded up communication, a new scam developed, placing or accepting bets around the scheduled time of a race after one party to the transaction had received news of the result.

Horse racing was usually an honest and enjoyable sport, but it had many points of weakness which cheats could exploit. When the rewards could be counted in hard cash, temptation could prove too great, even for normally honest men.