Racing: Miners rally to racing's gesture: Paul Hayward reports on the surge of support ahead of a track's special day to highlight protests over pit closures

SOUTHWELL racetrack, which has attracted less than a hundred spectators for some of its all- weather meetings, is in danger of being overrun on Friday week as it stages a fixture in support of the 30,000 British coal miners threatened with redundancy. Is the cause too big for the course?

So popular is their 'Racing for the Mines' day becoming that yesterday Southwell were contemplating an urgent telephone survey of threatened mining communities to determine just how oversubscribed facilities at the course, near Newark-on-Trent, will be.

A surfeit of concerned boxers alone will stretch the management's hospitality resources, as among a group of professional fighters who will be in attendance are Herol Graham, Johnny Nelson, Naz Ahmed and Fidel Castro Smith, who, with his name, would have a less than zero chance of getting past the gatemen at Royal Ascot.

The unlikely alliance between horse racing and an industry which many of its (racing's) rulers would still stubbornly associate with Arthur Scargill and the lights constantly going out is partly a reflection of Southwell's geographical position close to the mining areas of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. But it also illustrates how the fate of the miners has drawn concern from the most unusual sources.

Richard Alexander, one of a number of Conservative MPs who will join the pugilists at Southwell races next week, said yesterday: 'This has not been a party political thing and people in London and at British Coal have been very much surprised at the extent to which people of all social backgrounds are deeply concerned about what was proposed (by the government).

'I don't think that they (the organisers of the miners' day) are seeking money but they are seeking an even wider public consciousness of the devastation which we hope we may be able to avert. There has always been a close link between the Southwell area and the miners.'

If that is so, the executive at Southwell are learning one or two lessons about the size of the political mobilisation now taking place. The track have issued free tickets to miners and their families and have named all six races in honour of imperilled collieries (the Bolsover and Shirebrook Handicap will particularly delight one Dennis Skinner), but the prospect of a full-scale political festival taking place in their normally sedate parish is producing as much anxiety as it is pride.

'The problem,' Ron Muddle, the course's owner, said yesterday with a trace of ruefulness, 'is not knowing how many people are going to turn up.' Normally he would mean, 'how few', but this time Muddle finds himself saying: 'We're going to have to have a ring round to see if we can ascertain how many coaches and so on are coming.'

Muddle has had well-catalogued disputes with the Jockey Club in the past, so the question of whether racing's rulers have provided any logistical assistance elicits the answer: 'Are you joking?'

The Jockey Club may be about the only social grouping absent from racing's temporary rainbow alliance. Brian Clough will be emerging from the pit that his Nottingham Forest are currently in to defend the right of others to climb into holes, and among other prominent patrons will be Robin Cook, shadow President of the Board of Trade, Richard Caborn MP, chairman of the Trade and Industry Select Committee, and Alan Meale, the MP for Mansfield who is public enemy No. 1 at the Jockey Club for his attempts to have it disbanded.

Newmarket or Ascot would be unlikely to countenance having miners' banners, brass bands and free food and drinks stalls intruding on their manicured lawns. But then nor could they ever boast of supplying creches for customers' children, nor claim to have the support of local solicitors, catering firms, transport companies, local authorities, financial advisers and the Sporting Life, as the organisers' of Southwell's miners' day can.

Unquestionably it will be a novelty for the winning riders to be presented with commemorative miners' lamps, which should provide betting shop punters with plenty of material for jokes about jockeys needing head-torches for guidance. The lights could find early employment if the sky goes dark with all the balloons - one for each job lost in mining - that the TUC is planning to release over Southwell at noon.

'We've got mines to the north, south, east and west of us,' Muddle said, contemplating the scale of the influx to his course on what would normally be a forgettable Friday.

All-weather racing may have found its audience at last.

Gee Armytage was yesterday preparing herself for another spell on the sidelines as she recovers from a back injury sustained in the Welsh National at Chepstow on Monday. She crushed a vertebra in a seventh-fence fall from Merry Master and is likely to be out of action until the end of January. Armytage, who broke her left collarbone in a fall from the same horse almost a year ago, only recently recovered from a heavy tumble at Taunton in November which lacerated her left arm.

(Photograph omitted)