Foinavon

by David Owen

  It must have been quite a sight, the 38-foot-long mobile home as it trundled across the Downs on a low-loader trailer all the way from the US air base at Greenham Common where Passey had bought it as scrap. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, central heating, even air conditioning and, once it had been plonked down behind the stable-block in a field that also housed an ever-growing heap of wood shavings from the horses’ discarded bedding, Hemsley lived there for years with his wife Jill and son Shane.

  The Kemptons’ bungalow housed a memento of family success earlier in the century in a different form of racing. This was a cut-out photograph of Mick the Miller, the famous greyhound, who had been owned by a relative called Phiddy Kempton. There were also some pieces of fine glass from the days before the war when the family owned a glass-works. Sometimes, when the horses were running poorly or unexpected expenses incurred, Molly would sell a piece of glass to make ends meet. More often they would strive to balance the books in the same way many other trainers did, including Prendergast in his early days – by placing bets.

  You might see no great harm in this. And when trainers merely staked a small sum on a horse of theirs they thought was in with a particularly good chance in order to balance the books, you would probably be justified. (Jockeys were banned from betting.) But, of course, in such circumstances there would be a strong temptation both to enhance a likely horse’s chances of winning and to cash in to the greatest extent possible when you found yourself with a ‘sure-fire certainty’ on your hands. This led to practices such as the deliberate ‘stopping’ by jockeys of improving horses whose trainers had their eye on a substantial pay day in a race or two’s time and did not wish too promising a performance in the meantime to spoil things by getting the horse saddled with a punishing handicap. It also gave trainers a strong incentive to try to disguise whatever betting activity they were engaging in to avoid cramping the odds and reducing the amount of money they stood to make. This was all rather hard on the poor punter, who might find himself unwittingly backing a horse which had almost no chance of winning for the very good reason that its connections had no intention of allowing it to win, even if capable of doing so.

  As part of his graphic account of the seedier side of racing during this period, Barry Brogan, a leading jockey active between 1962 and 1977, spelt out some of the pitfalls for ordinary racegoers. ‘There is no end to the ways in which gullible, unsuspecting punters are ripped off by the professional fixers,’ Brogan wrote. ‘Favourite methods include deliberately running horses with sore shins, sore backs, sore withers, pulled muscles, over the wrong distance, on unsuitable ground conditions and when they simply aren’t fit enough to do their best.’ Brogan also reckoned that, notwithstanding the rules, ‘up to 50 per cent of jockeys bet on horses every day’.

  Trainers could fall foul of dishonest dealers as well, as the Kemptons had discovered before moving to Berkshire, when running the gallant Monsieur Egbert in a humdrum race at Wye, the Chatham Hurdle. The horse had recently had a couple of promising outings and the family fancied his chances, so Jack Kempton had a substantial wager on the outcome. The horse romped home at long odds with plenty to spare, but anxious to secure the highest possible payout, Jack had given his stake to a stranger who said he could place the bet in such a way as to avoid the price being shortened and Jack’s winnings reduced accordingly. He never saw the stranger again and the stake was lost. The Kemptons had to make do with their comparatively meagre prize-money of £137.

  On setting up in Compton, John still thought enough of that victory to want to commemorate it. The yard was renamed Chatham Stables.

  See Notes on Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  A Horse to Run in the National

  One chilly morning, not long after Foinavon’s Baldoyle tumble, Colin Hemsley found himself planting plastic daffodils in the circular centre-piece at Chatham Stables. It was customary (and sensible) to have the yard looking its best when new owners called. There was still snow on the ground and the head lad thought that the flowers, which were then given away with packets of washing powder, would brighten up the place for the visit of Mr and Mrs Watkins, a local Berkshire couple thinking of buying the odd racehorse for the Kemptons to train. Hemsley felt he and the stable girls had done a good job. Even so, he was surprised when Mrs Watkins asked how they got their daffodils to bloom so early.

  The couple – comfortably off but far from wealthy – had the sort of profile you might expect of small-time racehorse owners in an age when rising prosperity was stoking demand for leisure activities and opening new routes to social advancement. Cyril Watkins, a cab proprietor’s son in his mid-fifties, was a football pools concessionaire, responsible for the smooth processing each week of thousands of coupons collected by agents from workplaces around the pleasant market town of Reading. The idea was to team up in the racehorse venture with another concessionaire called McIntyre ‘Mac’ Bennellick. Mac, who also owned a hairdressing shop in Rainham, was based in Essex.

  Cyril and Iris married at the register office in Iris’s home city of Nottingham on 6 December 1947. The country was still basking in the glow of another wedding, between Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mount-batten, just two weeks earlier. But this was austerity Britain with people still rationed, much to Cyril’s frustration, to two ounces of butter per week. Cyril was 39, a divorcee and a Didcot-based stores foreman for the Air Ministry. Iris Nixon was the 30-year-old daughter of a deceased brewery clerk. She was also a dressmaker and would draw on these skills in years to come to make silks for the jockeys who rode their horses.

  By the early 1960s, the couple was living in a small Edwardian semi on Craig Avenue in the Norcot area of Reading. Part of the house was pressed into service as an office for Cyril’s football pools concession. Around the middle of the decade, however, they upgraded to a new bungalow, set in acres of land, on leafy Nine Mile Ride in well-heeled Berkshire suburbia. Cyril traded in his Ford Zephyr estate for a pillar-box red Inspector Morse-style Jaguar.

  Cyril and Iris had no children, but several animals. These included Shoes and Socks, two boisterous Airedale terriers, a couple of escapologist bullocks, called Mr Wart and Mr Bossy, and a goat. The property was initially heavily wooded and was traversed by a stream frequented by frogs and adders. Once the land had been prepared, however, the couple acquired two thoroughbred brood-mares called Betty – short for ‘Betting Control’ – and Peggy. By this time, Cyril also owned a pet-shop in Tilehurst, a village just outside Reading. Around the back of the shop was a small office building which became the focus of the football pools business, with Cyril’s agents delivering completed Littlewoods coupons there on Friday nights for despatch to the company’s headquarters in Liverpool.

  At this time, the football pools were as much a part of the fabric of British life as the Grand National. They had also become very big business. In the 1950s, when cash betting on horse races was still technically illegal except on the racecourse, as many as 7¾ million people were said to be sending in pools coupons on a weekly basis during the football season, staking upwards of £50 million a year. By the 1960s, the sums gambled in this way had comfortably exceeded £100 million. ‘The pools are an interest which no government can ignore,’ observed Northampton MP Reginald Paget in May 1960. ‘They have become a power in the land because they represent an awful lot of money.’ The pools were also an efficient source of tax revenue, described by one MP as ‘the cheapest tax in the world’. Finally, they were a significant source of employment, especially on Merseyside. In 1968, there were said to be 2,000 people in Glasgow, 1,000 in Cardiff and 14,759 on Merseyside whose jobs depended on the pools. Nearly 1,800 of these were in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Huyton constituency.

  As the plastic daffodil story suggests, Iris Watkins was scrupulously polite and perhaps at times a little naïve. Another story has her struggling to pull out of a tight parking-spot before finally accepting an offer of help from a man. The good Samaritan duly parked her vehicle pe
rfectly for her, upon which Iris thanked him without daring to point out that she was now back to square one.

  Cyril could be generous to a fault, but he also had a more roguish streak and more than his share of eccentricities. Taking his turn on the tea-run during the war on a ship in heavy seas, he is said to have been sick over the tray of drinks he was carrying. Thinking himself unobserved, he wiped away the evidence and continued on his way back to his cabin-mates, rather than disposing of the contaminated beverages and collecting another round. Unfortunately for him, this indiscretion was witnessed. It earned him a beating.

  He had a gambler’s interest in horse racing, spending Saturday afternoons in front of a large television set while phoning in bets. On Sunday mornings, he would walk the Airedales up to the paper shop in his pyjama jacket. He smoked heavily, ate his beef very rare and his bread brown, thinly sliced and with butter covering every single millimetre of the surface.

  Mac Bennellick was the son of a Boer war veteran, who endured the siege of Ladysmith and spent much of his later life as a Devonshire postman. Born in Holsworthy, Mac moved to Rainham, where he met his wife Peggy, as a young man. In 1949 they had a son, Colin. Though initially a hairdresser, he had stopped wielding the scissors by the time the idea of a horse-racing partnership with Watkins came up, spending his days instead in his office below the hairdressing business. Like Watkins, Mac did very well from his Littlewoods pools concession.

  Hemsley’s daffodils did the trick. A few months later, the Watkins–Bennellick partnership bought a four-year-old hurdler called McCrimmon out of the Duke of Norfolk’s Arundel stables for 800 guineas and started keeping him at Compton. Within five weeks of the start of their first season as racehorse owners in 1965, the young gelding had won a race for them – a novices’ hurdle at Devon & Exeter worth all of £136. Before the end of September, he won again, at Folkestone.

  After that, he was obliged to run in better races, against other horses who knew what it was like to visit the winners’ enclosure. What is more, the handicaps in such races were often not wide enough to truly reflect the relative merit of all the runners. Like many other racehorses before and after him, McCrimmon turned out to be not quite good enough to excel in such circumstances and his form fell away. His novice owners’ appetites had been whetted, however. As John Kempton recalls, ‘They got more enthusiastic and said they would love to have a horse to run in the National.’

  See Notes on Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Ma Topham and the Battle for Aintree

  It was one thing to have a horse to run in the Grand National, but would there be a Grand National for that horse to run in?

  On 1 July 1964, the world of horse racing was stunned by a 255-word statement, issued from the racecourse offices at Aintree, which appeared to bring down the curtain on a 128-year-old sporting institution. Authored by Mirabel Topham, the domineering ex-actress who, as chairman of Tophams Limited, had managed the property since before the war, the statement disclosed that the company proposed applying for planning permission to develop the land. As a result it had been decided ‘with the greatest regret’ that the 1965 Grand National ‘must be the last to be run at Aintree’.

  At 72, and with no children of her own to take over, Mrs Topham was on the face of it only doing what owner-managers of other family businesses have done unremarked since the dawn of capitalism: cashing in on a lifetime’s hard work and preparing to take things a bit easier. Not many family businesses are founded on events as popular as the Grand National, however. And a negotiator as dogged as Mrs Topham would undoubtedly have realised that securing clearance to build on the racecourse was key to obtaining an attractive valuation for the property, while also guaranteeing that the transaction would be big news. She had worked hard for her windfall though.

  In 1946, she performed wonders to enable the first post-war Grand National to be staged within weeks of the US evacuation and was rewarded with a bumper crowd, estimated at up to 200,000. She brought motor-racing, including the British Grand Prix, to Aintree, overseeing construction of a £100,000 circuit that opened in 1954. She had a new horse-racing course with easier fences – intended to serve as an introduction to Aintree for young animals – built inside the Grand National circuit. She did all she could to augment the National’s international appeal, through initiatives such as the Soviet horses and jockeys who took part in the race in 1961. And she strove to ensure that the race made appropriate allowance for changing public attitudes towards animal welfare while remaining steeplechasing’s sternest test.

  From her base at Paddock Lodge, a compact house on the Aintree property, she adopted a particularly hands-on management style, using an old-fashioned bell-pull to summon different members of staff. ‘Nothing on the racecourse was ever done unless she said “Yes”,’ recalls Ossie Dale, who worked there for three decades, beginning in 1953, for the most part as stable manager. There is no doubt that her reputation for forcefulness was richly deserved and she kept a tight grasp on the company’s purse-strings, but she was loyal to her core workforce and well capable of recognising when a more indulgent approach was warranted. For example, when Steve Westhead, Aintree’s chief jump builder and, as such, an absolutely key member of staff, was faced with ‘domestic trouble’, she advised that the company ‘stand by this man who had always been an extremely good and reliable worker.’ She also made arrangements for him to have ‘a hot meal cooked for him each day right through the winter.’

  ‘We used to call her Ma Topham,’ says Ossie Dale, recalling how much she appreciated his regular offerings of chrysanthemums grown in his greenhouse. She also seems to have had a genuine fondness for animals, raising pigs and cattle at Aintree, and coming out to give apples to the workhorses Dale used to mow the lawn in front of Paddock Lodge.

  Not all Ma Topham’s innovations worked out, however, and, try as she might, she just could not arrest the relentless slide in revenues which set in quickly once the euphoria that greeted the end of the war had ebbed away. In 1946, the year of that big post-war Grand National crowd, Tophams Limited enjoyed income of nearly a quarter of a million pounds (£241,760). By 1950, this had dipped below £200,000 and by 1956 – the year of the Devon Loch incident when the Queen Mother’s horse inexplicably collapsed when about to win the National – below £120,000. Even after the race had started to be televised in 1960, income struggled to rise far beyond £130,000. These figures were generally enough to produce a profit – even after the payment of dividends to shareholders, of whom Mrs Topham was, of course, one – and to enable the family to live in some style. In addition to Paddock Lodge, Mrs Topham had a London house in a Nash terrace in Regent’s Park and a holiday house on the Isle of Wight. Just five months before the bombshell announcement, the board of which she was part agreed to give her a 50 per cent increase in her salary and expenses.

  The problem was, though, that the stands and other racecourse buildings were falling into poorer and poorer repair. No matter how brilliantly, or abstemiously, Mrs Topham had managed Aintree’s day-today affairs, it was impossible to see how the property, as then configured, could generate the income-stream necessary to upgrade facilities to a level worthy of the world’s best-known steeplechase. Yes, intervention by some outside agency, such as the newly established Horserace Betting Levy Board, charged with using money from betting to improve the sport, could conceivably have identified a way to fund the improvements. But the sums involved would have been huge and Aintree’s autocratic boss was never likely to stand for the levels of interference such a scheme would entail, even supposing that the sport’s notoriously fractious politics didn’t themselves form an insuperable barrier.

  By 1963, then, it seems Mrs Topham had had enough. She embarked on negotiations with a view to selling the property. As the individual responsible for every decision of note taken at Aintree for more than two decades, the Tophams chairman must plainly have realised that paving over the Grand National course would be controversial. But
she seems genuinely to have imagined that the race could be staged elsewhere. She may even have felt that a commitment to do so would mitigate the outcry.

  In early 1964, therefore, a subsidiary company of Tophams was formed for the purpose of acquiring ‘the goodwill and title and all other rights of whatsoever nature attaching to the Grand National Steeplechase.’ By distancing the race from Aintree in this way, at least on paper, Mrs Topham was ensuring that a steeplechase called the Grand National could in theory be staged by another racecourse, while also creating a structure which ought to enable Tophams Limited shareholders such as herself to collect royalties wherever it was run. When the statement was released, on 1 July, it emphasised that efforts were being made to arrange for the Grand National to be ‘transferred to a new locality and continue as one of the country’s greatest sporting events.’