by David Owen
By the time of the Doncaster bloodstock sales in October 1965, the future of the Grand National was settled – for one more year. On 5 June, the Tophams board decided to press ahead and apply for four fixtures in 1965/66, culminating with a Grand National meeting in March. News of the move broke two and a half weeks later on 22 June. ‘Grand National is on next year,’ announced the Liverpool Daily Post the following morning. ‘But Mrs Topham warns: it will be the last.’
Within a month, the Mistress of Aintree had underlined her determination to pursue her legal battle with Lord Sefton to the bitter end, as Tophams decided to take the case to the House of Lords. With costs to date estimated at £20,000, this was a brave, or a foolhardy, move. The company also felt duty-bound to put in finally for planning permission.
Nonetheless, as John Kempton set off for South Yorkshire on a fine autumn day, with a remit to find his new owners their Grand National horse, he knew that they would get at least one opportunity – but perhaps only one – to fulfil their dream. By the time he came home, he had handed over the largest sum he would pay for a horse in his career as a trainer.
See Notes on Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Hello Susie
It was Lot 59 in the catalogue that had caught John Kempton’s attention. At seven, the dark brown gelding was still young for a steeplechaser and might be expected to have plenty of races left in him. His sire was Vulgan, whose reputation as a stallion was by then firmly established. And for most of his life, he had had just one considerate owner, Anne, Duchess of Westminster, known for the sensitive handling of her racehorses. Think of the sales ring as a used-car dealership, with many potential pitfalls awaiting the buyer; the duchess’s prominence on Foinavon’s curriculum vitae was like seeing an AA stamp of approval on the vehicle Kempton had his eye on.
The key phrase that jumped out at him, though, was ‘qualified for the Grand National’. With just five months to go before the 1966 race, which was again potentially the last Grand National, he needed an eligible horse if his enthusiastic new owners, Cyril Watkins and Mac Bennellick, were to have the best chance possible of fulfilling their Aintree ambition. That battling Leopardstown victory in February 1965 had conferred this eligibility on Foinavon.
‘He was very clean on the legs,’ Kempton recalls, a big plus-point in a steeplechaser, whose limbs come in for fearful punishment during the course of a long career. The young trainer also noted that the horse ‘had a lovely big heavy shoulder to him’. He saw at once, however, that he was ‘a bit herring-gutted’, an evocative term used to describe horses whose belly has a pronounced upward slope from front to back. The shape of such animals could make them prone to slipping saddles, not a problem any jockey would wish to contend with while negotiating steeplechase fences.
There was also the question of price, which the ‘Grand National-qualified’ tag was bound to inflate. ‘We only really had about £2,000 to spend,’ says Kempton. So it came as a relief when he was able to snap up the horse for 2,000 guineas (£2,100). This was many times less than the sums for which proven Grand National horses such as Anglo and Rutherfords would be sold in subsequent years, but still at least double what Kempton and his owners were in the habit of paying for their racehorses.
The long journey back to the Berkshire Downs transported Foinavon from the Manchester United of the horse-racing world, where he had resided up to that point, to the equivalent of local club Reading, then a fair-to-middling side in the old English Third Division. He immediately found himself expected to work a lot harder than under Tom Dreaper’s minimalist regime. Regular downland hacks were a feature of life for all the Kemptons’ horses, but Foinavon clocked up more miles than his stablemates, as head lad Colin Hemsley and his staff tried to build up his stamina with Aintree in mind. There were hours and hours of monotonous schooling on the end of a rope over practice fences, with a view to correcting any vices in his jumping technique that might explain why he had fallen so much in his final months in Ireland. Kempton took him out hunting too, as he endeavoured as quickly as possible to get to know the horse he now expected to ride in his third Grand National. ‘I didn’t just toddle around,’ Kempton says. ‘I’d pop him over everything that was available.’
Joy Douglas, the £5-a-week stable girl who rode Foinavon out most days in his first year at the yard, often wearing a pink woolly hat and old-fashioned jodhpurs, remembers him as a good-natured and happy horse. ‘We used to tickle him behind the saddle and he would try to buck you off,’ she says. ‘I think we all gave them far too many peppermints and Polos.’
There was one problem, however: the newcomer was at first reluctant to eat up his regular feed. Fortunately, a solution was close to hand.
Susie was a ruthlessly single-minded white nanny goat which the Kemptons had bought from a roadside verge near Crewkerne in Somerset on the way back from one of their summer sorties to the racecourses at Newton Abbot and Devon & Exeter where the season traditionally got under way. There was a school of thought in racing to the effect that goats made good companions for horses. Irish jockey Bobby Beasley’s first Grand National mount, Sandy Jane II, was ‘inseparable’ from her cloven-hoofed friend. After the race, he recalls seeing her lying flat out in her box while the goat licked her stomach scratched ‘red raw’ by the Aintree fences. The Fossa, a Worcestershire-based racehorse whom Foinavon would run against at Liverpool and elsewhere, was another who travelled with a nanny goat. Her name was Amelia.
Susie, whose obsession was eating, was bought initially to accompany Seas End, the Kemptons’ first Grand National horse. This worked well enough for a time, until the horse – who otherwise was so good-natured he used to stroll up to the side-door of the Kemptons’ bungalow to ask for tea and biscuits from them – started chasing her away. When Foinavon arrived in Berkshire without his appetite, it was decided to switch Susie to this new partner to encourage him to eat up. Thereafter they went everywhere together. ‘He was quite possessive over having her,’ Kempton says. ‘It wasn’t just a little gimmick; it did seem to work.’
The relationship had its ups and downs, however – particularly at feeding times, which in a way was the whole point. ‘That was the dangerous time,’ says Clifford Booth, who worked as a stable lad at Compton. He describes how the two animals would stand in different corners of the stable eyeing each other as he put the feed in the manger, the horse with its ears flat against its skull in a classic posture of aggression. Very soon, the goat would run out of patience and race for the manger, whereupon Foinavon would charge across, grab her by the neck and throw her out of the way. Woe betide anyone who hadn’t exited the stable by the time this happened.
The odd couple also caused Booth the occasional difficulty at race-meetings. The pair had to be unloaded together from the horsebox, he recalls, otherwise the goat would panic. Yet they would often be fighting as they got off. If, as sometimes happened, the upshot of this was that they tore off in opposite directions, Booth would have to let one of them go. ‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘if you let the goat go, she was harder to catch, so I used to let Foinavon go. I let Foinavon go at Liverpool.’
There was one other element in this farmyard soap opera: the horses were all greedy for the goat’s milk, even though Booth thinks it tended to make their legs swell up. ‘We used to milk the goat into a bucket and take it around and they would all drink it,’ he says. The horses’ craving was particularly useful after their six-week summer break, for which they were turned out unshod. When the time came to recapture them and put them back into training, a bucket of goat’s milk would bring them all tearing obediently over to be caught.
About ten weeks after Foinavon’s arrival at Chatham Stables, on New Year’s Day 1966, Kempton rode him in a race for the first time. It was a three-mile chase at Newbury, their local course, and a horse called Rondetto, who had run well in the 1965 Grand National, was the red-hot favourite. Predictably enough, in his first race for more than eight months, Foinavon was in the re
ar from beginning to end and plodded past the post fourth and last. But he had stayed on his feet, as he did again the following month over some of the stiffest fences outside Aintree – at Kempton Park, in Sunbury-on-Thames near London.
Foinavon, though, wasn’t the only member of the partnership who had work to do if he was to be ready for the Grand National at Liverpool on 26 March. As a six-footer, Kempton was unusually tall for a jockey. Though rake-thin, this meant that when riding in handicaps against rival horses with better records, he might exceed the weight that his mount had been allotted, hence reducing their chances of a good result. In his first two outings with Foinavon, he was able to carry over 11 stone, which was not a problem for him. At Aintree, he would need to get down to as close to 10 stone as he could manage. This presented a major challenge.
See Notes on Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Wasted
The 1960s was the decade when Twiggy launched a million diets. But not even the most devoted mimic of the waif-like teenage model could have monitored her own weight more meticulously than Britain’s 500 or so jockeys.
First thing in the morning – and often last thing at night too – these skinny men would stumble across their landings to consult an item of equipment that regulated their lives as rigidly as a factory clock: their bathroom scales. On race-days, what the dial told them would often determine how they spent the balance of the morning so as to be able to ride at the correct weight that afternoon. Since, unlike most Twiggy lookalikes, jockeys had to retain enough strength to control a skittish half-tonne animal galloping at high speed, many of them would eat a relatively hearty evening meal. This meant it was common practice for jockeys to wake two or three pounds heavier than their lightest comfortable riding weight. Hence, too, the first thing most of them would do on arriving at the racecourse was stand on the main scales. ‘The scales become everything to you,’ says Brough Scott, the jockey-turned-journalist. There is a reason why the place jockeys go to get ready is called the weighing-room.
These spare, flinty individuals had, in essence, four options for shedding excess pounds. They could exercise, they could starve, they could sweat or they could resort to pharmacological assistance. In practice, many jockeys would work a combination of these methods into their daily routines.
Josh Gifford, the talented and determined Sussex-based rider who was champion jump jockey four times in the 1960s, favoured exercise. ‘I did a lot of running and sweating,’ he told me. ‘We had to put a plastic sweatsuit on go running and running and running and come back and jump in a hot bath.’ Gifford only turned to so-called ‘pee-pills’ once – ‘I nearly fell off.’ Then again, he had a couple of important things going for him. First, as one of the many National Hunt jockeys who started their careers on the flat, he was relatively light to begin with. Second, he was working for a trainer – Captain Ryan Price – who, in this respect at least, was prepared to be accommodating. ‘I used to say, “I can do 10st 3lb” and the old man used to say, “If they can’t win with 10st 3lb they are not going to win with 10st,”’ Gifford recalled. ‘Nine times out of ten’ he wouldn’t mind putting up 3lb overweight.
Gifford’s great friend and rival Terry Biddlecombe, however, battled hard with weight throughout his career. Such a well-known figure did the blond West Countryman become in the Turkish baths which could still be found in many British cities at this time that when television’s This is Your Life! decided to feature him, host Eamonn Andrews conducted the obligatory ambush at the Savoy Baths in London’s Jermyn Street. According to Biddlecombe, who as the clock ticked down towards the 1966 Grand National was well set to retain the jockeys’ title he first won in 1964/65, another Turkish baths in Gloucester ‘almost became my second home’. After a cup of tea, he would get to the baths at 7am and promptly weigh himself. He reckoned to be able to lose up to 6 or 7lb in a couple of hours. ‘If I had not stuck rigidly to my routine at the baths I would never have been able to carry on riding,’ he said.
The Savoy Baths, equipped with cubicles with bunk beds inside, were even sometimes used by jockeys as a de facto guest house. ‘£1.50 – cheapest bed in London,’ recalls Richard Pitman, the jockey-turned-broadcaster. Pat Buckley, another jockey, once spent from Thursday evening until Saturday morning in the baths, losing 12lb in the process. He then went to Sandown Park in suburban Esher and got the better of the great Mill House in the big race on a horse carrying a minuscule 9st 7lb. ‘So severely had he been forced to fast,’ according to Reg Green, best known as a Grand National historian, that Buckley ‘could hardly stand to receive his trophy from the Queen Mother.’
These unorthodox sleeping arrangements did lead to the occasional tense moment between the bristlingly heterosexual jockeys and the Savoy’s many gay customers. Mostly, however, the two groups contrived to ignore each other.
Biddlecombe has commented on the ‘quite awful’ smell if you were late getting into the hot rooms in the morning. ‘So many people congregated down there during the night that the aroma of stale sweat went up your nose and into your mouth so that you could taste it,’ he added. Dave Dick, the rider who won the sensational 1956 Grand National, taking advantage of Devon Loch’s collapse, used to take matters into his own hands, scrubbing out the affected rooms with Dettol – no doubt getting rid of another unwanted pound or two in the process.
Biddlecombe also had his own personal sweatbox, heated by 150-watt bulbs with bamboo filaments, that had been sold to him by Dick for £25. He used to sit in the box in a deckchair wearing goggles, suede shoes and a sweatsuit. ‘I had an old carpet on the floor to absorb some of the sweat,’ he recalled. ‘I had a little bowl in the box that I used to step into at intervals, pull the leg of my sweatsuit away from my leg and let the water pour out. It was just like turning on a tap.’ Other jockeys even sweated in their sleep, retiring to bed clad in pyjamas and plastic Stephanie Bowman sweatsuits with a tracksuit as the top layer. When they woke in the middle of the night, perspiration would bucket off them.
Part of the attraction of the baths, as opposed to other weight-loss methods, was their social side. This was often accentuated by the presence of alcohol, which was in turn justified by the highly questionable notion that consumption of champagne in particular helped you sweat. Biddlecombe recounts how at 9.30am in the Gloucester baths he would order ‘the usual’. This consisted of a Worthington E beer and a port and Babycham. ‘I would drink exactly half the beer before going back into the baths. Then I would come out and finish it.’ He would sip the port and Babycham driving to the races in his car. If drinking did serve a genuinely useful function in all of this, it was probably to keep up morale during what could be a tedious and uncomfortable process, as well as providing an incentive to do another stint in the hot room. Jockey Barry Brogan acknowledges regularly attending the Warrender Turkish Baths in Edinburgh with champagne and a quart bottle of brandy. ‘The champagne helped me sweat and the brandy was for [a tiny masseur called] Jimmy. I would get him so utterly drunk that he couldn’t stand on his feet, and I would laugh myself silly just watching him swaying and swerving, then falling flat across the naked customers he was supposed to be massaging. Jimmy’s performances certainly made the baths a lot more tolerable for me.’
Brogan talks of regularly not eating ‘a crumb’ for up to five days, but Biddlecombe generally preferred to avoid fasting. ‘I tried special diets and low-calorie programmes but I used to get so depressed that I preferred the rigours of wasting,’ he remembered. There were times, though, when even the champion jockey had no choice but to starve himself. ‘If I was really going light, I’d have a steak and a bit of salad. I’d chew the steak and spit it out.’
The so-called ‘pee pills’ alluded to by Gifford were another weapon in jockeys’ weight-reduction armoury at the time. The diuretic of choice was called Lasix, better known in more recent years in racing circles as a means of preventing horses from bleeding through the nose during racing. The drug, whose generic name is furosemide,
prevents the body from absorbing too much salt and is used in the treatment of high blood pressure and abnormal fluid retention, or edema.
Unpredictability is and was the norm in jumps racing. So there would have been moments in many jockeys’ careers when these pills would have come in extremely useful. A last-minute call to ride at light weight at a course several hours’ drive away might be one of them. A jockey in this position would have no time to sweat, starve or run an excess pound or two away. But he could pop a pill, though it would mean more than the ideal number of stops en route.
A few jockeys resorted to pee pills much more regularly than this. Barry Brogan, a heavy drinker, was ‘gulping Lasix pills by the handful’ to try to keep his weight down. ‘They left me limp and weak,’ he remembered. ‘I had to follow up with bottles and bottles of potassium tablets to restore the salt balance.’ Richard Pitman’s first venture with Lasix forced him to make seven stops in 60 miles ‘some of them in a state of panic’. He lost 11lb, felt like ‘death warmed up,’ but rode two winners. Side-effects included being able to hear his own voice inside his head ‘as if it were a cave’ and cramp, an affliction unpleasant enough at any time, but, you would think, potentially disastrous if it struck on the approach to a steeplechase fence. ‘I tried to keep Lasix as a last resort,’ he concludes. ‘But, like all other medicines, in the end one pill would not even make my eyes water.’