Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  What makes him cross though is the way the handicapper reacts to successes by his kind of stable. The Akehurst hurdler Bimsey won a good race at Aintree earlier this season and was raised 12 pounds for the William Hill Hurdle at Sandown. No complaint about that. But when fellow Epsom trainer Simon Dow’s Chief’s Song beat the highly regarded Putty Road at Cheltenham, his weight wasn’t raised at all for Sandown. Bimsey meanwhile was raised another 4lb when a horse he had beaten into second won a race. Akehurst demanded a meeting with the handicapper to voice his complaint that what was going on was the handicapping of certain trainers rather than their horses. His point was sustained when Chief’s Song duly won the William Hill with Bimsey in fourth.

  The South Hatch trainer has even found that horses have had their handicap ratings dropped on leaving his yard and he complains, ‘Why should we pay a penalty for showing we are better at the job? You become a victim of your own success.’

  Reg argues that while three-year-olds may sometimes improve too fast for the handicapper to catch up with their progress, older horses only win when they are back to the rating at which they have done so before. With the figures available to all through the racing press, he argues, it is all there to be seen for punters who are prepared to do their homework.

  The Epsom trainers were an intriguing mix. The hardworking Simon Dow, who has long deserved better horses than he gets, has put much effort into rebuilding Epsom as a training centre but for many years horse numbers remained low despite the easy accessibility of Epsom’s training grounds for those plying their trade in the City of London.

  A visit in August 1996 to a historic local landmark introduced me to a young trainer who then looked to be one of those who might help to bring a turnaround. It also reminded me of a little racing history.

  When the future Liberal Prime Minister Lord Rosebery was told by the Oxford University authorities that owning racehorses was not consistent with undergraduate life he wrote home, ‘Dear Mother, I have left Oxford. I have secured a house in Berkeley Square and I have bought a horse to win the Derby. Your affectionate Archie.’ The horse was called Ladas and it finished last in the 1869 Derby.

  But for Liberals, patience pays. Twenty-five years later, during his brief spell as Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery won the Derby with Ladas II. When critics then suggested that owning racehorses suggested a lack of seriousness the Prime Minister retorted that he had owned unsuccessful horses for years without anybody complaining. The first neat response, perhaps, to the politics of envy.

  Lord Rosebery, who won three Derbies in all with horses he had bred, was passionate about the Turf and hosted magnificent parties in his red-brick Epsom mansion. Sadly though, the house and the stable complex at The Durdans were allowed over many years to fall into decay. The notoriously hard-to-please Rosebery, I wrote that August, would have been pleased to find a new breeze blowing through the place in the shape of the 32-year-old Joe Naughton, who had moved in to use it as his training base.

  Up on the Downs in his baseball cap and gaudy golf shirt, Joe Naughton is the epitome of racing’s new generation. The son of a former managing director of Playboy Casinos, he is firmly aware of the need to market his product: ‘You can’t lay back, you’ve got to get out and meet people.’ Back in the fast-expanding yard, standing amid clusters of new boxes in what used to be a huge nettle patch, he proudly reels off the modern facilities that would have made Lord Rosebery’s eyes pop – the solarium, the treadmill, the magnotherapy rugs to massage a horse on the way to the races.

  The once dilapidated indoor riding school had been refurbished as a sand area where the horses could come and have a roll and a kick to vary their routines and the trainer, who had been an assistant with Barry Hills through the maestro’s highly successful four years as the master of Manton, had built up from five horses to 65 over five years, scoring early success with the speedy Hever Golf Rose who won the Prix de l’Abbaye at Longchamp and took a course record at Goodwood. Bought for 6,000 guineas, the speedy filly collected £675,000 in prize money but sadly Joe Naughton’s comet burned out quickly. He never had a horse as good and, plagued as many young handlers are by bad payers, he was forced to give up training in 2002. Even more sadly, Hever Gold Rose died in foaling.

  One of my favourite Epsom characters was Terry Mills, a man who did it the opposite way round to Joe Naughton, coming into training having first made his fortune in the haulage business.

  You know within a few minutes when you have walked into a well-run racing stable. It is not just neat tack rooms or a well-swept yard, it is organised bustle, the sense that everybody is moving somewhere with a purpose, the questions rapped out by a trainer and the answers from his staff. At Terry’s Loretta Lodge on the Headley Road, the stable once owned by Brian Swift, I was struck by the seriousness of purpose and the teamwork between Terry, his son Robert and their long-time assistant Richard Ryan.

  Terry didn’t come from a racing dynasty. He began as a lorry driver when he left the army, built up the A.J. Bull haulage and demolition businesses and was at one stage running a fleet of 2,000 lorries. He began owning racehorses with an animal trained at Epsom by John Sutcliffe named As Dug, bought out of the proceeds from digging gravel inside the perimeter of the Kempton Park course. As Dug was second five times. Terry’s next horse Swinging Trio won five times, and some twenty years on, Terry began training himself.

  This was no rich man’s indulgence. There was nothing amateur about it. The day I went to see him in August 2002 Terry was higher up the trainers’ table than Henry Cecil or David Elsworth, his strike rate better than Mick Channon, Richard Hannon or Barry Hills, and at that point his season’s runners were showing a £62 profit to a £1 stake.

  He paid top dollar for good staff and proudly showed me around a five-furlong Polytrack that had cost him six figures, the equine swimming pool, the £20,000-worth of blood-testing equipment on the premises. He was house-proud enough to stop the 4 x 4 at one stage to pick up a single scrap of plastic floating across a paddock. He wouldn’t say how much he had sunk into racing but friends put it at more than £4 million, although he was usually willing to sell on his horses to Hong Kong and Singapore when he could take a profit.

  When he put in his financial plan the powers-that-be exclaimed, ‘But this shows you are going to lose money.’ ‘Of course it did,’ he told me. ‘Anybody who told them anything different would have been deluding himself.’ But while he acknowledged he was subsidising the operation, Terry insisted, ‘This is my pleasure rather than boats or houses in Spain, but it’s got to be run as a business and it is coming right.’ He added:

  Demolition and waste disposal were a kindergarten compared with this game. You go and spend £250,000 on a horse, gambling that it’s got an engine. If it’s no good you can’t ring up and say ‘Put a new gearbox in’. One minute you’re up in the air with a winner, the next day two scope dirty and another pulls a muscle.

  Terry Mills could be emotional. I was at Goodwood in August 2001 when Where Or When, the apple of Terry’s eye, was backed down from 8-1 to 11-4 favourite for the Celebration Mile, a Group Two race. Coming down the finishing straight jockey Kevin Darley, sitting on the heels of the leaders, went for one gap after another only to find them all closing in his face. Finally he resigned himself to pulling out and coming the long way round the outside, only to be pinned in where he was by Richard Hughes, coming from even further behind on the eventual winner Tillerman, trained by Amanda Perrett for Khalid Abdullah.

  The exuberant Hughes pointedly raised a single finger as soon as he had crossed the line with four horses in a line behind him. The gesture wasn’t lost on the crowd who had seen him do the same at Ascot only to be judged second by the photo finish. But Terry and his son Robert, told by Darley that had he been able to get through on Where Or When ‘we would have won a minute’, were furious that their horse had not been allowed to run his race. Apart from turning the air blue a
bout him Terry entered an official objection to Richard Hughes for holding in Where Or When. When it was rejected with no penalty for Hughes he protested furiously that there was one law for the Establishment and another for smaller yards like his – and it has to be said that there were one or two patronising Establishment smirks on view.

  I am a huge admirer of Richard Hughes, not just for his tactical genius but for the searing honesty of his autobiography about how the strains on a young jockey can lead to alcoholism, but that day I had huge sympathy for Terry. There was no doubt that given a clear run Where Or When would have won. There were counter views. Mark Perrett, former jockey and husband to the winning trainer, insisted that Hughes, who admitted shutting the door on Where Or When, was only doing what he had been paid to do. When I argued that Tillerman’s neck had been angled in towards Where Or When, preventing him from getting out while Hughes was supposed to be keeping a straight line, former champion jockey Willie Carson defended Tillerman’s jockey, chiding me: ‘He could hardly say “Oh, go on Kevin, after you, do please come out”.’ But trainer Philip Mitchell, one of the best amateur riders ever, had every sympathy with the Mills yard and their criticism of Hughes.

  In fairness to Richard Hughes it had to be said that winning a race on Tillerman was a feat in itself. The horse, previously a disappointing favourite, has a mind of its own and had to be held up for a precision-timed final burst. If the pace was too slow while he was at the back he would fight for his head and lose interest. Where Or When too needed to be held up behind a good pace and for horses with that requirement there would always be the danger that gaps would not appear at the right moment. Kevin Darley had to take his share of the blame.

  In the end, I concluded, it was a question of just how far the ‘professional foul’ should be allowed to go in our shirt-tugging age. Richard Hughes did not technically break the rules of racing. He did not maltreat a horse or endanger the safety of another rider. But the best horse on the day did not win and that could not be good for punters or for racing.

  Fortunately there was a happy ending to that particular saga. Early that October I was able to tell Spectator readers that one of the pleasures and privileges of writing about racing was to rub up from time to time against success:

  Sometimes you are there in the unsaddling enclosure when dreams are realised, when long-laid plans have come to fruition and when tears of joy are shed. Yes, I know it is only a sport but when Terry Mills declared, thumping his chest after his Where Or When, a 7-1 chance, had comprehensively beaten the odds-on favourite Hawk Wing in the Group One Queen Elizabeth Stakes, ‘I can die a happy man now’, it did not seem an exaggeration.

  Terry, who had not slept for three nights, knew what his horse could do: ‘He’s been working like a dream for the past few weeks. He hasn’t just got gears, he’s got another gear after that. He is a monster.’

  The horse Where Or When beat comprehensively that day was Aidan O’Brien’s potentially great Hawk Wing. But as the one-eyed busker on the path to Ascot station told me later, ‘He may be a hawk but he hasn’t got wings.’ When taken on by Where Or When, Hawk Wing’s head went up and a supreme natural athlete was found lacking in the resolution department. I am not sure there was a miler in Europe who could have beaten Where Or When that day and jockey Kevin Darley told me, ‘He has a terrific turn of foot. I tracked Hawk Wing because I knew we had only one horse to beat. When I went up to him and Mick Kinane asked him he went flat for a stride or two. Mine was a proper horse and he galloped to the line.’ Victory was all the sweeter at Ascot that day because Tillerman was in the field and didn’t make the frame. Big offers came in for Where Or When after that, but they were never taken.

  Terry, who named many of his best horses after Frank Sinatra songs, was always good to talk to on the racecourse. He continued his quest to win a Derby with an Epsom-trained horse but tragically cancer took him before he ever did. However, he had great success with Where Or When, and Ascot winners too with Bobzao, Mitcham and Norton, the latter a 300,000-guinea son of Barathea named after Terry’s old pal Bill Norton with whom he used to go dog-racing at New Cross in the days when neither of them had more than a few bob in their pockets. We miss him.

  With another Epsom trainer I used to keep an eye not just on the condition of his horses but on the colour of the shirt he was wearing. It wasn’t quite as familiar as Jack Berry’s cherry-red shirts but Roger Ingram had a ‘lucky’ yellow shirt he would wear when he felt a winner coming on, he told me when we watched his string early on an October morning in 1998. As we watched Clonoe and Soviet Lady go through their not-very-fast paces, Roger swapped trainerly grumbles with John Benstead about the difficulty of finding races for moderate performers of the kind his owners could afford and about the excess of paperwork required by modern officialdom.

  Roger had run Peaceful Sarah at Pontefract and fancied her enough to invest £100 in her chances. A top jockey who had not ridden his most distinguished race on her and failed to reach the frame came back to report that it was his opinion she didn’t go in the soft ground. Next time out at Catterick, overnight rain had turned the course into a bog. Assuming that her chance had all but gone, Peaceful Sarah’s trainer limited his investment on this occasion to a tenner, only for the filly to bolt in. ‘Just imagine,’ Roger reflected, ‘the kind of trouble I would have been in if I had reported after Pontefract [as trainers are encouraged to do] that she didn’t go in the soft. I could have been in really deep water.’

  Roger Ingram’s view is that he trains horses for their owners, not for the punting public. ‘Unless you break the rules, the Jockey Club should leave you alone.’ The best thing the authorities could do for smaller yards like his, he said, was to provide more 0–70 handicaps: ‘If you’ve got a horse rated 48, half the time they can’t get in a race. But they’re too good for a seller.’

  He started as a lad with Brian Swift. ‘I had three rides as an apprentice. I like to think I got too heavy, but I was no blinking good.’ Swift was one of the first British trainers to acquire Arab owners and he remembers how the lads used to jostle for the Sheikh of Bahrain’s horses when the allocations were made. The £5 tips the Sheikh dispensed were much prized given that usually you were left with only around £2 a week after deductions.

  In a typical racing biography Roger also had spells with Martin Tate, Michael Oliver (where he looked after National winner West Tip in his novice chasing days) and Frank Jordan. He was then private trainer to Terry Mellor at Southwell until the recession forced his patron to close down and he arrived to set up in Epsom with a single unplaced horse, Cheap Metal.

  Roger insisted that he was as much the victim (well, nearly!) as the gainer from the gamble that made his name with the first winner he sent out while in Epsom. ‘A friend had told me owners were crawling out of the woodwork here but they weren’t.’ Luckily one shrewd punter sent him Kinnegad Kid, who went on to win eight races, and an unknown quantity called Joe ’n Jack. Joe ’n Jack, it later transpired, had been banned from running in Ireland after his jockey never gave him a chance in a race there. Roger worked Joe ’n Jack for a few weeks and then, after being impressed by a trial gallop at Lingfield, reported him as ready to win. As the starting price drifted on course from 20-1 to 33-1 the owner and his friends backed him nationwide in small betting shops, leaving out the Big Three bookmakers.

  After Joe ’n Jack bolted in there were investigations but no rules had been broken. It was a simple, old-fashioned betting coup. Surely Roger cashed in himself? ‘I won a few bob. If I had really known what was going on I would have won a lot more. I was a bit naïve. He paid 80-1 on the Tote.’

  The week after Joe ’n Jack’s success, Cheap Metal won the first of his three hurdles at Plumpton and Roger Ingram was in business. At the time we talked there were fourteen in the yard, down from twenty at the start of the season (he doesn’t carry on with no-hopers). With ten boxes let out to ‘do-it-yourselfers’ h
e reckoned he needed twenty horses to be comfortable at Wendover House, part of Walter Nightingall’s and Scobie Breasley’s old yard and home to Persian War in Arthur Pitt’s time.

  A miner’s son from Tredegar, at 48 he still had the look of a cheeky pixie and somehow managed to catch more headlines than most small trainers. In 1997 he had wagered £500 with Bowman’s at a useful price that he would train ten winners by the end of the year. They said payment was only due at the end of the calendar year – and then went bust before 31 December. He says he doesn’t need to bet to survive but if you see a man in a yellow shirt walking the course before racing, as the careful Ingram likes to do when he fancies one, then it is probably worth taking a look at his entries that day.

  * * *

  Like many other Epsom residents in Derby run-up days, various trainers there will have suffered the experience of a scruffy-looking crew turning up on their doorstep and offering to tarmacadam the driveway for a bargain price that suddenly quintuples when the job has been completed. One racing figure I knew was once picked up by the throat by a seventeen-stone tar-spreader who threatened to kill him when he refused to pay more than the £100 originally agreed. But one day on the edge of the Downs the scam merchants got their come-uppance.

  The proprietor of a local livery yard agreed to let a tar gang patch a few holes. She came back from a West Country trip to find the whole yard asphalted, very poorly, and the driver of a scruffy van demanding several thousand pounds. Scared out of her wits, she was driven to the building society to get the funds but on a technicality withdrawal was refused. They drove her back to the yard to discuss the next steps, which were unlikely to have been pleasant.