Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Fallon is the strongest, most focussed jockey I have ever seen. Ice-cool rides like that on Kris Kin in the Derby and Hurricane Run in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe will live in my mind forever. He owes racing, but he deserves one more chance. Let us pray the demons don’t get at him again.

  Trainers

  Paul Nicholls’ chief patron Paul Barber once offered the intriguing thought that it is the lesser jockeys who tend to make the best trainers: ‘Jockeys who haven’t been successful have the time to see what is going on, to think, to watch, to pick up an awful lot so that when they go into training they have it half thought out.’

  It is not, obviously, a hard and fast rule. Fred Winter was both champion jockey and champion trainer in his time. David Nicholson was one of the top riders and he took the trainers’ championship too. Jonjo O’Neill not only rode Dawn Run to success in both the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle, the only horse ever to achieve that double, he has also trained 22 Festival winners himself. He remains the only man to have both ridden and trained 100 winners in a season. But to take just a few random examples, those two supremely talented Flat jockeys Pat Eddery and Walter Swinburn have never won so many, nor such high quality races as trainers as they did when they were in the saddle. Neither Tom Dascombe, who rode just 96 winners in his ten years as a jump jockey, nor Clive Cox were names to conjure with in their riding days but they were soon on a rapid upward trajectory as trainers. The same applies now to David O’Meara.

  Having over the years visited yards up and down the country, I have a huge admiration for those who achieve success as racehorse trainers. Good jockeys are usually born with an instinctive flair, which the best ones then develop with application and experience. But many who have made the switch to training, as Mouse Morris and Jamie Osborne have done, concede that a jockey’s life is very much simpler. As a jockey you ride your race, chuck the reins at a stable lad, utter a few banalities to the connections and off you go. As Mouse says, ‘When I became a trainer I had to stay around afterwards and explain what had gone wrong.’ Soon after Jamie switched roles, he told me that his head lad Ron Thomas was head of personnel and his secretary Jenny was head of the office:

  I’m head of marketing, I’m head of communications and I’m head of the work programme. In a normal business this size you would have finance and marketing directors. In racing that’s me – and I’m not trained for any of them.

  Young trainers I met in their early days like Jamie and Harry Dunlop confessed to over-eagerness as they learned on the job. Harry Dunlop told me, ‘I galloped the tripes out of one or two of them before they ever saw a racecourse: now most of mine improve for their first run.’ He added, ‘Winning first time out can be the kiss of death anyway. You’ve then got to go on to higher company before they’ve got the experience to cope with it.’

  Even experienced handlers worry about whether they are doing it right. I remember Mick Channon on the gallops when he was preparing Flashy Wings for the 1,000 Guineas in a spring so cold, he complained, that they’d found two dead polar bears in a thicket. ‘The last two gallops aren’t for the horse at all,’ he said, ‘they are for you. You wouldn’t want to be going to a Classic with a horse that wasn’t fit, looking a prat.’

  Often on the racecourse I am with a pack of media folk in the winners’ enclosure talking to owners, trainers and jockeys after a race victory. Most of my fellow scribes have to concern themselves with future plans for the successful animal: I love to hear too about the preparation for the victory and the tactical choices, the wider reflections from a trainer’s race-reading. Some trainers are good at articulating what they do; many are not. Among my favourites are Mark Johnston and John Gosden.

  I remember John telling us one day that Ascot, with its short finishing straight, makes a jockey look a genius or an idiot, rarely anything in between: ‘At Ascot when you get shuffled back to last you have one choice: stay on the rail and pray for a gap, because if you attempt to come around the field you will always be the unlucky third.’ At Goodwood when his natural front-runner Mutahir won, he explained how he always worked him from behind at home: ‘If you work a front-runner in front they never really learn how to relax and use their stride properly.’

  Horses are not the robust creatures they look to be from a Saturday afternoon armchair in front of the TV. They are frighteningly delicate animals bred over 300 years to install the maximum engine in the most streamlined frame – a recipe for constant injury and breakdown. It is an achievement to get most of them to the racecourse, let alone win a race with one. Even when you do have quality horses a mystery virus can blow in and lay low your yard for a season or more. Then there are the staff to manage, often including a fair proportion of restless itinerants. One Newmarket chaplain claimed to have encountered a lad who had been in every stable except the original one in Bethlehem.

  On top of that trainers must bear in mind the competition for the leisure pound: they have to be astute marketing directors and public relations paragons, patrolling the racecourse bars and the right dinner tables in the hope of increasing their orders for the sales. Sometimes that gets taken to extremes. One comely female trainer was said to have kept one elderly patron for years by supplying services of a strictly after-dinner nature. I am sure that it works the other way too: I once heard a lady at Kempton confide to her companion as the elegant François Doumen went to saddle a horse that she wouldn’t mind at all if he’d been coming to saddle her too. It brought to mind the tale of the Lambourn dinner party at which the conversation had turned to the rights and wrongs of pre-marital sex. ‘I didn’t sleep with my wife before we were married,’ said one upright owner to his trainer, ‘did you?’ ‘I am not sure,’ came the unthinking reply, ‘remind me of her maiden name.’

  One thing has always struck me as unfair. Given the days, weeks and months that a trainer has to devote to his charges compared with the jockey’s few minutes in the saddle, it does not seem right that they are rewarded with virtually the same percentage of the winnings – especially when the quality of a well-prepared horse has given the jockey virtually an armchair ride. It was a different matter in the days when most horses were ridden by retained stable jockeys who had been true working partners, helping to develop the horses step by step. Nowadays the dominance of the jockeys’ agent providing the top ten riders with a much bigger proportion of the best rides leaves little room for that kind of mutual loyalty, although some trainers still see it differently. When I visited her yard, Emma Lavelle told me, ‘There’s nothing more irritating for an owner than having a jockey get off a horse and say “If only I’d known him a bit better …”.’

  There is of course no rigid set of rules for training: different approaches work. Emma, for example, is against what she calls the ‘picnic in the woods’ approach, insisting, ‘Horses like routine. Magical mystery tours just wind them up.’ But Henrietta Knight used to send her string off through the woods in twos and threes to make their lives more interesting and you can hardly question her results.

  Lambourn

  The first racing book I wrote was a portrait of Lambourn, Valley of the Racehorse, published in 2000. Poring over every available racing biography and memoir over the years I had long been thrilled by the over-the-wall rivalry of Fulke Walwyn and Fred Winter, which had given Lambourn its profile. Jenny Pitman’s breakthrough achievements had added a new lustre while on the Flat Peter Walwyn had won the Derby with Grundy and Barry Hills had taken every other English Classic as he built a racing dynasty. Just up the road from Barry his chum Nicky Henderson had won three consecutive Champion Hurdles with See You Then and pretty well every other race worth winning at the Cheltenham Festival. In 1995 Kim Bailey had brought off the Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle double.

  I spent a year in and out of Lambourn talking to owners, jockeys, trainers and stable lads, with many a convivial evening in the Malt Shovel pub or the Hare and Hounds run by Henry Cecil’s twin brother D
avid, a figure every bit as elegant and stylish as the great Newmarket trainer.

  I tried to depict a year in the collective life of the Lambourn community and 1999/2000 turned out to be an eventful one indeed with huge Cheltenham success, another Classic for Barry Hills, the unwarranted involvement of Lambourn figures in corruption trials and the passing of the training baton from Jenny Pitman to son Mark. But what was just as fascinating to me as getting into the top stables and seeing how they were run was hearing about racing as it used to be from some great veterans. Three of them, all now sadly passed on, I remember with special affection and respect.

  Doug Marks had been in Lambourn since 1962 and was certainly the only trainer there to have ridden two Classic winners, which he did as an apprentice in 1940. Dick Francis could not have made up his career.

  Doug’s father, a First World War veteran, had written to the Prince of Wales for help and his son was taken on as an apprentice by royal trainer William Jarvis. ‘I was four stone and that was mostly head. Father took me to the stables saying I loved horses but actually I’d never seen one. I was so useless I was on the stable pony for eighteen months.’ When the Prince of Wales visited and inquired after young Marks the trainer said he was thinking of giving him a ride soon. ‘I rode a winner at Newcastle and nobody said “well done” because the money wasn’t down.’

  The young apprentice fell in love with a yearling and the trainer gave way to his entreaties to be allowed to look after her. Known in the yard as ‘Judy’, she was named Godiva and she was a handful. She kept dumping other riders so he was allowed to ride her in a Classic trial, which they won at 16-1. He had a fiver on himself.

  Next time out with someone else riding Godiva refused to start ‘and literally pissed all over the starter’. Then jockey Jackie Crouch was killed in a plane crash and Marks was put back on, duly beating a filly ridden by Gordon Richards, who had won the Queen Mary by ten lengths. After a third in the Middle Park when she had been off work with a blood blister he agonised all winter if he might get the ride in her three-year-old year. ‘When jockeys came to the stable and looked at her I felt as a man does when someone else eyes your woman.’ Eventually Jarvis told him he would ride her in the 1,000 Guineas, saying, ‘For God’s sake don’t do anything stupid because if you do it won’t reflect on you because you’re only a little boy.’ Doug Marks won the race by five lengths, after impudently shouting ‘Come on Gordon’ as he passed the champion jockey.

  When Godiva then ran in the Oaks Trial at Lingfield he was told the other jockeys were conspiring to force him to make the pace. He did so, but only at half speed and Godiva had enough left to win all the same. Then came the Oaks itself and again he had heard they would try to force him to make all and expose Godiva’s stamina. He was ordered into line at the tapes but dropped her in behind anyway as they broke and was well last at the first turn. It didn’t worry him: ‘When you’re in a Rolls-Royce you don’t worry about cyclists on the road ahead.’

  Trainer Jarvis was on top of the stands and when he heard his favourite was last he started down the steps to avoid humiliation by getting lost amid the throng. He was three steps from the bottom when the crowd started to cheer on Godiva as her young rider threaded her through the field to win.

  The next phase in Doug Marks’s wartime life was a grim one. He told me:

  I went into the Air Force. I wouldn’t have been a pilot, I would have been an air gunner and the odds are you would have been talking to my ghost but I got TB in the bone and I was in hospital for three years. You were totally immobilised in an iron and leather frame with your legs in plaster boots. We lost about a third of those being treated. They left you in five years and you either died or got better. When I came out I couldn’t walk.

  It may have saved his life but nobody wanted a jockey who had been three years in hospital and he finished up driving dumper trucks. Eventually he got back to stable work and survived by punting. One day after much pestering he was allowed to ride a dodgy customer for Jack Holt’s father and they finished fourth, full of running. ‘Unsaddling the horse the Guv’nor hissed “Be quiet”. The horse then won eight of his next nine races, the first time at 100-6.’

  Later Jack Holt senior was ‘warned off’, quite wrongly Doug insisted, and he went training himself, at one stage having thirteen consecutive winners at Newton Abbot.

  When Doug trained near Ascot, Jack Holt was his head lad, Reg Akehurst his conditional jockey and David Elsworth too was on the team. Doug won the Chester Cup with Golden Fire, bought for only 400 guineas, and then they backed him at 28-1 for the Cesarewitch. His orders to David ‘Flapper’ Yates were ‘Don’t win too far’ but Bill Williamson crossed Golden Fire and they finished second. Marks borrowed a tenner to lodge an objection and they were awarded the race.

  As those who worked for him soon came to know, Marks was a great practical joker. He once tricked his highly undependable paperboy: for weeks the trainer regularly fed one of his horses from a bowl placed in the paddock on an open newspaper. One day, when the paperboy was late again, he told him, ‘You’re really upsetting my horse. He gets in a right state if he doesn’t get his Sporting Life on time.’ As the paperboy argued that this was nonsense, Marks spread the paper down on the floor. Immediately the horse trotted over to sniff the paper, looking for his bowl of oats but appearing to be scanning the headlines. After that the papers arrived on time.

  When he came to Lambourn Doug Marks, affectionately known around the village as ‘Sir Douglas’, first bought the Uplands Stable later made famous by Fred Winter, paying £17,000. He trained for many showbiz personalities including Danny La Rue, Frankie Vaughan and Jimmy Tarbuck. He gave Tarbuck a winner with his first runner Tattie Head at 8-1, with Tarbuck and his solicitor each putting on £600. The comedian sent Marks a case of vintage champagne and a note saying, ‘I hope we can do this on a regular basis.’ Said Doug, ‘I think he expected it to run once a week like a greyhound.’ Tarbuck once said that he had to have horses in training with Doug Marks to stop the trainer taking over his job as a comedian.

  * * *

  One thing that was striking in visiting Lambourn thirteen years ago was to see the number who still called out from the passing strings to a small figure with a well-weathered, outdoorsman’s face, a man as adept on the dance floor in his 70s as he was in the saddle in his 30s – the one-time champion National Hunt jockey Jack Dowdeswell, who took the title with 58 winners in 1947. Modesty personified, Jack Dowdeswell never made much of his achievement, insisting, ‘I am and always was just a stable lad who happened to ride a few winners.’ But others recognised it: when I visited Jack and his wife Betty at the time of their diamond wedding anniversary, the card which took pride of place amid many others was one from the Queen.

  Hearing Jack Dowdeswell tell the story of his racing life was a reminder not just of the sheer grit required of those who ride over jumps for a living but of the carelessness, even callousness the racing community showed in the past about the meagre rewards for the stable staff who keep the whole show on the road. Some regret the passing of the old-style apprenticeships and the craft-learning that could go with them. But they were also a licence for exploitation.

  Jack Dowdeswell had been on horseback since he was four. A tough father who worked with a hunt and then ran a riding school as well as fronting the Craven Arms at Enborne had put him on anything and everything around the pony classes and show-jumping circuits. As Jack put it, ‘A lot of parents bought ponies for their Little Lord Fauntleroys and then found they couldn’t handle them so I got all the hot ones to ride.’

  He arrived in the village at the age of fourteen in 1931, apprenticed to Ted Gwillt at Saxon House in Upper Lambourn on just two shillings a week. ‘Why my father ever dreamed of doing it I cannot imagine. It was slave labour fourteen hours a day and I was never taught a thing. I couldn’t have gone to a worse stable. He never gave apprentices a chance, he never ‘made�
�� a jockey.’

  The youngster would get up at 5.30 and go round with the head lad helping with the feeding. Then there would be a cup of tea, mucking out and working around the yard until lunchtime. ‘I was the only apprentice so there was the afternoon work when the others went off.’ Even in his 70s he could remember his list of tasks in order: Hay. Oats. Carrots. Wood. Chaff. Copper. Mash. And in his spare time he was expected to do the weeding. There was another cup of tea before two hours on evening stable duties, which finished around 7.00pm.

  After that I had to walk down to Lambourn and fetch the Guv’nor’s evening paper. There was a station here then. I think I earned my two shillings a week. All I did was ride the yearlings, break them in and ride them away. I learned to ride yearlings well but in five years I probably only did ten gallops. All I ever did was canter.

  Stable routine, he said, was much the same as today: first lot around 7.30am, then second lot and then the ‘roughs and scruffs’. But he did ride three winners from the half-dozen rides he was given in the first few years by Gwillt and Marcus Marsh. When Epsom trainer Walter Nightingall inquired of Jack’s father what had happened to the pony-club star, Dowdeswell senior wrote to Gwillt asking if Jack’s indentures could be transferred to Nightingall. There was no reply. Eventually the apprentice plucked up his courage and asked for a response. He received just two words in reply: ‘Definitely not.’

  At the end of his five years the trainer said to young Dowdeswell, ‘I suppose you’ll be staying on then now you’ll be getting £2 5s 0d a week as a lad.’ ‘Definitely not,’ replied the ex-apprentice, with emphasis, and he left that night.

  He went to Captain Bay Powell at Aldbourne and by the next day was riding schooling. He began getting more race rides and rode six winners from just a handful of opportunities. Shortly after that there was what he called ‘a terrible argument’. The trainer asked him to go a good gallop on a horse that was being schooled over fences, directly into the wind. He thought this crazy and came at a steady pace instead. After the bawling out he went back to the yard for breakfast and was summoned to the trainer’s house.