Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Ex-trainer Syd Mercer, who had proved a shrewd punter with the horses he handled himself, including the famous stayer Trelawny, sent Copper’s Evidence, a horse who had won five races in a year, to Oxley to be trained for the 1968 Lincoln Handicap. Although Copper’s Evidence was a decent horse, watching the two on the gallops Barry became convinced that Frankincense was far superior.

  One day he gave Copper’s Evidence two stone and beat him out of sight. I remember ringing Syd Mercer and telling him about it. But Syd wouldn’t have any of it. His words were ‘Lad, the Lincoln Handicap trophy is on my sideboard.

  At that point Barry went out and started backing Frankincense for the Lincoln:

  We backed him from 66-1 to 5-1 favourite, though he drifted back on the day [to 100-8]. He was a certainty. He worked on Side Hill at Newmarket one day and beat the others out of sight. You didn’t need to see any more. We toured round bookmakers’ shops putting small bets on everywhere.

  Ironically Barry and his punting friends continued to get a decent price because Syd Mercer kept backing Copper’s Evidence. They were aided too by the fact that Frankincense had been allotted 9st 5lb by the handicapper and no horse had ever won the Lincoln with more than 9st 1lb.

  Come the day of the Lincoln at Doncaster and the Irish-trained Bluerullah, ridden by Lester Piggott, was made favourite. Also fancied for the race was Tom Jones’s Waterloo Place. Stable jockey Greville Starkey, who was to become godfather to Barry’s twins, had taken some persuading to ride Frankincense rather than Copper’s Evidence. With Frankincense’s big weight, the plan was for him to swoop late but Starkey found his mount going so well that he sent him on down the centre of the course a furlong out and then held off the late challenge of Waterloo Place by half a length. He said afterwards that from the break he had never doubted his horse would win. Bluerullah burned out early and Copper’s Evidence finished fifth.

  Barry and his fellow punters didn’t celebrate that night. He had his travelling head lad’s duties to perform. He has never been famous for displaying his emotions and when I asked him if it had felt like a life-transforming moment he replied, ‘I was expecting the horse to win and he did. It was mapped out. It happened. After that it was simply a matter of looking for a stable to buy.’

  There was a fun session though the Sunday afterwards when those who had shared the gamble, like Eddie Mills, one of Barry’s earliest owners, counted the proceeds from the betting shops at the Mills family home. Said Dorothy Mills: ‘All my life I have wanted to take a bath in fivers: now I can!’

  The £60,000 which Barry won, worth more than £1.5 million in today’s money, enabled him to buy the South Bank Stables in Lambourn Village from Keith Piggott, Lester’s father, and set him off on a training career which brought him more than 3,000 winners, including a Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and five British Classics. The only Classic which eluded him was the Derby, in which Hills-trained horses four times finished second.

  Barry is not a loquacious man, rather one of those who prefers to let his achievements speak for him. Nicknamed ‘Mr Grumpy’ by the family, he is famous for his bollockings of jockeys and staff who fail to meet his meticulous standards. His wife Penny has a cushion in their drawing room emblazoned with the slogan ‘Sometimes I wake up feeling grumpy and sometimes I let him sleep’. But there is a great deal more to Barry Hills than the occasional gruffness which he has built in as a trademark.

  He is a genuinely brave man who fought cancer uncomplainingly for twenty years and in many ways he is a traditionalist, always impeccably turned out whether on the racecourse or the gallops. He would win the best-turned-out trainer award in every race if there was one.

  One of my fascinations was trying to understand what made him such a great trainer. Much of it, I was to discover, boils down to instinct and to the fact that he is as consistently patient with his horses as he can be impatient with human failings. Now he has handed over the reins at Faringdon Place to son Charlie, Barry’s greatest pleasure is in his garden. The Chelsea Flower Show is as much a fixture in his diary as Royal Ascot, York’s Ebor meeting or Doncaster’s St Leger and his study holds as many books about horticulture as it does about horseracing. He says that horses are like flowers: ‘They bloom when they are ready, you cannot force them.’

  He does not overcook his horses at home, he says, preferring to give them ‘nice, progressive work’. Overdo things on those stiff Lambourn gallops, he argues, and you will soon be in the workhouse:

  I never ask my horses too much at home. The secret is to get them to peak fitness without really testing them. If you make a horse happy it will generally do well. They must like work and if they are used to doing a good day’s work then, like a human, they will be happy.

  Barry is no mere traditionalist. Immense thought went into the design of his barns at Faringdon place, where he reckons he took the lessons of Manton and ‘Rolls Royced’ them. Light and ventilation are calculated to protect the horses from sudden changes in temperature but to ensure regular changes of air so as to avoid infections. They were built with concealed taps in every stall, rubber floors to minimise injury risk, and rails designed to prevent horses getting cast in their boxes.

  Back in 1999 he told me that horses like routine:

  They are herd animals. They like company. They like rhythm and routine. The knack is getting them to a peak and keeping them there. You can’t push them. They’ll tell you when they can go. They soon get knocked off colour, especially early in the year when the weather can change three or four times in a day. In bad weather you’ve just got to let them tick over. Freddie Maxwell used to say ‘Never gallop a horse when the wind is in the north east’ and he was absolutely right. They can’t cope with stress.

  Happy horses, he argues, will eat up well and can be given more work to make them fitter, although he does not believe in over-feeding. Routine is the key: ‘They have to have the temperament and the constitution as well. It’s like training soldiers. Only some will make it. You’ve got to get them into a good routine, you’ve got to get their heads right.’

  John Francome says Barry is ‘a proper stockman’ attuned to the rhythms of the countryside. John Hills says his father never forces horses. ‘He has the ability to spot if they are thriving and taking what he is giving them. He sees before most people when he needs to back off. He’s got an instinct.’ What Barry’s team told me was that he had an extraordinary capacity for looking at a horse and saying what race he would win with it in several months’ time.

  That capacity, it seems, begins very early. Jack Ramsden told me that Barry was a wonderful judge of a yearling:

  I would back him in front of anyone to go and buy one. He would have a look at a pedigree but he wouldn’t allow it to dominate his mind. The training and everything else is done on instinct. It’s an absolutely natural thing like being able to go into a sales ring and pick a couple out and end up with the right ones. Everything is done on instinct. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. He’s got it in bucketfuls.

  Paul Nicholls

  It takes a lot to keep me away from Newmarket’s Champions Day meeting but the prospect of an hour on stage at Cheltenham’s Literary Festival with Ruby Walsh and Paul Nicholls talking about Paul’s autobiography Lucky Break was lure enough in October 2009. The champion trainer’s careers master might have been surprised to find the ever-reluctant schoolboy there. When Paul said he wanted to go into racing, he warned him, ‘You will never make a living out of horses.’ Uh-huh? At the time of the book event, Paul’s horses had won some £3.5 million in each of the previous two seasons.

  The ‘lucky break’ occurred when a horse kicked out in a Devon lane in 1989 and painfully shattered Paul’s left leg. Not most people’s idea of good fortune, but for him it was the turning point towards a training career. Even as he lay awaiting the ambulance he dreamed of the big meals awaiting him in hospital. He had for nine years tortured himself
to keep a big policeman’s body (both his father and grandfather were in the force) two stone at least below his natural weight in order to go on being a jockey.

  Much of his riding life, he admits, was like being terminally ill as he starved, tossed down the ‘pee pills’ and sweated as he drove to the races in a tracksuit, coat, a woolly hat and bin bags with arm holes cut out, with puddles of perspiration on the floor beneath him.

  The champion trainer is unduly modest about his achievements in the saddle, accepting the label of ‘journeyman’ and saying, ‘I was exactly the kind of jockey I would not employ now’. In reality he twice won the Hennessy Gold Cup and had a Welsh National to his credit too. But the second lucky break came when big-time dairy farmer Paul Barber, whose ambition was to milk 1,000 cows and win a Cheltenham Gold Cup, chose Paul from the applicants to be the tenant of Manor Farm Stables in Ditcheat. He now milks 3,000 and Paul has given him two winners of the Gold Cup in See More Business and Denman.

  Paul Barber noted that as well as his drive and ambition, Paul had from early on too that touch of arrogance you find in most of those who get to the top.

  In the early days Paul used to find it hard watching others ride his horses. He bawled out those who didn’t do it exactly as he wanted. Gradually he mellowed, and the long relationship with Ruby Walsh, who had no retainer with the yard, just a gentleman’s agreement to a sort of open marriage as he rode also for Willie Mullins in Ireland, was a harmonious one until Ruby’s decision in 2013 to focus on the Irish scene for his family’s sake.

  Gambler Harry Findlay, for a while part-owner with Paul Barber of Denman, named another of his horses Herecomesthetruth because he said that is what you always got from Nicholls. Certainly he is one of the most open in the sport and in his autobiography, excellently crafted by collaborator Jonathan Powell, there are some stark revelations. Nicholls had to be restrained by friends from punching his arch-rival Martin Pipe after Pipe’s Cyborgo, ridden by AP McCoy, squeezed See More Business out of a Gold Cup race as he pulled him up injured. Now Paul totally dismisses any conspiracy theory and praises Pipe for leading the way in getting horses fully fit. But he and Pipe never managed to rub along.

  Owners looking at the vet’s bills for their horses stabled with other trainers will have noted Paul Nicholls’ dismissal of trachea washes and blood counts and endless weighing. Fitness is all, he says. ‘I do more with a horse in a day than others do in a week’, and that can be assessed by eye. He won’t delegate the training of his animals to vets.

  Of course, with horses like Kauto Star, Denman and Master Minded winning prizes so consistently, Paul was regularly sent the best. But he improves those who seem restricted by breathing problems with a wind operation which vet Geoff Lane calls ‘the Nicholls’. His only coy moment on stage was when I asked him who had been given the operation that summer.

  Horses

  In the end our sport is all about the horses and I was happy to get the chance of telling some of their stories when Icon asked me in 2012 to put together a volume on those I considered to be the hundred best. What was rather more daunting was that they asked me to rank them in order, a near-impossible task when they included both Flat racers and jumpers.

  Initially it brought to mind my favourite limerick:

  A crusader’s wife slipped out of the garrison

  And had an affair with a Saracen

  She was not oversexed, or jealous or vexed

  She just wanted to make a comparison.

  Comparisons as they say of course are odious and I certainly set off a few pub arguments when producing as my top ten Arkle, Brigadier Gerard, Frankel, Sea The Stars, Seabird, Kauto Star, Golden Miller, Mill Reef, Sceptre and Red Rum. We went to press with Frankel yet to run over further than a mile. When he had proved even more impressive over ten furlongs I elevated him above Brigadier Gerard to second place for the later paperback version.

  In making my choice I was influenced not just by victories amassed and records broken but by how much I judged particular horses had seized the public imagination. All of us, I guess, have our personal lists of horses who have come to mean something special to us, giving us a kind of emotional part-ownership when they performed. Among those for whom I developed a particular affection or admiration were Dawn Run, the incredible mare who remains the only horse ever to have won both the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup, Persian War, the much patched-up three-times Champion Hurdler, and Giant’s Causeway, who to me was one of the greatest battlers I have seen on a racecourse. Then there was Mill Reef, one of the most graceful movers across the turf, the gorgeous Pebbles, with whom Clive Brittain became the first British trainer to win a Breeders’ Cup race, and Best Mate, superbly handled by Henrietta Knight to win three Gold Cups. But here are six horses who somehow became extra special to me.

  Mandarin

  The first of them, Mandarin, I only ever saw run twice but he was the first horse to make me realise how important courage and tenacity are in a racehorse as well as speed. Like Persian War he was constantly in need of the vets’ attentions and like Arkle he ran not just in championship races like the Gold Cup and King George VI Chase but in multi-runner handicaps too.

  Owned by Madame Peggy Hennessy and trained by Fulke Walwyn, little Mandarin won the Hennessy Gold Cup (later a fixture at Newbury) when it was held for the first time at Cheltenham in 1957. He was passed by the Gold Cup winner Linwell at the last but fought back typically up the hill to re-pass him. Four years later, Mandarin won the Hennessy again with the likes of Grand National winner Nicolaus Silver and the Irish National winner Olympia in the field, fencing fast and cleverly despite his top weight and going away on the run-in. There were regular visits to equine A & E departments to have his tendons fired and a stifle bone repaired but in between Mandarin also twice won Kempton’s King George VI Chase, in 1957 and 1959, and three times had been second in the end-of-season Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown.

  Peggy Hennessy once declared that she only kept steeplechasers in training in Britain because she wanted to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup and in 1962 Mandarin gave her her heart’s desire, winning the supreme championship at the age of eleven and doing it in his accustomed style, gutsily passing Ireland’s hope Fortria on that daunting final rise to the winning post. That was his eighteenth victory in Britain but it was his next race which turned Mandarin and his rider Fred Winter into racing immortals.

  I was not there but thanks to one of the finest pieces of sporting journalism I have ever read, the report of the race by rider/journalist John Lawrence, later Lord Oaksey, I have always almost felt I was. John Oaksey described in vivid terms how, as they approached the fourth obstacle, the bit in Mandarin’s mouth broke and his jockey was left without any contact with the horse’s mouth or head. Effectively he had lost brakes and steering. His only handhold was the reins held by the martingale around Mandarin’s neck and the neck strap attached to his girth:

  The man, with no means of steering but his weight had to rely entirely on grip and balance. The horse, used to a steady pressure on his mouth, had to jump 21 strange and formidable obstacles around a figure-of-eight course with his head completely free, a natural state admittedly but one to which Mandarin was totally unaccustomed.

  Winter had to rely on rhythm to get them around four 180-degree turns, although the French jockeys sportingly helped with a little shepherding. Mere survival would have been an achievement, especially after a swerve at some bushes left them in fifth place at the final turn. Two out they were seven lengths behind the leader but with Winter using all the power in his legs to impel his mount forward, Mandarin responded gallantly and took the lead at the last. There was then a frantic tussle all the way to the line with the French hope Lumino. It went to a photo but Mandarin had it by a whisker. After their incredible achievement Winter, suffering from stomach cramps, had to be carried into the weighing room. But Mandarin had also had his problems. One of his tendons
had ‘gone’ again three fences out. He really was the bravest of the brave and in his retirement he fully deserved the regular supply from Whitbread’s of the stout he relished in his food.

  Russian Rhythm

  How do you choose which football club to follow? Family tradition? Locality? The colour of the kit? I am not quite sure what makes me ‘adopt’ certain horses and follow them devotedly through their careers. Often it is a thrilling performance, a display of courage or exceptional speed. But with Russian Rhythm, trained by Sir Michael Stoute, it was a case of love at first sight.

  I first saw Russian Rhythm, a chestnut daughter of Kingmambo, in the paddock at Ascot towards the end of July 2002. She was like a statuesque woman who comes into a room dressed by the best couturier in the expectation that she will be the focus of attention – an expectation immediately confirmed. Certainly she was not petite. Her imposing physique was built on substantial lines but there was something about her challenging head, her direct and intelligent gaze as well as the obvious power source of her high-muscled rump. She had cool, she had presence and when she went out on track to contest the Princess Margaret Stakes she showed she had the ideal racing temperament too, quickening up impressively under a hands-and-heels ride from Kieren Fallon as she and Luvah Girl went five lengths clear of the field. Immediately in that week’s column I urged Spectator readers to get on quickly at the 10-1 then available for the 1,000 Guineas of 2003.