by Robin Oakley
What they didn’t know was that the lady herself had a relative with a few unfortunate habits of his own. At the time he was on the run, thanks to a little misunderstanding when he had popped into the bank to inquire about an overdraft and just happened to be wearing a balaclava and carrying a shotgun. Just as she and the asphalter escorts arrived back, armed police in search of her cousin came swarming over the back wall. The asphalter team took one look, pushed her out of the door and screamed out of her yard in their van, never to be seen again.
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Epsom racing’s best asset has long been Simon Dow, training at Clear Height Stables just behind the grandstand. Nobody has worked harder to maintain Epsom as a vital training centre. Occasionally, as with Young Ern, the eternally youthful Dow gets a horse to match his abilities.
When a talented newspaper colleague of mine left to join a tabloid our then editor muttered that he would be ‘playing the piano in a brothel’. Simon got much the same reaction from his banker father when at sixteen he said he was going to be making his future in racing but at 24 he was a fully-fledged dual-purpose trainer.
Plan A had involved a riding career. As he told me, ‘At twenty I had visions of being John Francome, but then came maturity.’ He obviously didn’t lack courage: the matter-of-fact way he dismissed 32 shoulder dislocations was evidence of that. Nor would fitness have been the problem: Simon was Britain’s schoolboy half-mile champion at fifteen. But soon he was recording in the Directory of the Turf, ‘Riding career: Amateur 1983–85. Useless.’
Simon worked for Mick Haynes and Philip Mitchell before setting up on his own near Guildford with £1,000 worth of credit with the bank, a barnful of hay and two-and-a-half horses. He admitted later, ‘There wasn’t a horse in the yard that could raise a gallop but if you could talk, you could sell.’ There were early winners and the numbers increased but soon he was down again to five horses. One morning two came back lame and a third was claimed by another trainer after Simon ran it in a selling race at Warwick, but he borrowed money, bought his Epsom yard and in four years had 50 winners on the board to launch his career. Since then it has been steady rather than spectacular, but the dreams are still alive and he has remained a fixture among Epsom’s ever-shifting trainer population. It would be a much poorer place without him.
I worked alongside Simon for a while trying to help develop Epsom as a racing centre, and in particular to create affordable accommodation for stable staff in a suburb full of better-paid London commuters. Epsom Downs though are divided between the responsibilities of several different local authorities and they have not all been sympathetic to the needs of racing. In Newmarket and in Lambourn, local councils intervene actively to help the racing community and to prevent racing premises being closed down and converted into housing projects. Sadly over the years there has been little evidence of the same spirit among the local authorities with responsibilities abutting on Epsom Downs. In September 2001 I drafted a document for Simon and the Epsom Training and Development Fund which was a heartfelt appeal to local planners. I include some of it here because it typifies the problems faced by racing communities in many areas.
So many pleasures in life we take for granted. The glorious stand of beech trees at a beauty spot, the provincial theatre that lets you see London shows at half the price, the little delicatessen that always has your favourite cheese. Then one morning we wake up and they are no longer there. Blighted by benign neglect, no longer ‘economically viable’, squeezed out by bigger commercial interests, suddenly they have gone. It hasn’t exactly been anybody’s fault, but they will never be replaced and our lives are the poorer for it.
Do not please let that happen to one of the greatest glories which Epsom and the surrounding area enjoy. Epsom Downs and the horses trained there are a unique and precious part of our heritage. Go up on the Downs any morning and watch the training strings emerge from a woodland path, the riders chatting, the horses snorting recognition. Watch them power up the all-weather tracks, the lads crouched low on their backs, and see them swagger back after exercise, four-legged athletes revelling in their condition. It is a dull soul who is not cheered and enriched by such a spectacle.
It is not a sight you can see in any other suburban town, or almost anywhere else within a half-hour train ride from central London. But it is a sight which those living in or near Epsom have been able to enjoy for over two hundred years. Many people probably see their first horse on Epsom Downs and the horse gives Epsom something special.
In my business I have to travel a good deal. People ask me where I am from. When I simply reply with the word ‘Epsom’ alone it brings no more than a faint stirring of recognition. When I say ‘Epsom – Epsom Downs where the Derby is run’ you can watch the illumination light up people’s faces. Epsom’s horses and Epsom’s trainers and Epsom’s stable staff help give the area its identity. They add to the quality of life. But they and that quality of life are in peril if some of you in positions of authority cannot now make a leap of imagination and think what you can do to help.
Thanks to the tireless work of Simon Dow as chairman of the Epsom trainers, most of you know the basic facts and figures. In 1970 there were nineteen trainers and 520 horses in Epsom. In 1990 there were twelve trainers and 400 horses. Now there are eleven trainers and around 200 horses. Living in Epsom for 30 years I have watched yard after yard close and the premises go out of racing, sometimes turned over to housing estates, sometimes adapted for other uses.
Epsom has excellent training facilities and first-class, well-maintained gallops. It has talented trainers who can bring the best out of the animals in their charge. It has the advantage of closeness to London. An owner can watch his horse at work on the Downs and still be behind his City desk by 9.00am. It should be a thriving training centre to match, say, Lambourn or Middleham. Instead it is a training centre in decline. It needs new blood. It needs a way of encouraging stable staff to make their careers in Epsom rather than drifting off to Newmarket.
Those of us who work with the Epsom Training and Development Fund charity have had to settle for small beginnings. But we have a vision. First of all we want to work for the welfare of the racing community in Epsom, to improve conditions for stable staff and to help them when they fall on hard times. Secondly, for the sake of those staff, we want to make our contribution to rebuilding Epsom’s status as a training centre. We want to initiate a virtuous circle with young trainers wanting to set up in Epsom because it has the right facilities, with good stable staff wanting to work in Epsom because it is a community which understands their needs and with both trainers and their staff encouraged by an influx of good horses brought in by owners because they are convinced that Epsom is on the up.
The first need we are trying to meet with the Fund is for more and better accommodation for those who work in Epsom stables. The long and awkward hours mean that stable staff must live near their work, but in an expensive commuting town affordable lodgings are hard to come by. Very young lads and lasses may settle for dingy bedsits or single rooms with landladies. But those at the end of their teenage years are not going to settle for that. They want and need some independence and a little space. If they do not find it in Epsom they will move to training centres elsewhere where they can find it, probably leaving just at the point when their skills have developed enough to make them truly valuable contributors to their yards. That is why a prime objective of the Fund is the development of a purpose-built hostel to house twenty or more stable staff in decent, though not luxurious style.
We want to be able to help stable staff with transport costs, maybe even with clothing at the very early stage when they go to the British Racing School to learn the basics. We want to be able to help with suitable leisure activities too to help build a spirit of camaraderie. Charity events run by the Fund have succeeded in raising tidy sums already and helping to form a social hub for the Epsom racing scene. But it will need a benevol
ent eye from planners if we are to take things further.
To help the staff there is a need to help the trainers too. And there the real need is for the development of starter yards. They need to be yards with access as directly as possible to the training grounds and with the minimum need for the horses to use public roads. That inevitably means development within green belt areas covered by the three separate councils. But what do we create green belts for if not to enhance the environment? And if training strings out on the Downs for all to see are not an enhancement of the environment I do not know what is.
Please, please do not stick with the mantras of well-worn sub-clauses in regulations which seemingly forbid the exercise of initiative. Please, please make that leap of imagination which is necessary if the Epsom Downs are to have a future. For if Epsom does not remain as a training centre, do not imagine that the Downs themselves will be as well maintained as they are today. Restoring Epsom’s glory as a training centre is not just in the interests of racing folk – it is in the interests of anybody who wants Epsom to have an individual character, anybody who walks a dog or flies a kite on the Downs and anybody with the soul to thrill at the sight of horses and riders silhouetted on the morning skyline.
One of the key figures in the development of the Epsom fund was the famed crisis manager and company doctor David James, later Lord James of Blackheath, the man they called the City of London’s Red Adair and the saviour of the Dome.
David when I knew him was one of the fearless punters in Ascot’s Iron Stand Club, formed a century or so ago by the Prince of Wales so his chums could meet their mistresses and divorced friends in a convenient spot without having to leave the royal enclosure. Iron Stand members account for some 25 per cent of bookies takings’ on some courses and you can see why.
Jilted at 26 by his then fiancée the young James, then earning £900 a year with the Ford Motor Company, decided that he would hazard on a horse the whole of the £600 he had saved for the deposit on their house. He was, he says, challenging the gods to dictate the pattern of his life on the outcome of a single race.
The very day he was wrestling with his marital misfortune, the weights came out for what was in those days (we are talking 1967) one of the best handicaps in the land, the News of the World Handicap on the last day of Glorious Goodwood. It was a 21lb limited handicap from 8st 0lb to 9st 7lb and Sucaryl, a horse trained by Noel Murless, had been allotted just 8st 6lb. Since Sucaryl, ridden by Bill Rickaby, that day ran a half-length second in the Irish Derby to a heavily fancied stable companion, Mr James decided that Sucaryl merely had to stay alive to win at Goodwood.
He invested the whole £600 on the nose, starting by getting 14-1 for the whole of his £75 credit line with Guntrips and carrying on with £100 at 8-1 with Ladbroke’s and £100 at 7-1 with William Hill. The rest went on here and there at prices averaging 7-2. Overall his money was on at an average 6.5 to 1. But then came the courageous bit. Appalled by what the young man was doing, Lewes trainer Towser Gosden, a friend, counselled him against it and arranged with local bookies to buy up the bets at an average 3-1. David James would have been left with an impressive profit and no race to risk but he decided to stick with it.
I was not surprised to discover later that he was literally a man who had stared down the barrel of a gun and held his nerve. In 1986 he flew to Tripoli to negotiate the release of some British engineering company employees who had been taken hostage and was held himself while the Americans bombed the facility. It was also David who triggered the ‘Iraqi supergun’ affair by tipping off MI6 about some gun barrels he spotted when visiting a Midlands manufacturer.
That July David went through the first three days at Goodwood without having a single bet. News of the World day turned out to be a sticky, steamy one with the air thick with thunderflies. Sucaryl, by now the 5-6 odds-on favourite, came into the paddock totally stirred up, covered in foamy sweat as if he had just done three cycles in a washing machine. But still David James did not lay off, and just as well. In the race Sucaryl was never off the bridle, coming home in George Moore’s hands a two-and-a-half-length winner. The gods had spoken. The intrepid punter had won several years’ salary.
The money went into the bank. David James’s business career took off and in the Epsom days when I knew him he was still unmarried. ‘First I was too poor, then I was too busy and then I was too old.’ Had he ever come close to it? ‘My status has often been in danger, but I have always thought better of it in the morning.’ However, for romantics, there was a happy ending. The iron-disciplined James, who works out every morning even earlier than Clive Brittain gets his horses on Newmarket Heath, overdid things on his rowing machine one day and suffered a stroke. Friends say he fell for one of the ladies who aided his recovery. Whatever the explanation for his change of heart, I espied him one evening at a Jeffrey Archer party to hear him say, ‘Robin, meet my wife.’
The Derby
When the writer Bill Bryson went to Epsom for the first time he declared, ‘The Derby is a little like your first experience of sex – hectic, strenuous, memorably pleasant and over before you know it.’
Having lived for some 30 years in Epsom I am of course a devotee of the Derby, although I have always been better for some reason at finding the winner of the Oaks. In earlier days we used to be able to buy a ticket as local residents which allowed us to take the car up to the course and park close to the rails about two furlongs out with a copious picnic and a few friends. Having the children jumping up and down on the car roof as the likes of Grundy, Empery and The Minstrel drove home to collect the Blue Riband didn’t do much for the bodywork but since Mrs Oakley invariably backed Lester Piggott’s mounts those last two were both Oakley family winners. I do remember too backing Morston when he won in 1973. Many years later I saw the action from a different viewpoint as I served for a while on the Epsom Race Committee.
Racing has had to branch out this century and a Race Committee colleague told me that we virtually doubled the gate on summer evenings with live music from tribute bands and the like after racing. One evening it turned out that the top performer engaged was a gay icon and some tentative ads were taken out in the gay media. An Epsom official responding to one booking call outlined the facilities, mentioning the Queen’s Stand venues. ‘Oh how delicious,’ replied the caller, ‘and what are we allowed to do there?’
Ascot may be grander, Goodwood prettier and Sandown Park somehow friendlier but Epsom on Derby Day has something truly special. The undulating mile and a half across the Downs with its tricky downhill bend, left-tipping camber down the straight and rising finish remains a supreme test of horse and rider. You need the temperament to cope with the hubbub, the speed to keep yourself out of trouble, the guts and control to remain balanced under pressure, the stamina to last out.
For years I have been battling those who say that Epsom has somehow lost its glory: for me it will never do so. It is true that we no longer see a quarter of a million streaming to the Downs on Derby Day to ride the roundabouts, stuff their faces with candyfloss and have their palms read between races by dark-eyed gypsy ladies. Nor does every leading owner these days seem to feel that his three-year-old will not have proved himself the best unless he is at Epsom on Derby Day. But Edward Gillespie, who used to run the show at Epsom before he became the embodiment of Cheltenham’s charms, got it right when he told me back in 1996, ‘The heritage is priceless. Take a horse over to win the Japan Cup and you are, what, the fifth to have your name inscribed. Win the Derby this year and you are on a roll of honour stretching back over 216 years before you.’ He offered a comparison with tennis: ‘Those stars who can’t produce their game on grass like to pretend that the US Open or the French Open are just as important. But what is the championship everyone in their hearts still wants to win? It’s Wimbledon.’
American John Galbreath may have been a little prejudiced when he declared in 1972, ‘Anyone who doesn’t consider t
he Epsom Derby one of the greatest sporting events in the world must be out of his mind’, because his colt Roberto had just won the contest in one of the best finishes of all time. But the great Italian breeder Federico Tesio was no less of an enthusiast. He declared, ‘The thoroughbred exists because its selection has depended not on experts, technicians or zoologists but on a piece of wood, the winning post of the Epsom Derby.’ He was right because the horse that answers all the questions posed by the Derby has just what you need in a stallion – look at Galileo. That is why Coolmore’s John Magnier and his team continue to support the Derby in days when the French have shortened their version to a mile and a quarter and the Americans allow geldings to run in theirs. As Magnier says, ‘It is the race where all the qualities of a colt are tested.’ That includes temperament: Sea The Stars trainer John Oxx puts it this way: ‘You can’t run any old horse in the Derby – you need an uncomplicated sort.’
First the horses climb uphill for four furlongs, streaming around a gradual right-hand bend. Then comes their only chance to settle as they switch left to the inner rail and head up to the top of Tattenham Hill. There follows a pell-mell dash down the slope to the sharp left-hand bend round Tattenham Corner.
Lester Piggott, who won the race an astonishing nine times, says of a potential Derby winner:
Size is less important than the manner of racing. You need a horse that can lay up handy a few places behind the leaders: getting too far back at Epsom can be disastrous as there is no part of the course where you can rapidly make up ground forfeited early on. You have to get into a reasonable place and keep out of trouble as beaten horses fall back on the downhill run.