by Dick Francis
Lester took things calmly and rode competently enough and with competitiveness, but without the old easy inspiration. No one reproached him, least of all his parents, but neither did anyone give him much advice. He saw eventually that his future depended on himself: that he would have to sort himself out and build his own road ahead.
Everyone, including himself, had taken it for granted that when he grew too heavy for the Flat he would turn to jumping and follow in his father's and grandfather's distinguished wake. Keith had been tough, tireless and consistently successful. Ernie, Keith's father, had been champion jump jockey several times both in England and in France. Lester was expected to inherit the great tradition. Since Keith Piggott trained jumpers in addition to Flat racers, his son accepted that he would henceforth ride them, but less with enthusiasm than resignation.
During the 1953 Flat season his only winners of any consequence were the Royal Vase at Royal Ascot on Absolve, and two good races on Zucchero (by now trained by Bill Payne), the Coronation Cup at Epsom in June and the Rose of York Stakes at York in August. All the rest were for prizes of under £1,000. His Derby mount, Prince Charlemagne, finished 15th. He rode 41 winners in all, scarcely more than half his previous year's total.
Troubled and increasingly heavy, he approached his first winter of jump racing with a lonely and slowly growing determination to put himself back into top Flat-racing shape for 1954. Physical shape, mental shape, all the way.
He asked his mother to give him less to eat.
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4 Jumping
KEITH and Iris had never regulated Lester's diet, but had given him what he wanted to eat; and considering he was a normally growing boy, they were wise. He had never, in any case, eaten greedily or wanted a great deal. When he asked to be given less, Iris as usual did as he said. Lester, all along the line, was lucky in his parents.
By his eighteenth birthday he was approaching what proved to be his final height of five feet seven and a half inches, although no one could be sure of it at the time as some young men are still growing at twenty. He had inherited a light frame, but even so the expected weight of a male of that build and age would be over nine stone, and that seemed to be the weight his body was trying to achieve.
For a full-time Flat race jockey, a body weight of nine stone was nearly impossible: most Flat horses in Lester's early days carried seven stone something or eight stone something. Nine and over was the top of the handicap, with comparatively few in that bracket.
For a jump jockey, however, nine stone is fight. On jumpers, Lester would be back where he started, able to ride absolutely everything from the weight point of view. He was accustomed to the jumpers in his father's stable, and that Keith could train them successfully is without doubt: he produced Ayala to win the Grand National in 1963.
Keith's jumpers ten years earlier were mainly selling platers or moderately good old horses, and looking at it squarely, this was not the material his son needed. But then Lester had made his way upwards before from the springboard of Keith's runners, and the elder Piggott philosophically believed he-night do so again.
Keith had taught Lester how to ride over jumps as part of his general education, and Lester had had a good deal of practice on the schooling grounds at home.
Accordingly, in his normal calm way, he went out to race over hurdles for the first time on 27 November 1953. The place was Kempton Park; the horse, Tangle, trained by Bill Payne. Tangle set off well, made a couple of jumping errors early on and finished second to last. No one could feel any excitement.
After a pause, Bill Payne, who had produced many a Lester winner on the Flat, offered him a chance on Eldoret in a handicap hurdle at Wincanton on Boxing Day.
Eldoret, incidentally, had presented apprentice Joe Mercer with his first win-on the Flat-a year earlier at Bath, and Lester himself had ridden him to victory on the Flat in 1950. Lester therefore accepted the jumping ride with gratitude, started favourite, rode a well-planned race and won by five lengths with plenty in hand.
His next win, on 2 January 1954 at Newbury, was again for Bill Payne: he made all the running on Stranger, and beat this book's author into third place. I took my revenge at Sandown two weeks later, on 15 January, when Lester again partnered Stranger and I was on Deal Park, trained by Peter Cazalet, for whose stable I regularly rode. Stranger started at 7-4, Deal Park at 9-4; first and second favourites.
Stranger led for most of the way, but Deal Park passed him on the approach to the second last hurdle and won after a strong contest up the hill, both horses finishing very tired.
Lester has photographs of himself leading the field of fourteen, with Deal Park in the background. I have a photograph of Deal Park leading Stranger over the last hurdle (see no. 6). There am I, looking determined and slightly apprehensive, with my mount getting awkwardly into his stride, followed by an equally determined little demon bunched over his horse's withers, not giving up for a second, although I'd already passed him. For young Lester, no race was lost until the winning post was reached.
The fact that Lester's photographs and mine show alternative versions of the same event do not, incidentally, reflect our ignoble vanities: the photo agencies used to send free to jockeys whatever pictures they thought would please the jockeys most!
For five weeks or so Lester rode no more hurdle races but came back with a flourish at Ludlow on Strokes and Deux Points, scoring a double for his father.
A week later he was back in the winner's spot on Corola Pride at Worcester, with Mull Sack lined up for the first race at the Cheltenham Festival the next day.
Lester had never ridden at Cheltenham; so Keith, in his thorough and no-nonsense way, insisted that he should walk the course.
They stopped at Cheltenham on the way back from Worcester and set off on the nearly two-mile grassy hike. Lester went without much enthusiasm ("and it was dark by the time we got round!"), but the next afternoon, putting the lesson to good use, he duly won on Mull Sack.
With his overall score then standing at six, Lester was engaged to ride in the Triumph Hurdle, run in those days at Hurst Park but later transfer red to Cheltenham. He rode Prince Charlemagne, his partner from the 1953 Derby, who was setting out in a hurdle race for the first time, aiming high at the NH event considered the crown for four-yearolds.
Prince Charlemagne might not have had quite enough class for the Derby, but he was nonetheless a very good horse. His trainer, Tommy Carey, wanted to have a bet on him in the Triumph Hurdle and, needing to know his state of readiness, took him to Kempton Park a week before the Triumph to gallop in a training session over the course after the day's racing had ended. (Many trainers follow this practice. It gives their horses a taste of racecourse experience, and racecourses themselves in general offer a better surface and better-built jumps than the gallops back home.)
Lester rode Prince Charlemagne alongside two other very good horses trained by two other trainers, Bob Read and Stanley Wootton, and went easily all the way round until he reached the last hurdle. Prince Charlemagne flattened it, went through it without jumping, but despite this setback, finished upsides and level with his companions.
Tommy Carey beamed with pleasure and went away to put his money on with confidence for the Triumph. Unknown to the other trainers, unknown to any but Lester, he had packed Lester's weight-cloth with lead and had sent his horse out to gallop carrying a colossal 13 st. If Prince Charlemagne could carry 13 st. and finish level with the horses so far considered the best of the year's four-year-old hurdlers, what could he not do with the 10 st. 10 lb. he was allotted in the Triumph?
Lester with a straight face went out to demonstrate, and Prince Charlemagne gave an exact repeat performance, going easily throughout the race and making a total mess of the last hurdle. The trainer's bet might have come nastily unstuck right there, but Prince Charlemagne recovered and produced enough Derby-class speed to regain and keep the lead. He had started favourite at 11-4, having opened at 5-1; and Tommy Carey cheerfull
y pocketed his extensive winnings.
Prince Charlemagne that day beat a field of eleven other horses, eight of which had won the last time out, with two others second. It has to be, in hindsight, one of the most remarkable Triumphs.
Lester had a fall later in the day. Jump racing is a great leveller.
He rode a couple more winners for his father, ending his first jumping season with 9 wins, 3 seconds and 4 thirds from 25 rides. Considering his obvious ability and his light (for jumping) weight, the National Hunt world had beaten a remarkably subdued path to his door.
Lester enjoyed jump racing to a certain extent, but it was only in that first season that he made any real effort to advance into a jumping career. He does, all the same, acknowledge a debt to his NH experience. Jumping toughens you up, he says. It did him good. He saw the other side of racing and grew in understanding. The people he rode against were bigger, stronger and earthier men, full of jokes. He found jump jockeys easy to get on with, and says: "They always were much more of a sporting lot. But at that time, there were one or two you wouldn't want to go up on the inside of. Like Bryan Marshall. You wouldn't want to poke up on his inside going into a hurdle. You'd get flattened.
They were entitled to do it. Nowadays, they probably wouldn't be doing it so much.
You never see a jumping jockey put another fellow in trouble if he can help it, do you? If you're going into a jump and you want a bit of room, they'll give it to you.
They're not going to do you, and put you on the floor or through the wing; that's where they're so fair."
He thinks that compared with racing over jumps, the Flat is easy. Conversely, he also says that one needs to be fitter to ride on the Flat.
This apparent contradiction is borne out by all jockeys who have tried both. The fact is that in a jumping race, although the distance covered is almost always longer, the jockey's body frequently changes position, the spine straightening as the horse lands over the jumps. In a Flat race, the crouch over the withers is constant, with the head tipped back to see the way ahead. The strain on all muscles is definitely more when they can't bend or stretch, particularly in races as long as a mile and a half, like the Derby. Because of the crouch, it is also harder to breathe; in a short Flat race, a jump jockey hardened to three miles or more over fences can get out of breath. In a Flat race, too, one usually has to ride harder for longer approaching the winning post, and can finish exhausted.
Lester took the usual tumbles in his jump races. "Bound to happen. Law of averages." He emerged more or less unscathed, although one day at Newbury he cracked his shoulder blade. "My own fault. I fell off," he says laconically.
In his third season he rode Rich Bloom for Walter Nightingall, winning in October, but coming to grief next time out.
"I rode Rich Bloom again at Kempton on Boxing Day, and he fell. There's that hurdle just round the bend, past the stands, and he galloped straight through it. He wasn't a good jumper. He probably hadn't been schooled enough. Some horses feel like that, as if they've never been steadied at home. They tend to grab at the hurdles. I had an easy fall really. There were quite a few runners and they galloped all over me, and one put his foot right on my face. Cut all over. Before that happened I could have got up and got out of the way. But you don't, do you? You're usually better staying on the ground." He tells the story with tolerance: many worse things happened on the Flat (see chapters beginning on pp. 132 and 233).
The statistics of his sporadic jumping history tell their own tale. After the first season in 1953-54, he rode only 1 winner from 15 rides in 1954-55. In 1955-56, he rode in no NH races at all; 1956-57 saw 6 wins (including Rich Bloom) from only 9 rides. In 1957-58 he rode 2 wins from 3 rides, and in 1958-59, 2 from 2.
After that, he stopped. He never closed the door with finality on jumping but simply drifted away from it through being offered more and more opportunities to ride flat races abroad during the winter. No one tried to stop him because of the danger.
Four of his later wins (out of four rides) were for Pierre Raymond, the innovative hairdresser who was one of the originators of the "swinging" sixties. Pierre Raymond bought his most prolific winner, Royal Task, from Keith, and became a good friend of all the Piggotts. It was in his colours that the Keith Piggott-trained Ayala won the Grand National, but with Pat Buckley, not Lester, on board.
Lester might have done more National Hunt racing if he had been offered top-class horses, but those top horses were in stables where jockeys like Fred Winter, Dave Dick, Tim Molony and that fellow Dick Francis had first claim. Besides, Lester rode only in hurdle races, and not at all over the bigger fences, and there were the established hurdles specialists, Harry Sprague, Ken Mullins and Johnny Gilbert in his way.
Fourteen of Lester's grand total of 20 jumping winners were trained by his father.
One might say that he never got a full chance to show what he could do, though from my memories of him he had all the physical and mental equipment to get to the top if his heart had been in it. His record of 20 wins from a total of 54 rides can be called spectacular, but he did very definitely prefer to ride on the Flat, and jumping was to him always second best.
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5 The Shape of the Racing Year
WITHIN this book, the names of many races constantly recur, and I thought it might be helpful for anyone not closely involved in the sport if I set out here the regular shape of a Flat-race jockey's season. The list is selective, geared to Lester's experiences; several big races have been omitted.
I've given the races the titles they're best known by, leaving out in most cases the names of the present sponsors. Races initiated by sponsors, such as the Waterford Crystal Mile, are the exceptions. The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot was called The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Festival of Britain Stakes for that one Festival year only, 1951, and became the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes when de Beers started sponsoring it.
The Flat season opens on a Thursday in the second half of March and closes in the first half of November. Dates of all races vary a little from year to year. This table includes the main Irish races and a few French races also, as to Lester they were a normal part of the calendar.
The races starred * are commonly regarded as preparation for the classics.
In the Age column, c = colts, f = fillies, g = geldings.
Here goes.
Month
Racecourse
Race
Age of contestants
Distance in furlongs
April
Ascot
until 1978
One Thousand Guineas
thereafter Salisbury Trial*
3-yr-old f
7
April
Two Thousand Guineas Trial*
3-yr old c
7
April
Newbury
Fred Darling Stakes*
3-yr-old f
7
April
Newbury
Greenham Stakes*
3-yr-old c & g
7
April
Newbury
Spring Cup
4-yr-olds & upwards
8
April
Newmarket
Craven Stakes*
3-yr-old c & g
8
April
Newmarket
Free Handicap*
3-yr-olds
7
April
Sandown
Esher Cup*
3-yr-olds
8
April
Sandown
Classic Trial*
3-yr-old c & g
10
April
Epsom
Great Metropolitan Handicap
4-yr-olds & upwards
12
(orig. 18)
April
Epsom
Princess Elizabeth Stakes*
3-yr-old f
/> 8
April
Epsom
Blue Riband Stakes*
3-yr-old c & g
8
April
Newmarket
One Thousand Guineas
3-yr-old f
8
April/May
Newmarket
Two Thousand Guineas
3-yr-old c & f
8
April/May
Newmarket
Jockey Club Stakes
4-yr-olds & upwards
12
May
Chester
Chester Vase*
3-yr-old c & f
12
May
Chester
Chester Cup
4-yr-olds & upwards
18
May
Lingfield
Oaks Trial Stakes*
3-yr-old f
12