by David Owen
Laxatives were also very much part of the weighing-room scene in 1966, whether swallowed as ‘physic pills’ or in chocolate form, sometimes as a chocolate sandwich. According to Pitman, both were taken a day ahead of the race, necessitated many nocturnal toilet visits and were ‘unpleasant but effective’.
Still more drastic remedies were available for occasions when the target weight was abnormally low, or the pounds proved impossible to shift. Brogan’s ‘favourite trick’ was to weigh out without the pad that rests under the saddle. In June 1965, meanwhile, Biddlecombe slimmed down to a svelte 9st 12lb after enduring an ‘irrigation’ – a process involving a funnel, a nurse with a cigarette in her mouth and a quantity of soapy water. ‘I said, “It’s going to come out of my throat in a minute”,’ Biddlecombe recalls. ‘That was hard, very hard.’ In spite of his ordeal, he could only finish sixth.
Cursed with a sweet tooth, John Kempton had taken his fair share of tablets and pounded the Berkshire lanes extensively over the years, donning his plastic suit, getting dropped off a dozen miles from the family bungalow and running back. It was typical of his maverick approach to racing though that, with the Grand National approaching, he alighted upon a novel way of attempting to take the drudgery out of wasting.
Kempton had recently taken up with his future wife, Patricia, and her mother had turned to a hypnotist to try to wean her off smoking. He now decided to ask the hypnotist, a Gloucester-based practitioner called Henry Blythe, if he could help him to control his weight. Blythe duly set the jockey/trainer a target of shedding 10lb before the big race at Aintree on 26 March. This would have enabled him to clamber aboard Foinavon at 10st 2lb, around the weight he regularly attained in the summer. Unfortunately, Blythe had a business trip planned and could manage only two consultations before departing for Scotland. In his absence, he left his client a record of his voice, with instructions to play it whenever his craving for sweets came back, while concentrating on his picture. ‘It may not work,’ a sceptical Kempton told a newspaper reporter at the time. ‘I don’t know if I am a good subject for this sort of thing, but I’m willing to give it a try.’
The treatment may have had some effect, with Kempton riding as light as 10st 7lb that spring. But Foinavon didn’t make it to Liverpool. With his preparations disrupted by wet weather and performances far from breathtaking when he did run, the horse was eventually withdrawn from another huge National field. In the event, 47 runners lined up and hared away towards the Melling Road. The race was won by a striking chestnut outsider called Anglo, with the unfortunate Freddie again second. The going was so soft it was described to me by the winning jockey Tim Norman as ‘up to your eyebrows’.
The gold trophy was duly presented to Stuart Levy, the winning owner, whose company, Anglo-Amalgamated, produced the Carry On films, and whose business partner, Nat Cohen, had won the 1962 National with Kilmore. The race came less than a week after the theft of football’s World Cup, making security of what might have been the last Grand National trophy a concern as the big day approached. The Liverpool Daily Post reported that a guard from a national security firm and 12 ‘hand-picked heavyweight shop assistants’ were making sure that it didn’t disappear. One member of staff at the city centre jeweller’s where it was on display was said to be a weightlifter and another a ju-jitsu expert.
See Notes on Chapter 9
Chapter 10
1966 And All That
A striking black-and-white photograph captures the brooding atmosphere that hung over Liverpool that frigid, grey spring meeting. It is taken at The Chair, the biggest fence on the Grand National course. But it could be the scene after a mortar has landed. Three figures in white riding breeches catch the eye. Two are slumped, dazed, on the ground among dislodged spruce boughs. The other is balanced hopelessly on one leg while clinging with his left hand to one rein of the black horse he has just toppled from – and which he now has his back to. Industrial buildings populate the background. Though, in reality, 50,000 people and 46 more horses are not far out of camera-shot, these might be the last four creatures on earth.
A second or two earlier, as Jeremy Speid-Soote, the man on one leg, told me, his mount – a 100/1 outsider called Black Spot – had landed on top of the fence which, at 5ft 2in high and 3ft 9in wide, and guarded on the take-off side by a 6-foot wide open ditch, was as forbidding an obstacle as you could encounter on an English racecourse. This had happened, he said, because, on approaching the fence, Black Spot had seen another horse stuck in the ditch and had consequently taken off from too far away. This marooned animal was Game Purston, the mount of Paddy Cowley, the jockey sprawled in the foreground of the photograph. Game Purston had breasted the fence, but it had stopped him dead and he crumpled back into the ditch, leaving Cowley to soar over the barrier without him and crash to earth. Another jockey, Ken White – who had ridden Game Purston to victory in a big race at Haydock the previous year, but was out of action recovering from a fractured skull – had brought his wife of four days to Liverpool to round off a short Lake District honeymoon. By chance, they had decided to watch the race from a vantage-point beside the fence. It was White who ended up catching the trapped horse and leading him out of the side of the ditch in his jacket and tie.
Just after the camera-shutter clicked, more drama: Speid-Soote heard ‘this clatter and this crash, and I saw this poor bloody horse … It had got the ring of its bit stuck over one of these bloody great stakes that stick up in the middle of the fence.’ This was Fujino-O, the mount of top rider Jeff King, and the first Japanese horse to run in the Grand National, his bridle festooned with good-luck charms. ‘He was left hanging there,’ King remembers. ‘His feet didn’t even touch the ground because it was such a deep ditch in those days. I leaned up his neck and pulled the ring off and he fell down into the ditch.’ He too was eventually led out and ran another race at Folkestone just 11 days later.
Aintree’s fate at that time was hanging in the balance every bit as much as Fujino-O’s in those moments before King freed him. There was a sense about the place that something was about to happen. But what? One experienced local reporter described the atmosphere throughout the three-day meeting as ‘that of a spy story’, with knots of newsmen huddled in hopeful expectation at strategic points. The fact that these were also the final days of a general election campaign called early by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in a bid to strengthen his hold on power might have added to the intrigue. Not even the presence of Paul McCartney, awarded the MBE with his fellow Beatles by Wilson the previous summer, could significantly change the mood. McCartney did, though, have cause to twist and shout before the afternoon was over: his father’s horse Drake’s Drum won the race before the National in a tight finish.
Four days after the crowds had squelched their way home, and on the eve of polling day, something did happen: the Law Lords ruled in favour of Mirabel Topham. ‘Aintree Can Be Sold For Housing’, announced the Liverpool Echo. ‘Earl of Sefton faces £30,000 bill for costs.’
If you had walked past that headline on a news-vendor’s stand, you would probably have assumed that the game was up; that Aintree had staged its last Grand National and that, if the 1967 race was held at all, it would be at Ascot or Doncaster. In fact, that particular caravan had moved on. Over the 21 months that Liverpool racecourse’s future had been officially in question, it had become clear to those with some insight into the matter that the planning authorities almost certainly would not allow housing to be built there. Now the talk was of the need to preserve Aintree as a public space and, in particular, of a scheme for a £4 million sports centre to provide local people with a year-round amenity without condemning the race. Sports minister Denis Howell, campaigning in Birmingham, reacted to the judgement by proclaiming that ‘the future of Aintree is more a planning matter than a legal question’ and described plans submitted to him as ‘extremely imaginative and realistic’. Even Mrs Topham referred to the Law Lords’ decision, much in the manner of a cricket captain t
hwarted by stout resistance from the opposition’s tail-end charlies, only as ‘a moral victory’. That did not prevent a fellow director from stating, at an April Fools’ day meeting of the Tophams board, held as the sweeping extent of Mr Wilson’s election victory was becoming clear, that ‘thanks and congratulations should go to Mrs Topham for the hard work she had put in on the legal matter which had resulted in our triumph.’ The tone of this reminds me irresistibly of the portrayal of another Mrs T and her Cabinet in the Spitting Image satirical puppet show of the 1980s and 1990s.
There was just one small problem: the lack of £4 million – a detail that ensured the future of the racecourse remained as much a matter for conjecture after the Law Lords’ pronouncement as it was before.
By late May, it was confirmed that planning permission for the original scheme had indeed been refused. Relations between Mrs Topham and Leslie Marler had in any case been subjected to strain by a letter to The Times in which the Capital and Counties boss appeared to be trying to position the company for a role in whatever new scheme took shape. ‘I think it quite possible that a first-class racecourse could be restored and the area generally developed, both as a centre of recreation and for housing and its various ancillary usages,’ Marler wrote. ‘I believe that private enterprise is much more likely to give a lead in bringing this about than any amount of government talk.’ The letter was branded ‘extraordinary’ by Mrs Topham and her fellow directors, meeting at Paddock Lodge on May Day afternoon (a Sunday). Mrs Topham ‘had expressed disapproval when he had read it to her over the telephone before sending it to the paper,’ the minutes expostulate. What was more, ‘his press conference had been given without reference to us or our lawyers and was in fact insulting to the racecourse.’
This left Mrs Topham to negotiate with Lancashire County Council over the sale of the property, a task she set about with customary gusto in an attempt to compensate for what had now been exposed as a decidedly weak hand. By late July, she had sent them a new proposition, while erecting posters inscribed with huge question-marks outside Aintree in a futile attempt to chivvy councillors along by keeping the impasse in the public eye. By October, she had come up with a new ruse: advertising the course for sale the following spring in ‘an American paper’. She had even composed the sales pitch: ‘Grand National course for sale with copyright of the world famous Grand National Steeplechase – £2,000,000.’ For all this, the long-term future of Aintree remained as much of an enigma as ever.
One important question had been resolved over the summer, however: Mrs Topham had consented to put on the race once again in 1967. She had even agreed to have the stands repainted – and received a ‘very, very reasonable estimate’. A particularly late date – 8 April – had been selected, and the Tophams chairman expressed the hope that this would ‘help to give us better weather and so encourage more spectators to come along’. The rain and cold that affected the 1966 race had hit takings, which were down around £10,000 from the successful 1965 meeting. Catering alone had produced a £1,000 loss. While the Grand National was again saved, it was considered too late to organise the usual autumn and Christmas meetings at Aintree in another symptom of decline.
September brought fresh disappointment in the shape of a letter from the prime minister’s office declining Mrs Topham’s invitation to attend the Grand National ‘owing to a prior engagement’. In the event, Wilson, a Liverpool MP, spent the eve of the race visiting a frozen-food factory in nearby Kirkby. One can imagine the reaction of Aintree’s grande dame to this snub by an upstart politician who could find time to stare at fish-fingers, but not attend the national institution over which she presided. Then again, Liverpool’s decaying racecourse scarcely squared with the image Wilson was cultivating as a resourceful young leader, in tune with youth culture and alive to the excitement of new technology and its transformational potential for stuffy old Britain.
After missing that 1966 Grand National, Foinavon plodded unspectacularly through the last two months of the season, staying on his feet in a succession of middling races, but rarely threatening the leaders. However, he was starting once again to make up ground on rivals in the final furlongs of his races, as his fitness-oriented training regime took effect. This was most notably the case when he ran into third place – his best result in England for three and a half years – in a three-mile steeplechase at the picturesque Northamptonshire course of Towcester, noted, then as now, for its stiff uphill finishing stretch. He also showed every sign of appreciating Kempton’s employment with him of the same sort of bit-less bridle that had rejuvenated Seas End. But there was nothing as yet to suggest that his pools concessionaire owners would recoup their investment in him – no matter how many races he ran in.
That freezing spring did bring one brief, but significant, encounter. On 16 April, Foinavon was due to return to Cheltenham to run in the Sunday Express Handicap Chase, which, at four miles, was a longdistance contest only about half a mile shorter than the Grand National itself. The meeting was due to be televised by the BBC’s Grandstand programme – a detail which would have appealed to Cyril Watkins and Mac Bennellick, his owners, who were keen for their horse to run in big races, even if he stood little chance of winning. The weather, though, was atrocious. Two days earlier, the worst spring blizzard for 16 years had swept across 33 counties in southern Britain, cutting off villages and forcing snowploughs to be taken out of storage. London experienced its coldest April day since 1911: 20 people were stranded on Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, and British featherweight champion Howard Winstone slipped over in Merthyr Tydfil and broke a small bone in his leg. Most importantly from Foinavon’s point of view, the first of what was scheduled to be two days of quality racing at Cheltenham was abandoned. In the event, the elements eased up just enough for the second day to go ahead, with an extended card of ten races, prompting a cavalcade of horseboxes to slither their way towards Prestbury Park, on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment.
From his base outside Banbury, John Buckingham had an easier journey than some. Even so, it was a hard way to earn one solitary riding fee. Especially as the horse was an outsider he had never ridden before. Buckingham was unusual among jockeys in that he had not been near a horse, much less sat on one, until attaining the ripe old age of 15, when he followed his mother to work for Edward Courage, a member of the brewing family, on his extensive Edgcote estate. That was in 1955. Now, after a decade of schooling and riding Courage’s renowned string of largely home-bred racehorses, he was an able jockey who, while always popular, lacked the pushiness required to snare rides and force his way to the very top of his unforgiving profession. More importantly for John Kempton, Buckingham was a lightweight, who, unlike him, could easily make the sub-ten-stone riding weight Foinavon had been allotted that day.
It was not a fairy-tale start. After jumping off with the leaders, Foin-avon soon dropped back and came home sixth of the seven runners, just behind Vulcano, the old adversary who had won the Grand National qualifier at Baldoyle when Foinavon blotted his copybook so badly. Even so, Buckingham remembers that he gave him a good ride in his bit-less bridle and that the owners seemed pleased. The race was won by a horse called Jim’s Tavern, who had battled to fifth place in the Grand National three weeks before.
The big race of the day, the Daily Express Triumph Hurdle, worth more than £3,500, was won, appropriately enough, by Black Ice ridden by Bobby Beasley. In wintry conditions such as those prevailing that afternoon, the Irish jockey’s riding equipment would certainly have included his ‘angora finger’. This was a device, knitted for him by his wife Shirley, to combat a complaint brought on by frigid weather. This, he used to find, cut through the thin material of his racing breeches and left him ‘suffering from freezing cold in a most embarrassing place.’
Fifteen weeks later, on a typical English summer’s day of sunshine and showers, 92 racehorses, their handlers and jockeys assembled in the quiet Devon market town of Newton Abbot for perhaps the most negle
cted season-opening fixture in the history of sport. The lack of interest in the first meeting of the new National Hunt racing season in England was attributable partly to the shortage of quality on display. With the seven races on the card offering aggregate prize money of less than £2,000 and the going classified as ‘firm’, this was not an occasion for the big equine stars of steeplechasing. But the same could have been said of the sport’s traditional West Country curtain-raiser in any other year. What made 1966 different was the meeting’s coincidence with an unseasonal football match 200 miles away in north London.
By the time the ten runners in the last race of the day, the Lustleigh Handicap Chase, had cantered to the start, Geoff Hurst had blasted home the sixth and final goal of the World Cup final, inspiring one of the most famous commentating one-liners in history, and the England football team were world champions. Foinavon proceeded to run as if determined not to upstage Bobby Moore as he climbed the Wembley steps to collect the Jules Rimet trophy. Ridden by Kempton, he was at one point labouring in last place, though he did rally characteristically towards the end to cross the line a distant sixth.
The jumps-racing schedule invariably started with a clutch of West Country fixtures. It was the Kemptons’ practice to travel down with a string of horses and base themselves there for this period, lodging in Newton Abbot at a popular stopping-off point for jockeys called the Rendezvous Café.
A mere four days after his seasonal debut – and barely 48 hours after Mrs Topham had confirmed that the 1967 Grand National was on – Foinavon was in action again, in another three-mile chase, this time in an evening meeting at nearby Devon & Exeter. He performed much better, leading for much of the race, before the odds-on favourite got on terms at the second-last and ran on to win by one-and-a-half lengths. This winner, steered home by the former champion jockey Josh Gifford, was Honey End.