TO the summer Sunday race meeting at Redcar, there to put £2 on a horse for no better reason than that it carried the name of a Teesdale village where once I interviewed a vicar about the lush crop of tobacco he grew in his front garden.

Barningham duly galloped to a gallant but profitless fourth place. Rather more intelligently in the next race, £1 was invested in a name which rang no personal bells but, on only one board, had been left stranded at 11-1 when other bookies had suddenly reined it in to eights.

Receiving £11 thanks to a short-head victory over the favourite is a splendid antidote to a double dose of ever-so-slightly niggling conscience.

First, this was a Sunday, and children who lived in our part of Hawthorn Drive in the 1940s knew the social stigma attached to going even to the pictures on that most boring afternoon of the week. And secondly: was it good form, so to speak, to bet on horses while wearing the NSPCC's sash and discreetly rattling a collecting tin.

Well, not actually rattling it just then. My wife, my mother and I had joined a small team of that admirable charity's volunteers at the race-meeting but at the moment of the Barningham wager the tin was tucked under my arm. It was forgotten until the bookmaker leaned forward both with my ticket and with his own quite unsolicited pound coins for the good cause.

I was surprised on both counts. Not only because, a far cry from the Saturday-night mayhem of south-east London's Catford dog track during my mispent youth, the on-course bookie's ticket is these days instantly computer-printed with details of your individual bet (which he has also voice-recorded), but also because you somehow don't expect a bookmaker to be, well, human in that sort of way.

Human enough, perhaps, to clip an ear or two if excited 12-year-olds at their first race-meeting bash into his stall. But a large, loud-suited man carrying a tatty Gladstone bag and touting inexecrable pronounciation both of the Queen's English and of the numerous French names on every racecard does not fit the popular image of someone who routinely squirts the milk of human kindness in the direction of abused children.

Then came two quid in my wife's tin from a tick-tack man, although like most of his colleagues this one was doing his ticking and tacking into a CB radio rather than waving white-gloved hands about in the traditional manner. You don't see tipsters on racecourses these days, but if they make a comeback there's sure to be a feather-headdressed one called Prince Monolulu.com. He'll be crying: 'I've gotta horse! Cross my palm and I'll e-mail it to you!'

There were a couple of the old-style tick-tack men still plying their trade and, blow me down, one of them strode the length of the grandstand to contribute. It made me a bit ashamed of the school of thought in the newsroom that thinks it bad form for event organisers to wave raffle tickets in front of reporters who are 'only there on duty.'

What made these and other examples of largesse from bookies and their staff stand out was the lukewarm response of racegoers themselves. Perhaps the mistake was to choose the (relatively) posh side, the £10 and £14 entrances to Tattersalls and the silver ring, just as seasoned NSPCC collectors will tell you that more people look right through you in Northallerton's prosperous high street than outside Asda in down-market Hartlepool, where a very ordinary bloke once startled my wife by giving her £70 in fivers 'for the bairns'.

A director of the Redcar racecourse company, the young Lord Ronaldshay - his father, Lord Zetland, is a former chairman - later told me on the telephone from the Zetland Estate office at Aske Hall, Richmond, that the generosity of the bookmaking fraternity was no surprise to him.

"I've noticed it time and again. They are always the first to dig into their pockets for causes like that," he said, before we moved on to matters of high politics

HIGH politics and the Zetlands? Surely that's a fair description of a new disclosure that Lord Ronaldshay's great-grandfather once accused Winston Churchill of trying to manipulate the abdication crisis of 1936 to catapault himself out of his years in the political wilderness straight into 10 Downing Street.

The Lord Zetland of that time was Secretary of State for India in Stanley Baldwin's Cabinet and one of his duties was to write a weekly letter to the Viceroy summarising the deliberations of that Cabinet. It was in at least two of these letters, whose contents have recently become known, that Lord Zetland warned that Churchill's backing of the King in his determination to marry Mrs Simpson might ultimately bring down the monarchy.

The possible consequences of Edward VIII's love affair were anyway a hot potato throughout the Empire but the Viceroy would have been especially interested in the latest on Churchill's involvement. One of the two main reasons Winston was excluded from office in the Baldwin government was his opposition to concessions made to Indian nationalists; the other was his campaign for rearmament against Germany.

Baldwin had told Edward he would resign if the marriage took place. Lord Zetland wrote to the Viceroy that although the Labour Party under Clement Attlee would then almost certainly refuse to form a government, 'the King has undoubtedly been encouraged to believe that Winston would.'

Churchill would not have a majority in the Commons and so would be forced to seek a dissolution. Then would arise, opined Zetland on December 5, 1936, 'the supreme danger, for the country would be divided into opposing camps on the question whether or not the King should be permitted to marry...You can imagine the sort of things that would be said in the heat of controversy on the platform and on the pavement...'

Commenting on the letters, the constitutional expert Professor Vernon Bogdanor, says this would 'have been fatal to the monarchy, whose purpose is to evoke national unity. As soon as it comes to symbolise division, the value of the monarchy disappears.'

In the end, of course, the King stopped listening to Winston's advice; he abdicated on December 10. It is fascinating, though, to speculate on what might have followed had he not. Britain a republic these last 64 years? A Churchill-led Britain entering the war with the benefit of an extra two years of earnest preparation?

Almost certainly, we can say that the Darlington evening paper, the old Northern Despatch would have been denied the best scoop it had in its 70-year history, an interview with the Darlington vicar who was whisked off to France to conduct Edward's hole-in-the-corner marriage to his divorce in the first months of their exile.

And the celebrations of the 100th birthday today of the Earl of Strathmore's daughter, who as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon spent childhood holidays at Streatlam Castle near the market town she still remembers as 'Barney,' would be in rather lower key.

Happy birthday, dowager Duchess of York, would have been the cry, but perhaps only from a few diehard royalists