by Robin Oakley
With nothing else left of old Hurst Park it is at least a consoling thought that when it died twenty acres of prime Thameside turf went into the laying of Ascot’s new jumping track.
Liverpool days
The first opportunity I had to mix with and write about racing people came when I left Oxford and joined the Liverpool Daily Post as a graduate trainee. It was just after the Beatles had moved on from Merseyside to worldwide adulation and a friend insists he remembers a conversation one day which went:
Friend: ‘Are you coming to the Iron Door this week to hear the Rolling Stones?’
Oakley: ‘No, I heard them in Manchester a few weeks back: they’re not going to make it.’
Just as well I wasn’t trying to become a showbiz reporter.
We trainees were the dogsbodies of the two newspapers, the morning Daily Post and the evening Liverpool Echo, hired basically to be trained up to fill the perpetual shortage of sub-editors processing other people’s copy. You began doing weather and temperatures, checking the Chicago Lard and Hogs prices on the City page, writing up local flower shows and painfully visiting incredibly courteous local families to borrow the mantelpiece picture of a beloved father or son to illustrate an accident report of a death in the docks.
Keen to gain experience and eager to supplement my starting pay of around £850 a year in the hope of being able to start a home with my wife-to-be Carolyn, I used to take on every role I could. Soon I was adding to my basic salary as a ‘sub’ by writing articles, leaders and reviews on a freelance basis under various pseudonyms, even some under the name of ‘Susan Germaine’ for the women’s page. The key opportunity for me though was the discovery that the sports desk had no resident horseracing enthusiast and so ‘Francis Leigh’ (my two middle names) began a series for the Echo ‘Around the Local Stables’, shortly followed by a new racing columnist for the Daily Post who took upon himself the name of ‘Mandarin’, my all-time favourite horse (of whom more at an appropriate stage). When I was summoned one day to the management offices to meet Sir Alick Jeans, the LDP proprietor, I had imagined he might be planning to commend me for all my extra efforts, which nearly doubled both my hours and my salary. Instead all he had to say was, ‘You are earning too much money for a young man of your age.’
The curmudgeonly attitude did not worry me because as well as making progress towards my aim of becoming a political correspondent I was enjoying the opportunity to begin imbibing racing lore from the likes of handicap specialist Eric Cousins, Neston trainer Colin Crossley and the experienced Ron Barnes. That required the purchase of my first car, a second-hand Mini with leopardskin seats. One day it was stolen in Liverpool. The police found it later in Bootle and when I went to collect it the thief had done me a favour: the only thing missing was the leopardskin seat covers!
Before that I used to travel regularly on special raceday coaches packed with shrewd Merseyside regulars to the local tracks of Aintree, Haydock Park and Chester. It was one of my coach companions who told me as we munched our way through cheese and onion baps en route to Haydock one day about a local unlicensed greyhound racing track on Merseyside. It sounded like a different night out and so a Liverpool housemate and I tried it one evening. As I remember, it was somewhere on the fringes of dockland and it made the expression ‘run-down’ sound like an accolade. The dogs were mangy, the handlers, even the female ones, even scruffier: they could have been extras auditioning for the ‘before’ role in dandruff shampoo advertisements. The ramshackle greyhound traps would have lowered the tone of an abandoned allotment and the hare looked like what was left of a well-used washing-up mop. No self-respecting hound would have chased it for more than ten yards. The crowd consisted almost entirely of whey-faced men with pronounced facial tics in long dirty macs.
We hadn’t a clue what we were doing and conversation with scar-faced strangers seemed unwise. What puzzled us most was that most of them didn’t seem to have a bet until 90 seconds before the off when there would be a sudden mini-stampede and clamour to get on two particular dogs which would rapidly be chalked up as first and second favourite. Usually they lost.
After three or four races we were emboldened to step forward while all were hanging back with a couple of £2 reverse forecasts on dogs two and three. Suddenly the place went berserk. As if we had given some secret signal, everyone else rushed in, emptying back pocket wads onto dogs two and three. Amazingly they came first and second, and after the result was confirmed three rather heavy-looking gents whose heads disappeared into their shoulders with no sign of any connecting neck suddenly become our close but silent companions, exuding an air of quiet menace. Whether we had inadvertently stumbled on or interrupted some code or signalling system I will never know, but having collected our winnings it seemed a sensible moment to slip away. As we walked through the gate I turned and waved at the shortest of our three shadows. He did not wave back.
By contrast the horse-watching on Merseyside was a joy. A beautiful sight that I enjoyed on a regular basis and still see in my mind’s eye today was that of Colin Crossley’s string at first light on a summer’s morning cantering along the sands at West Kirby, silhouetted against the sea skyline as they kicked up the spray under stable jockey Eric Apter and colleagues. If they have beaches in the afterlife I will be happy to see any number of reruns.
At Sandy Brow, Tarporley, the former wartime fighter pilot Eric Cousins, who first took out his licence in 1954, proved himself one of the shrewdest placers of horses in the country, winning a couple of Lincoln handicaps, three Ayr Gold Cups, Kempton’s Great Jubilee in four successive years, Ascot’s Wokingham Stakes and the Portland at Doncaster. He did particularly well with cast-offs, as when he won the Cambridgeshire with Commander-in-Chief, formerly trained at Newmarket by Captain Sir Cecil Boyd-Rochfort. It was Eric Cousins of course who introduced his neighbour Robert Sangster to horseracing and the pair brought off a fine coup with Chalk Stream in the 1961 Great Jubilee Handicap at Kempton. Because the horse was a tricky starter Cousins told Sangster to station himself by the bookies and not to have a bet until the trainer raised his hat to show the horse had got off with the others. From high up in the stands Cousins saw the start and doffed his hat. Sangster swung around and took a huge bet at 8-1. The horse got up in the last stride.
I was writing mostly tipping-oriented stable profiles and few of the local trainers’ great thoughts have survived from my notebooks at the time. But I never forgot one experience with Eric Cousins. I began doing some short racing pieces for a BBC North sports programme. The very first time they sent me out with a bulky Uher recorder about the size of an accordion I duly recorded a talk with the Tarporley maestro, only to discover when I got back to the office that the material was completely unusable. Throughout the interview he had been gently rubbing a matchbox on his trousers and it came out on the recording as a noise like a buzz saw. Technology has never been my forte.
I didn’t forget either my first talk with Ron Barnes. Having endured traffic troubles in the Mersey Tunnel I arrived an hour late for an interview at his Norley Bank stables. Quite rightly I was roundly bollocked by the substantial figure of the trainer, built on Sam Hall lines, who bore a fierce scar across his cheek from being grabbed by one of his stable inmates.
Just a few miles from industrial Liverpool we talked, looking down beyond his rock garden to wooded slopes with a mare nuzzling her foal in the paddocks and a two-year-old frisking on a lungeing rein. It was an idyllic scene but Mr Barnes, as the Post and Echo liked me to call trainers in those more deferential days, was going through a lean spell and he began my education in the downside of the trade. Training for Merseyside businessmen who were more likely to spend £500 than 5,000 guineas on their animals in 1965, he had sent out 28 winners. Then after being inoculated against the cough his horses had ‘gone wrong’ and the next season he had won only six races (with the four horses who hadn’t been inoculated). He was the first of many to te
ll me over the next 40 years that it isn’t training horses that is difficult – it is training the owners.
‘If you can please racehorse owners,’ he said, ‘you can make chains out of sand. When you’re getting winners it’s fine. Everybody wants to buy you champagne and slap your back. Have a lean spell and even your friends don’t want to know you – they’re not interested in explanations. I wouldn’t advise a young man to go into racing until he’s made some money at something else [a policy he followed with his four sons]. There can’t be more than four people in the country who make good money out of training horses. I know if I hadn’t had a bit behind me I would have been finished last year.’
Ron Barnes’s ‘something’ included a building company and a Warrington farm, not to mention 37 acres devoted to his brood mares, and our relations were sufficiently mended by the end of the interview for him to insist on me staying to watch his prize stallion perform. It was the first time I had seen a stallion in action and when the mare was brought into the yard I have never heard such a noise as the roaring he made, nearly kicking to pieces his stall in his eagerness to get out and get on with it.
Ron Barnes’s maxim in preparing his horses was simple: ‘Feed them well and work them to it.’ And on one thing he was adamant: he didn’t bet: ‘If a trainer has to bet he’s got bad owners.’
There were few giants of the training scene on my Merseyside patch in those days but I was given a good introduction to the practicalities at the lower end by the likes of Jack Mason, who had been beaten a neck on Melleray’s Belle in the 1930 Grand National and by just a length in the Scottish version too. He never wanted more than around 20 horses and he told me, ‘I wouldn’t want 10,000 guinea yearlings in my boxes. I’d never get a moment’s rest at the thought – I’d have to sleep with them for fear.’
One who did know what to do with quality though was Rodney Bower, who trained in one of Merseyside’s posher spots in Heswall, in a cobbled yard with an orchard and dovecots. His Border Stud Farm at the time I visited him had sent out Cool Alibi to win the County Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival and had nearly brought off the double when Border Grace, already by then the winner of sixteen races, had finished second, anchored by an 8lb penalty, in the Mildmay of Flete Challenge Cup. That would have been an amazing achievement for a small yard essentially training just for a few friends – the kind of set-up which for so long provided the backbone of National Hunt racing. They were not a betting yard, but three members of the family did once find themselves picking up more than £1,000 for a fiver each way on the Tote on one of their horses. Very much an advocate of kindness in training horses, Rodney Bower told me, ‘The whole art is discovering the idiosyncrasies of each animal – and they all have them. You don’t want horses too clever – they are usually lazy – but you do want horses with courage. A good horse will strive to get to the front. That’s the kind I like.’
After four years in Liverpool I achieved my aim of being promoted to political correspondent for the Daily Post, based at the House of Commons. Carolyn and I moved south, first to Surbiton and then, by strange coincidence, to Epsom, home of the Derby. It did not however bring to an end my racing articles for the paper. I merely began to interview and profile instead the trainers within easy reach of where we now lived. Even better, until the newspaper’s accountants vetoed it, I had a wonderful perk. The Daily Post used to pay for me to have a ticket on the excursion train which in those days ran from London to Merseyside for the Grand National. I could enjoy a fine breakfast on board, watch the day’s racing and have dinner on the way back while leisurely preparing my copy for the next day for Monday publication.
Grand National
The National has had a special place in my heart ever since my Liverpool days and early images still stick: in 1966 when Anglo won at 50-1 I had bought Mrs Oakley a gorgeous stop-the-traffic pink trouser suit for the occasion. I am not sure which was the more agitated – the horses that passed her in it or my bank manager. An Irish priest whom I met at the Tote window (before an image-conscious church hierarchy forbade it they actually used to attend in their cloth) tipped me Rough Tweed, which was the first horse to fall. So much for divine inspiration.
There were raucous bookies tempting once-a-year punters to make it a fiver with calls of ‘1,000-1 the police horse’, and as I gazed in wonder at the flesh-revealing ensembles adopted by most of female Merseyside I learned the definition of the ‘Mersey tug’, the characteristic gesture with which the heftier young ladies grasp both sides of their bras beneath their dresses to haul them up and rearrange their décolletage. In 1967 I remember I backed the blinkered Popham Down, the horse who brought down most of the field as he ran down the 23rd fence.
I had never experienced a sporting atmosphere like it. You could almost cut the tension in the air as white-faced young riders were swung up into their saddles by leathery-faced trainers in trilbies. You were not human if you were not swept up by the roar from the crowds as the tapes went up and the cavalry charged to the initial obstacle as if there was a stage prize for getting to that first as well. Then as the race unfolded, mini-drama after mini-drama: there would be retreats and advances, blunders and falls. Lumps of spruce would go flying into the air as horses dived through rather than over those big, forbidding fences, and jockeys would be left sitting on the ground beating their whips into the turf in frustration as the remaining field galloped on. Bechers … the Canal Turn … then Melling Road … The Chair and what has became known as ‘the Foinavon fence’ imprinted themselves on the nation’s memories.
It is early in this volume to tackle the downside of our sport but it was those early visits to Aintree which impressed on me so vividly that it involves tragedy as well as triumph, both for the horses who become casualties and their riders. Horses are so noble, so big, so commanding, so athletic in their upright prime that there are few sights in life quite so painfully shocking as when you first see one stricken, threshing on the ground with a broken limb, awaiting the humane despatch that is the only kind response to certain injuries.
It is the plight of the equine casualties that usually engages the media’s attention but alas I will never forget either the sickening spectacle of Paddy Farrell being catapulted out of the saddle at The Chair in a fall in 1964 which was to leave him in a wheelchair for life. You somehow knew as he landed that this was a really bad one – the only good thing in the long run being that it was his injury along with that of Tim Brookshaw which led John Oaksey and others to found a proper compensation scheme for riders in the shape of the Injured Jockeys Fund.
The National today, of course, is not the National I first attended. Many things have changed: the prize money, the fences, the landing surfaces, the quality of horses running in the race, the distance covered to the first obstacle. So am I now going to launch an old fogey’s diatribe about things not being as they were? Am I hell.
I am a defender of the National and I will fight to the death for the race’s retention in the sporting calendar against those who campaign for its abandonment (and who, should they ever achieve that objective, would move on smartly to demand the abolition of jump racing as a whole). But racing has to acknowledge that it lives in a wider world and that animal welfare concerns must be addressed. Those of us who thrill to a sport which inevitably involves casualties to both riders, who choose freely to participate, and horses, who don’t have that luxury, have to be prepared to defend our involvement and to ensure that every possible safety precaution is taken.
Some years it becomes harder than others. After the mudlarks’ benefit 2001 race which he won on Red Marauder, even jockey Richard Guest conceded, ‘I am not sure we should have been out there.’ It did not do much for the image of racing to have only seven horses set out on the second circuit and only two jump round the whole course without a fall. There was an outcry after the National of 1998 when again the race was run in atrocious conditions. Tragically three horses died and o
nly six of the 37 runners finished the course. The Daily Mail in particular ran screaming headlines asking ‘Did three horses really have to die for sport?’ and an article insisting that the event had degenerated into a ‘grisly farce’. ‘This is surely not sport, this is closer to carnage,’ cried the Mail. I was invited by the Independent to contribute to the debate and made the point that the three fatalities occurred at the first, fourth and fifth fences: ‘It was not a cause of exhausted animals at the end of their tether being driven unwilling into the obstacles. They could have died the same way in any race anywhere.’ Their deaths were not justification, I insisted, to ban the National but in what the Racing Post was kind enough to call a ‘balanced analysis’ I suggested that if it had been a midweek fixture in the sticks the card would have been called off, and added, ‘What certainly can be said is that there were a number of horses in the field who were the equine equivalent of vanity publishing. Perhaps the authorities could look again at the race entry conditions to see if more stringent qualifications should be imposed.’ That was a case I had been arguing since the 1970s.
Change for change’s sake as a mere PR exercise I will always resist. It is the besetting sin of modern politics that beneath a media barrage governments insist on being seen to be doing something whether there is a quantifiable benefit or not. Racing is in danger of going the same way. But that does not mean we should resist carefully thought out changes that genuinely increase the safety of horses and riders.
The difficulty that racing faces is that the Grand National is watched by 600 million people in more than 300 countries. It brings in the punters who otherwise don’t focus on a horse race all year and so it is both the sport’s biggest shop window and its biggest potential PR disaster.