Foinavon

by David Owen

  In journalist and commentator Peter O’Sullevan’s words, ‘Arkle … seemed almost embarrassed by his effortless 20 lengths superiority over the nearest of his 11 opponents in the 2½-mile Honeybourne Chase’.

  As Arkle marched on, going through the entire 1962/63 season undefeated, however, Foinavon was consistent only in his mediocrity. He contested four more hurdle races, on each occasion partnered by Taaffe, and was unplaced every time. A second visit to Gloucestershire, for the 1963 Cheltenham Festival, saw him fail to make the frame in the Spa Hurdle. Ground as soft as dough afforded mitigating circumstances of a sort, though the conditions did not stop Arkle cruising home by more than 20 lengths in the Broadway Novices Chase. This was also the festival at which Arkle’s great rival Mill House trounced Dreaper’s Fortria to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup for the one and only time.

  Taaffe’s verdict on Foinavon was affectionate but unflattering. ‘I don’t think I ever met a horse with less ambition,’ he said. ‘With a little dedication, he could have done a lot better than this. But his attitude was quite clearly, “Why beat myself to a frazzle when there are easier and more enjoyable ways of running a race.”’

  Taaffe also said that nothing ever worried or scared Foinavon – an attitude that was to prove highly significant in future and for now at least made him popular with his handlers back at the yard. ‘He was a Christian of a horse, the best horse to look after,’ according to Vincent Slevin, then a £6-a-week stable lad, who tended to Foinavon as one of his three charges, along with the future Cheltenham Gold Cup-winner Fort Leney and Dicky May. ‘He was a grand horse in front, but he had no tail-end in him. He hadn’t the power behind. He had a powerful shoulder and a deep girth, but he was very slack in the hindquarters.’ As part of his duties at Greenogue, Slevin remembers spending ‘umpteen’ nights on a made-up bed in box number 8, next door to Arkle. He used to stay there for the last three nights before the yard’s new star was due to run as a precaution against would-be horse dopers. As steeple-chasing was a winter sport, this was not a job for the faint-hearted or, better said, the thin-blooded. However, nothing suspicious or dramatic ever happened on his watch.

  After this disappointing sequence of results, Foinavon was packed off back to Bryanstown, where it was noted that he had been ‘growing during the winter’. In August 1963, at around the time Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he was returned to Dreaper.

  With Arkle now gunning for the very top prizes in the steeplechasing calendar, it became quite infrequent for the two stablemates to travel to the same race meetings. This may in part explain why Foinavon started to be ridden by a wider variety of jockeys. And since, ambitious to succeed, they were often prepared to ride him in robust fashion, this may well have been a contributory factor in the marked improvement in results which became apparent once he had turned six.

  His first outing over the big fences ended in familiar fashion when he was unplaced at Leopardstown under Liam McLoughlin, who won the Irish Grand National on Kerforo in 1962 and was Peter’s elder brother. But he carried Taaffe to fourth place on his official sixth birthday on his first visit to Baldoyle, a nearby seaside course in north Dublin that the experienced jockey regarded as not really suitable for ‘young, green’ horses. In his next nine races, stretching over the 1964 calendar year, he was placed six times, winning twice. It seemed a corner had been turned.

  Race-riding in those days was a tough old business, especially in Ireland. As if navigating half a tonne of horseflesh around a curving course at high-speed over hedge-like obstacles was not a perilous enough way of making a living, jockeys had appended some additional hazards of their own, courtesy of their fiercely uncompromising racing tactics. According to Bobby Beasley, a top Irish jockey of the day and prime exponent, ‘It is a strange part of the Irish character that when competing against each other on horses, nearly everyone wants to “do” the other riders. They would try to ride each other off, put each other over the rails and so on.’ Describing how he once deliberately pulled across rival jockey Willie Robinson when he tried to come up on his inside, in an incident that left Robinson nursing a broken collarbone, Beasley argued, ‘I believed these were the right tactics in Ireland at the time … It was rough and tough but I loved it. As with everything else connected with racing, I studied the technique ruthlessly, so that soon no one dared even to poke his nose up on my inside and very few tried to “do” me for fear of reprisals.’ While jump jockeys, corralled into one of sport’s most precarious and demanding professions, exhibited legendary camaraderie at all other times, in sight of the winning-post it was dog eat dog. Explained Beasley, ‘You wouldn’t get any more rides from a trainer if you let someone get up on your inside.’ Besides, he added, ‘Willie didn’t mind. He’d done the same to me before.’

  Foinavon’s first victory came in a two-mile steeplechase at Naas on 29 February 1964 – exactly 652 days after his Dundalk debut. Paddy Woods, another senior member of the Greenogue staff, who was Arkle’s regular work-rider and a stalwart of the yard’s Gaelic football team, remembers it well; he had to work hard for his bonus.

  He had earned a reputation by this time as ‘sort of a lazy type’, Woods recalls. ‘So I stoked him up as hard as I could … I started to hit him at the first fence and didn’t stop until we had finished.’ The horse responded to the hard ride and ‘jumped like a buck’, but Woods was so worn out by the time they passed the winning-post that he nearly collapsed and was ‘hardly able to talk’ when he reached the weighing-room. His efforts had not gone unnoticed: the Duchess of Westminster herself saw fit to bring him a pick-me-up in the shape of a post-race cup of tea.

  A week later Arkle won his first Cheltenham Gold Cup, turning the tables on reigning champion Mill House, who had beaten him in the Hennessy, in their first ‘clash of the titans’ at Newbury the previous November. The yard was flying high and in April Foinavon delivered another victory.

  This time his jockey was Peter McLoughlin. The two-mile Tickell Chase at Punchestown was only the young stable lad’s second ride over fences. In his first, he had broken a collarbone. So he was strongly motivated to show that he had what it takes. The early pace was fast and McLoughlin soon found himself well back in the field. ‘After a mile, I was probably driving,’ he says. ‘Foinavon would never pick up speed. He was a true, true stayer. I was going nowhere when, all of a sudden, the other horses started getting tired.

  ‘I kept driving, pushing, kicking. Going to the last, there was one horse in front of me. I was ten lengths behind, then four lengths. He just stayed, stayed, stayed. I remember Mr Dreaper saying, “You certainly got the best out of him.”’

  In spite of these hard races, Foinavon was said to be looking ‘awfully well’ in May when returned to Bryanstown for his summer break. It was seven months before he was seen on a racecourse again, though in September he was ‘up and being ridden by [Johnny] Kelly’, the stud groom at Bryanstown, who had arrived there early that year. As a more seasoned chaser of proven staying ability, he was to be aimed in the 1964/65 season at three-mile races that were all the more likely to sap the strength of his opponents. This, though, was as good as it got for Foinavon at Greenogue. In January came an incident that would all but seal the now seven-year-old gelding’s fate at the yard.

  Baldoyle today is a sad sight for any racing enthusiast. The members’ entrance is through a fine red-brick arch; the turf is springy; and the setting, just across the road from a stretch of shoreline where godwits drill for food with their elongated bills, is idyllic. But the arch is concreted up and the last race meeting was four decades ago. The death-knell? A notification from the course’s insurers, received in 1968, that they would not much longer be able to insure the grandstands – now long demolished – because of rusting reinforcement rods.

  On 2 January 1965, though, the course, and the entire village, would have been buzzing as the crowds poured in for the New Year’s meeting th
at was the most important National Hunt event of the year at Baldoyle. In the parade ring, local high society in the form of men in crombie and astrakhan coats and women in furs studied the runners as they circled skittishly with their handlers. In the outside enclosure, the hoi polloi clustered around catering tents, bookmakers’ pitches, or the portable Tote building, clutching racing cards, cigarettes and steaming beverages, or a drop of the hard stuff from the Dolphin Hotel marquee. As course commentator, Michael O’Hehir was probably there calling the finishes as the horses flashed by Baldoyle’s star-shaped winning-post. Between races, the film-processing van’s pungent diesel generator throbbed insistently. This was to be rendered useless for the last race, which went off 14 minutes late in rapidly fading light, forcing the judge to fall back on the evidence of his own eyes and declare a dead heat.

  Foinavon made the short trip across from Greenogue to run in the fourth race on the card, the Claremount Handicap Steeplechase over 3 miles and 100 yards. The bald facts are that he was sent off as the 4/1 favourite only to disappoint again, succumbing to a heavy fall, his first for almost a year.

  That was bad enough, but what happened immediately afterwards made matters even worse. There are various versions, which differ somewhat in their particulars. Taaffe, riding him for the tenth time and yet to win on him, described the episode quite colourfully as follows. ‘On a day at Baldoyle, we fell very heavily. We parted company in mid-air and after I’d bounced, I looked round, half-expecting to see Foinavon in trouble. And there he was lying down … eating grass, cool as you please, just taking time for a snack. He was that kind of a horse. If he had been a man, he’d have spent his days, hands in pockets, whistling through his teeth, scuffling the dust.’

  Tony Cameron, Foinavon’s first jockey, who was at the course that day, adds a couple of details, saying that the horse ‘tipped up’ at the fence and ‘lay for dead’. He goes on, ‘Pat took one look at him and gave him a belt on the backside. He jumped up. He was no more dead than flying to the moon.’

  Peter McLoughlin was also there, having ridden in the first race. His recollection is that Taaffe at first couldn’t get him up and thought that his back was broken. As the jockey walked away, however, his mount sat up on his haunches and started cropping grass. McLoughlin says that Taaffe then heard a whinny and a drumming of hooves and, as he turned around, Foinavon raced past and aimed a kick at him, which fortunately missed. ‘I think Pat told Mr Dreaper he wasn’t going to ride him again,’ he adds. He never did.

  See Notes on Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Kempton Park

  About 250 miles away – and several divisions below horse racing’s Premier League – the only man who rode Foinavon in more races than Pat Taaffe was halfway through his sixth season as trainer-cum-jockey. John Kempton’s path into this tough but exciting world was far from direct.

  The son of a South London car dealer who sold used Citroëns from a showroom in East Hill, Wandsworth, Kempton was studying in the late 1950s to be a vet when his world was turned upside down by the collapse of his father’s business. His father Jack – who had served an engineering apprenticeship with the Campbell racing team of Bluebird fame and spent the war inspecting damaged Wellington bombers at Brooklands – suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, spending some time in hospital. The financial consequences of this included turfing John out of vets’ school to seek gainful employment.

  During a childhood spent mainly in Wimbledon and Epsom, John had developed a fondness for horses, learning to ride on Wimbledon Common and in Richmond Park. At the time of his father’s illness, he had acquired ownership of a horse with a club foot called Monsieur Egbert, which the family used to enter in the occasional race. Reluctant to give up the horse, he and his mother, Molly, began looking for stables to rent in the Home Counties, with the notion of starting a livery yard business.

  The residents of Compton, the Berkshire village where they settled, might never have had it so good, in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s era-defining phrase, yet recreational riding was still beyond the budgets of most families in the area, those without their own stables anyway, so this idea didn’t work out. Never shy of trying things out for himself, Kempton had learnt to shoe horses. He now turned to farriering in an attempt to make ends meet. Servicing villages near the dyed-in-the-wool racing town of Newbury in a small van, under the mission statement, ‘Anywhere, any time, £1 a set’, this went rather better. ‘I made them myself out of strip metal,’ he recalls. ‘I made a profit out of the £1.’

  Shoeing unknown horses can be a hazardous business, however, and it wasn’t long before Kempton started thinking in terms of obtaining a trainer’s licence. Eventually he persuaded one of his farriering clients to buy two racehorses and he started training in 1959 with the sum total of four possible runners. He was just over 20.

  In time, Jack was discharged from hospital and joined his wife and son in the bungalow across the yard from the single L-shaped stable-block they had purchased. With winners as scarce as new owners, however, it was a hand-to-mouth existence and John was obliged to keep doing the rounds of the local equine population in his little van.

  The new decade brought welcome reinforcement in the shape of Colin ‘Jake’ Hemsley, a seven-and-a-half-stone livewire with a shock of dark hair and an Isetta bubble-car, who had previously worked in the yard of Captain Ryan Price in Sussex alongside top jockeys such as Fred Winter and Josh Gifford. Hemsley had seen at first hand the precision and discipline with which a leading racing stable operated. He slotted in as head lad with responsibility for ensuring the horses were appropriately fed and exercised. This freed Kempton to concentrate on his riding and shoeing – and to prospect for new owners. His efforts soon bore fruit, pushing up the number of horses in training at the yard towards double figures.

  They rolled their own oats and installed a chaff-cutter for making the hay and grass ‘chop’ that was part of the lunchtime feed. On Wednesday evenings, in a small blue and white caravan equipped with a Burco boiler that also served as a tack-room, Hemsley would make up a linseed mash in a Redex tin with the top cut off. To save money, he often heated the mixture using home-made briquettes made from the tightly folded pages of old newspapers. With open country close at hand, he and his assistants regularly rode the horses several miles across the Downs to villages such as Lockinge and Harwell. When not being schooled or exercised, however, the horses remained in their stables.

  If a small yard had any potential edge over the likes of Price and Dreaper it lay in the individual treatment they could accord their horses in their efforts to bring out the best in them. Indeed, given that the animals they were working with were often regarded as damaged goods in one way or another – which is what brought them into the small owners’ price bracket – judicious experimentation was frequently the most rational way to try to make a difference, to turn an inveterate also-ran into a competitive racehorse. ‘Psychoanalysis’ (with apologies to Freud) is what Kempton called it.

  When a new charge arrived, Hemsley and Kempton would spend hours observing and discussing its characteristics – particularly in Sunday morning planning-sessions – trying to work out how to turn it into a more successful racehorse. In June 1961, the Kemptons paid around £500, on behalf of an owner from one of the families behind the Peek Frean biscuit company, for a horse called Seas End. It was a giant of a horse that Kempton would later ride in two Grand Nationals, with feet so flat he couldn’t be ridden along the stonier downland tracks. After performing well early in his career, the horse appeared to be in decline, running 11 times in the 1959/60 season for just one third place and being pulled up on several occasions. After taking him hunting a few times, as he often did with new horses, Kempton noticed he had a very tender mouth, so they started racing him in a rubber bit, with somewhat improved results. Then, larking around at home (while wearing his business suit) the trainer realised the huge horse was so controllable he could steer him around a field using just a
flimsy hay-tie attached to his head-collar.

  At this point, encouraged by Hemsley, Kempton fashioned a bridle like a padded head-collar and attached the long-necked Seas End’s special long reins to it, putting nothing in the horse’s mouth. ‘I went to the stewards at Devon & Exeter racecourse and asked if I could run a horse without a bit,’ he recalls. ‘They said, “There’s nothing in the rules to say you can’t, but be it on your head because if you interfere with any other horse, you’ll immediately be up with us.” I rode him without a bit that afternoon and he won by 12 lengths.’ The horse’s progress continued to such effect that he once broke a course record at Cheltenham. Kempton concludes, ‘It was an absolute transformation.’

  Such successes simply did not come often enough, however. Without the leverage to extract adequate fees from the owners of their horses, small trainers faced a grinding battle to make ends meet in the 1960s. Speaking in 1966, after completing a hat-trick of Flat trainers’ championships in England, Paddy Prendergast, the Irish-based trainer, summarised the situation as follows, ‘No trainer can afford to keep a horse under 16 guineas a week. A large majority of them are forced to charge considerably less than this sum. But even if he charges 16 guineas there is no salary for him if he does not win races.’

  Enthusiastic owners who paid reliably, tipped the staff regularly and were committed to the sport were a valued commodity. One man who did more than most to help the Kemptons keep the wolf from the door was Gordon Passey. A well-known figure in Newbury, Passey was from a family that had supplied knackermen to the local racecourse since 1925. His grandfather had rejoiced in the title ‘licensed horse slaughterer to Her Majesty’. As mechanised transport took over from horses even in semi-rural Berkshire, the family diversified its business. By the 1960s, Passey was also one of the leading scrap metal dealers in the area. He was once heard to observe that he had three ambitions in life: to own a Rolls-Royce, to be a millionaire and to have, as he put it, ‘an ’oss’ good enough to run in the Grand National. He came up short only on the third count. As well as keeping racehorses with the Kemptons, Passey was instrumental in keeping things ticking over at the yard in other ways. He supplied the unusual grey-blue-coloured paint, the sort of shade you might find on a naval vessel, with which the stable doors were coated. And when the cylinder-head of the old petrol-engined horsebox they used cracked, it was Passey who saved the day by telling them the equivalent part from a – readily obtainable – Humber Super Snipe car could be pressed into service. He also procured Hemsley’s living quarters.