The Sport of Queens

by Dick Francis

  Everyone was very hopeful, and though we talked calmly enough, there was a good deal of excitement in the air. Then Peter Cazalet helped me on to Devon Loch, and Arthur Freeman on to M’as-Tu-Vu, and with good wishes from the Royal party we walked out on to the course.

  Even though the start was a good one, and there were, at twenty-nine, far fewer runners than usual, four horses came down at the first fence.

  M’as-Tu-Vu went off in front, and Devon Loch jumped the first two in the middle of the field. But I soon found that he was not going to go slowly for the first mile, for he was striding out comfortably, and his leap at each fence gained him lengths. I have never ridden another horse like him. He cleared the formidable Aintree fences as easily as if they had been hurdles. He put himself right before every one of them, and he was so intelligent at the job that all I had to do was to ride him quietly and let him jump without fussing him.

  Usually the National is more of a worry than a pleasure to anyone riding in it: Devon Loch made it a delight. Usually one is kicking one’s horse along and taking risks to keep one’s place: Devon Loch was going so easily that he had time to think what he was doing.

  Over Becher’s we went, round the Canal Turn, and over Valentine’s, and two fences later had our only anxious moment. Domata, ridden by Derek Ancil, was just ahead of us on the inside, and as he came up to the open ditch he dived at it, and I could see he was going to fall. As he landed he rolled over on to the patch of ground where Devon Loch would have landed, but the great horse literally changed his direction in mid-air, side-stepped the sprawling Domata, and raced on without hesitation.

  From then on I had the sort of run one dreams about. Horses which fell did so at a convenient distance, loose horses did not bother us, and Devon Loch’s jumping got better and better. He cleared the Chair fence and the water-jump in front of the stands, and we went out into the country again lying sixth or seventh in a fairly closely bunched field. M’as-Tu-Vu was just behind us then, but three fences later he miscalculated the open ditch, and went no further.

  During the next mile Devon Loch was gradually passing horse after horse by out-jumping them, and as we approached the Canal Turn we were lying second. Armorial III was in front, but Devon Loch was going so splendidly that there was no need for us to hurry.

  Never before in the National had I held back a horse and said ‘Steady, boy.’ Never had I felt such power in reserve, such confidence in my mount, such calm in my mind.

  Armorial III fell at the fence after Valentine’s, and Eagle Lodge took his place, but Devon Loch went past him a fence later, and, with three to jump, he put his nose in front. Amazingly, I was still holding Devon Loch back, and when I saw beside me that E.S.B., Ontray and Gentle Moya were being ridden hard, I was sure we were going to win.

  Twenty yards from the last fence I could see that Devon Loch was meeting it perfectly, and he jumped it as stylishly as if it had been the first of thirty, instead of the last.

  Well, I had my moment.

  I know what it is like to win the National, even though I did not do it, and nothing that happened afterwards has clouded the memory of the seconds when Devon Loch went on to win. One might adapt an old saying to sum up my feelings exactly. Better to have won and lost, than never to have won at all.

  An appalling minute after Devon Loch had fallen, I stood forlornly on the course looking for my whip. I had thrown it away from me in anger and anguish at the cruelty of fate; and now felt rather foolish having to pick it up again.

  Devon Loch was being led back to his stable, and the stragglers of the race were trotting in, and I took my time over finding the whip, knowing that when I did I would have to face the long walk back to the weighing-room and the turned faces, the curious eyes, the unmanning sympathy of the huge crowd. I wanted very much to be alone for a few minutes to get my breath back, and as if he had read my thoughts an ambulance driver came to my rescue.

  ‘Hop in, mate,’ he said, jerking his thumb at the ambulance.

  So I hopped in, and he drove down through the people in the paddock and stopped at the first-aid room, so that I could go straight from there into the weighing-room without having to push my way through the dense crowd round the main door, and I was very grateful to him.

  While I was slowly dressing and tying my tie Peter Cazalet came into the changing-room.

  ‘Dick,’ he said, ‘come along up to the Royal box. They want to see you.’

  We walked across and up the stairs together. Losing the National like that was as disappointing to him as to anybody, and in some ways worse, for twenty years before he had seen Davy Jones break a rein and run out at the last fence with the race in his pocket, and such dreadful luck should not happen to any trainer twice.

  It was quiet in the Royal box. It was as if the affectionate cheers for Devon Loch which had died a long time ago in a million throats all over Britain had cast a shadow of silence. There was, after all, very little to be said. Their Majesties tried to comfort me, and said what a beautiful race Devon Loch had run; and in my turn I tried to say how desperately sorry for their sake I was that we had not managed to cover those last vital fifty yards.

  Her Majesty the Queen Mother said resignedly, ‘That’s racing, I suppose.’ But she and the Queen were obviously sorrowful and upset by what had happened.

  Peter Cazalet came down again with me from the Royal box, and we went over to the stables to see Devon Loch. He was munching some hay and being groomed, and apart from looking like a horse which has just had a hard race, there was nothing the matter with him. His intelligent head lifted as we went into his box, and I patted him while Peter Cazalet ran his hand down his legs to see if there was any heat or swelling in them, but they were cool and firm.

  I stood close to Devon Loch and leaned my head against his neck. We were both tired. ‘Oh, Devon Loch,’ I was saying in my mind, ‘Devon Loch, what happened? What happened?’ If only he could have answered.

  Peter Cazalet came back to the weighing-room with me, and with a few last sad words, we parted. Still a bit dazed and very unhappy, I collected Mary, and we drove with Father and my uncle back along the road we had travelled with such hope in the morning, to Douglas’s house at Bangor-on-Dee. We hardly spoke a word the whole way.

  The little house was full of children, ours and Douglas’s, who were too young to understand what the lost race meant to us, and who met us with blunt and penetrating candour.

  ‘The man on the wireless said Devon Loch sat down. Jolly silly sort of thing to do, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t win Uncle Dick. I had a shilling on you and now I’ve lost it, and the stable lads say their beer money’s gone down the drain too.’

  ‘Never mind, I expect you’ll win a race next week.’

  ‘Was the Queen cross, Daddy?’

  And the youngest, just three, said nothing, but after he had seen the picture of Devon Loch’s spread-eagled fall in the next day’s newspapers, I found him playing behind the sofa, running and falling flat on his tummy and saying, ‘I’m Devon Loch. Down I go, bump.’

  All evening the telephone rang, and Douglas answered it. Mary and I went for a walk. There was a gentle wind blowing clouds slowly across the moon, and we walked along the country road towards the racecourse. Somewhere not far ahead in the shifting moonlight lay the rails and the now deserted fences of the course where I had ridden my first race and my first winner, where so much that was good had begun for me, and where I came now needing solace.

  We reached a place where the River Dee runs close to the road, and we stood beside a tree there, looking down into the black sliding water.

  ‘Do you feel like jumping in?’ said Mary.

  ‘It looks a bit too wet,’ I said, ‘and cold.’

  The load of the day lifted suddenly and we laughed, yet nothing could for long ease our thoughts, and as we walked back in the wind and into our quiet room our sadness was still with us. Miserable and silent, we went to bed, but we could n
ot sleep. To ourselves and to each other we were saying again and again, ‘Why, why, why did it have to happen?’ It still seemed unbelievable that it should have done so.

  We went back to Berkshire the next day, and during the week which followed hundreds of letters arrived, many of them from strangers and from people who never go racing, and all kind and sympathetic. I had expected at least a few from cranks accusing me of driving my mount on to his knees from exhaustion, but I was pleased to find that the ‘cruelty to horses at Aintree’ brigade had not written a single abusive letter.

  Four days after the National Her Majesty the Queen Mother went down to Fairlawne to see Devon Loch, and I went too, to ride him in the park, and to school Her Majesty’s other horses. Devon Loch was looking very fit and well, and gave us no clue to the cause of his collapse, and as his Royal owner patted him I was sure she must have been wishing, as I had done, that he could tell us what had struck him down.

  Her Majesty said she would like to see me again to talk about the race, and later sent a message asking me to go to Windsor.

  She received me in a sunny room overlooking the mile-long, tree-bordered drive which stretches away into Windsor Great Park, and within the quiet solid walls of the Castle we talked of the excitement and the heartache that we had shared at Liverpool.

  Before I went Her Majesty gave me a cheque and a silver cigarette box as a memento of the race that was so nearly won. It is a lovely box, and I am deeply honoured by the inscription on its lid. It means so much to me that I keep it safely in its case (and in the bank when I am away, burglars please note), and it will always hold more memories than cigarettes.

  Her Majesty’s other horses brought home consoling numbers of winners as the years went by, and so far she has three times headed the owners’ list of number of races won in one season.

  Over the finish of the 1956 Grand National there still hangs a gigantic question mark.

  Much has been written, much discussed, many theories aired, many ideas exploded, but from all the fantastic explanations offered in a rush of journalistic blood to the head immediately after the race, four main possibilities emerge.

  First, did Devon Loch have a heart attack? It has been suggested that when he was hard pressed a fault appeared in his pumping arrangements, and lack of oxygen in his lungs and head made him falter and stop. After some races he panted deeply and longer than one would expect, but this is normal with any horse when it is not fully fit, and after the National, when if this theory is correct one would expect to see him gasping for air, he did not blow unduly.

  This theory also takes it for granted that Devon Loch was at the end of his strength when he collapsed. I cannot believe it. He was not going like a tired horse, rolling and staggering with effort, and I have ridden a lot of tired horses, so I know the feel of them. He had jumped the last fence powerfully, and was almost sprinting away along the run-in: he had had an extraordinarily easy race all the way round, and was not having to fight hard in a close finish; and if he had completed the course he would have broken the time record for the race.

  A seizure severe enough to stop him drastically in mid-stride would also, I think, have killed him. Yet five minutes later he was walking away as if nothing had happened. I have seen several horses have bad heart attacks when they were racing: they stagger for a few strides before they fall, and they go down dead. Devon Loch did not stagger and he recovered within minutes.

  One cannot entirely rule out a constitutional weakness of heart, but to me it does not seem at all probable.

  The second explanation seems to be the one most widely believed, and I am emphatically convinced it is not the true one.

  ‘A ghost jump,’ said newspapers and newsreels in chorus. ‘He tried to jump the water-jump which he saw out of the corner of his eye.’

  ‘They printed strips of pictures and slow motion bits of film to prove it, and they did a good job on even the racing world, which is half persuaded to believe them rather than me.

  The facts offered by the press to support their idea seem reasonable at first glance. Devon Loch had had a hard race, they said, and when he saw the wing of the water-jump on his left he was too tired to realise that the jump itself was not in front of him, so being a game-to-the-end horse he tried to take off in a last second reaction to the half sight of the wing on the edge of his vision.

  Also, said the press, he pricked his ears as a horse does before he is going to jump, and a horse does not prick his ears for nothing, especially after a long race. It seems to me that if a horse has enough time and energy to prick its ears it also has time and enough command of its senses to see what is or what is not in front of it.

  The press published pictures of Devon Loch with his hind feet on the ground and his forelegs in the air. See him jump, they said. But if a horse is galloping at thirty miles an hour and his hind legs abruptly stop and drop, it is easy to see that the sudden heavy drag behind will throw the forelegs into the air like a see-saw. His former momentum was enough after that to throw him forward through the air to land on his belly, and this is what has been interpreted as an attempt to jump.

  A lot was made of the fact that the horse collapsed by the wing of the water-jump. In fact, if he had been going to jump the water-jump, Devon Loch would have taken another stride before he did so; no horse of such experience would attempt to jump the water from outside the wings, for he would know he could not do it.

  The real answer to the ghost jumpites is Devon Loch himself. He was a horse of extreme intelligence. He was an outstandingly brilliant jumper. He was not noticeably tired and he was not being hard pressed. It is completely inconceivable that such a horse in such circumstances should have made such a shattering mistake. After all, he was used to passing the wings of jumps beside him. A hundred and fifty yards back he had passed the wing of the Chair fence without a flicker of emotion, and on other courses and in the park at home he was well accustomed to galloping along beside fences and hurdles without attempting to jump them.

  Because I was on the horse and not watching I am sure that the ghost jump theory is wrong. When a horse is going to jump he gathers the muscles of his hindquarters and tucks his legs under him for the spring. However hurried he was, no horse would attempt to jump without doing it, and if he were very tired he would be more likely to run straight into a fence and fall over it, than to start to take off with his weight all in the wrong place. I have ridden horses over more than forty thousand fences in racing alone, not counting hunting and show-jumping, and never has a horse intending to jump failed to gather himself together to take off. The feeling is absolutely unmistakable. Devon Loch did not try to jump.

  The third theory is that Devon Loch suffered a sudden and severe muscular spasm in his hindquarters, and the jolt it gave him at the speed he was going was enough to throw him down.

  In the actual second of his fall I thought he had broken a hind leg, for he collapsed from the back, but when I found that he was unhurt, cramp seemed the only solution.

  Very little is known about the physiology of cramp, and the cause of the lightning spasm known as stitch in humans is a complete mystery. Ordinary cramp in athletes usually comes on after the end of a great physical effort, and is thought to be due to an excess of lactic acid in the muscles; in horses it is called ‘setfast’ and often lasts for six or seven hours. Obviously Devon Loch did not suffer from any prolonged cramp, for he was walking normally within two minutes of his fall, but a violent spasm equivalent to stitch seems a reasonable possibility.

  If this sort of thing were at all common there would of course be no mystery, but veterinary opinion seems to be that it is so rare as to be almost unknown. On the other hand, soon after the race a retired huntsman told me that he used to ride a mare which did the same thing. She collapsed twice without warning in the hunting field while galloping, and once when trotting along a road; and after that he felt that she was more of a risk than a pleasure, and she was pensioned off.

  Sudden
cramp seems to be the most sensible, down-to-earth answer to the problem, but it does not explain why Devon Loch pricked his ears before he fell.

  There is a fourth possibility. At first it may seem a fanciful and extravagant one, almost as alarming as the ‘ghost jump’.

  Devon Loch was galloping easily, he pricked his ears, and he fell for no visible reason in a peculiar way not seen before or since on a racecourse. If this was the only fall of its kind it is worth asking whether on this one occasion there was anything else which had never happened before. There was. It was the only time that a reigning Sovereign had been at Liverpool cheering home a Royal winner of the Grand National.

  Could there possibly be any connection of cause and effect in these two unique events? Sad and ironic though it may be, it is conceivable that it was simply and solely because he belonged to the Queen Mother that Devon Loch fell where and how he did.

  From the last fence onwards the cheers which greeted us were tremendous and growing louder with every yard we went, and although I knew the reason for them, they may have been puzzling and confusing to my mount, who could not know that his owner was a Queen.

  In order to hear better what was going on he would make a horse’s instinctive movement to do so, and into those newly pricked and sensitive ears fell a wave of sound of shattering intensity. The noise that to me was uplifting and magnificent may have been exceedingly frightening to Devon Loch. He may have tried to throw himself backwards away from it; he may have reacted to it in the same convulsive way as a human being jumps at a sudden loud noise, and a severe nervous jerk at such a stage in the race could certainly have been enough to smash the rhythm of his stride and bring him down.

  The cheering was incredible. Everyone on the stands was yelling, and Raymond Glendenning’s wireless commentary, though he was shouting into a microphone at the top of his voice, could scarcely be heard above the happy din going on about him. I have never in my life heard such a noise. It rolled and lapped around us, buffeting and glorious, the enthusiastic expression of love for the Royal Family and delight in seeing the Royal horse win. The tremendous noise was growing in volume with every second, and was being almost funnelled down from the stands on to the course. The weather records show that there was a light breeze blowing that day from behind the stands, and this must have carried the huge sound with it.