Foinavon
Page 8
This began a spell of much-improved consistency for Foinavon. Starting with that runner-up spot, he finished in the first four in seven races out of eight over a six-month period, without ever finding the speed to register a victory.
On 7 October, he ran at Ascot for the first time, in a mixed National Hunt and Flat racing meeting of sufficient note to attract the television cameras once again. In a field studded with Grand National horses, BBC Grandstand viewers saw him perform honestly enough in the hands of another lightweight jockey Joe Guest, without ever getting close to the trio in front. These were led home by Bassnet, a promising seven-year-old steeplechaser, who had finished second in a race over the big Aintree fences that March.
It was at about this time that Mac Bennellick ran out of patience with his supposed Grand National horse and tried to offload his half-share to whoever would buy it. He could find no takers, though, for an animal that had gone 17 races since tasting victory. So he ended up simply giving his stake – and responsibility for the horse’s livery, training and racing fees – to his partner Cyril Watkins.
Two days after Christmas, following a grim autumn in Britain dominated by the Aberfan colliery disaster, Foinavon was back at Kempton Park, nestled among the reservoirs south of London airport, for the biggest race of his life so far. The King George VI Chase was, and remains, one of the highlights of the English racing calendar, a colourful alternative to football or department store sales for Londoners intent on a Boxing Day outing. In 1966, though a Christmas-night freeze forced the race’s postponement by 24 hours, a bumper attendance of 16,000 braved the traffic jams and a grey, misty day. Numbers were boosted by two factors in particular. The first was what trainer-cum-author Ivor Herbert calls the course’s flirtation with ‘a very restricted pay-TV experiment’ with ‘only a few homes in some London boroughs … connected to the system’. The second was the presence of Arkle. Everyone there expected to witness another serene exhibition by Tom Dreaper’s wonder horse, Foinavon’s former stable companion. What they got was high drama of an unimagined kind.
Approaching the second last, the race was still there for Arkle to win, but anxiety in the big crowd, which had sent him off at prohibitive odds of 2/9, was mounting. He had clouted one of the black birch fences on the far side of the course, was not moving with his habitual lissom power and now the rangy Woodland Venture, ridden by champion jockey Terry Biddlecombe, was hovering at his shoulder. Biddlecombe, still going easily, thought he had the race in his pocket. But Woodland Venture overjumped at the vital moment, leaving Arkle clear and his floored jockey ready to weep with frustration. Rather than capitalise on this reprieve, however, Arkle’s stride shortened and he clambered over the last hanging painfully to his left. By this time, the Irish horse’s many backers in the stands had noticed with disbelief that another challenger was gaining ground.
Dormant had not won a race for two-and-a-half years. He had finished a remote second to Arkle in the King George VI the previous year – a race marred by the fate of Dunkirk, a bold, front-running two-mile specialist, who crashed through the 15th fence, his lungs congested with blood, and landed dead on the other side, pinning jockey Bill Rees under his hot corpse with a broken right thigh. Subsequently, trainer Roy Pettitt claimed he had given Dormant sugar lumps coated with a tonic called Collovet, which contains caffeine, ahead of the race. This was one of a number of disclosures made by Pettitt and published by the Sun over the first week of its appearance in radically revamped format in 1969. Even with caffeine in his system though, Dormant could not – in 1965 – get close to Arkle. Jeff King, his jockey, not a man known for mincing words, has described him uncharitably as ‘an ignorant old shit of a horse’ who used to gallop through fences. Yet, in those final agonising seconds at Sunbury, this was the animal closing with every stride on the most dominant steeplechaser who ever drew breath. Dormant did have 21lb less on his back, but this was the sort of handicap that Anne, Duchess of Westminster’s horse was accustomed to overcoming with ease.
Inexorably, King and Dormant ground down Arkle’s lead and hit the front coming up to the line to win by a length. It was only then, as Foin-avon neared the winning-post with John Kempton in a distant but secure fourth place, that the full significance of what had happened became clear. Arkle was lame, very lame. Already, as Pat Taaffe, his disconsolate jockey, removed the weight-cloth from his back in the unsaddling enclosure, the realisation was starting to dawn that an era of horse-racing history had probably ended. An unnatural hush hovered over the scene.
This was at 2.15pm. By 3.45pm, X-rays had been taken and by next morning news of the injury was on the front page of The Times. Arkle had fractured his pedal (pronounced ‘pea-dal’) bone, the bottom-most bone in a horse’s leg and, as such, one of the most critical parts of a racehorse’s anatomy. In footballers’ parlance, you might say he had ‘done’ his metatarsal. Except that the potential consequences of the injury were much more severe: a broken pedal bone could be career- or even life-ending. In the event, Arkle was lucky. Blessed with a calm disposition, a patient owner and the best veterinary attention then available, he survived. But he never raced again.
This – the only occasion on which the two former stable companions, named after neighbouring Scottish peaks, lined up together for the same race – was not quite the last time their paths converged. On 4 February, Foinavon was back at Kempton Park for another three-mile chase, though this one was endowed with little more than a tenth of the prize money at stake on Boxing Day. Arkle, unfit to be moved, was still in residence in the racecourse stable-block, his injured foot encased in a 5lb plaster cast, his stable-wall adorned with a plywood hoarding covered with over a hundred ‘Get Well Soon’ cards. During the champion’s enforced stay in the London suburbs, he was attended by a rota of trusted lads, sent over from the Dreapers’ Greenogue base for about a week at a time. This February meeting was on Peter McLoughlin’s watch. Clifford Booth, a strapping 16-year-old stable lad who had recently started working at Compton, was with Foinavon. He remembers McLoughlin coming up and asking to see his old partner who had carried him to his first win over fences. Only the enterprising – and lucky – got on in the racing industry in those days. And Booth was a young man imbued with both those qualities. He proposed a ‘swap’ whereby, while McLoughlin was with Foinavon, he kept an eye on Arkle. ‘That’s what we did,’ he says. ‘I went in with Arkle.’
As it transpired, McLoughlin would have to wait less than six weeks before seeing Foinavon again. This time the circumstances were different: they were milling around on the start-line for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the most prestigious prize in British steeplechasing.
See Notes on Chapter 10
Chapter 11
500/1
Foinavon’s winless streak had now stretched to 19 races. Yet his schedule for the remaining months of the 1966/67 season included Britain’s two most prestigious steeplechases – the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Grand National.
It was part of the ethos of National Hunt racing at this time that bad horses could run in good races. Cyril Watkins was not the only owner of relatively modest means enthused to keep putting money into the sport by the realisation that he could take an active role in its grandest occasions for an outlay comparable to the price of a good car. Others bought a thrill of a different kind by, in effect, paying to actually ride in the Grand National, one of the world’s great sporting spectacles. Probably the best-known of these swashbuckling amateurs was the 18th Duke of Albuquerque. Seven times he rode in the race with frequently hair-raising results. It was by no means obligatory to have a Spanish nobleman’s treasure-chest to make it to the start-line, however.
At about the time Clifford Booth was enjoying his tête-à-tête with Arkle, Nobby Howard, a 36-year-old steeplechasing romantic with hard blue eyes, was selling off his livestock, a herd of two cattle and 22 steers. He had just lost possession of his farm – a smallholding where he had been a sub-tenant, a status which meant he would be due no co
mpensation. Having liquidated his assets in this way, Howard did what anyone in a similar situation might do: he started looking around for a Grand National horse on which to spend the money. ‘It looked like it would be the last Grand National,’ he says, as if this explains everything. ‘I always loved it from when I was a kid.’
On 24 February, two Grand National-qualified horses were to be sold at the Ballsbridge spring sale in Dublin. Howard flew over – ‘I had never been on a plane before’ – but the horses fetched more than his £1,000 budget, so it looked like a wasted journey. It was then that Providence, in the shape of Toby Balding, a gregarious and impeccably well-connected English trainer who happened to have been standing next to Howard, took a hand. ‘Do you want a horse to ride in the Grand National?’ the trainer asked. ‘I took an option on one this morning.’
They flew back to England together – Howard remembers people being excited because it was their first time on one of the new three-engined Tridents – and next day Balding asked him if he could collect the horse from an address in Sussex. It was a foul day with driving rain and trees being blown down by gusting winds. The only vehicle Howard had at his disposal was a borrowed horsebox with no roof. ‘I covered the horse with macs and a New Zealand rug and set off for Toby’s,’ Howard recalls. It was a filthy journey, undertaken largely in darkness, but eventually they arrived, with the help of a police officer asked by Balding to keep an eye out for them. Howard was able to buy the horse, a ten-year-old chestnut gelding called Scottish Final, for a more than reasonable £680. They managed one race together before Aintree, at Wye, finishing second. The scarlet and yellow colours Howard chose for his jockey’s silks were the same as those sported by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1944 film National Velvet, whose plot line focuses on the race and helped sow the seeds of the Grand National dream Howard finally fulfilled 23 years later.
One of the horses sold for more than Howard could afford at Balls-bridge – Ronald’s Boy – was bought on behalf of a London stockbroker called Paul Irby. His Grand National dream had taken root much later than the ex-tenant farmer’s. Irby started riding in the early 1950s, but visited Aintree with a horse-dealing friend for the first time only in 1966. The atmosphere in the run-down stands appealed to him at once. ‘I liked the smell of it really,’ he recalls. He said to his friend that they would return the following year – but this time he would be riding.
He was initially unsure how to finance the purchase of a suitable horse. Towards the end of 1966, however, he made a handsome profit on the stock market for a client, a New York carpet-dealer based on Third Avenue. Over dinner at the Connaught, topped up with ‘the best part of a bottle’ of Hine brandy, the client, Frank Robins, consented to buy a horse that Irby could ride in the race. Ronald’s Boy fitted the bill and was duly acquired for 1,500 guineas. The vendor was Gay Kinder-sley, Old Etonian grandson of the 1st Lord Kindersley, and a noted socialite. Kindersley, a former champion amateur jockey, had ridden the hard-pulling Ronald’s Boy in the 1965 Grand National, but come down at the third fence.
The fact that a former tenant farmer and a well-to-do stockbroker, let alone a seemingly indestructible Spanish nobleman, could line up together on equal terms before Liverpool’s teeming stands was a good illustration of how jumps racing – and the Grand National in particular – playfully subverted the class system. This was then being challenged far more brazenly by the new breed of decadent millionaire pop star that television and increased post-war prosperity had combined to propagate. But steeplechasing had for years offered intoxicating glimpses of a world where the established social order no longer applied.
The Masters of the Universe out there among Aintree’s dark, forbidding fences were skilled, professional horsemen like Josh Gifford, a Huntingdonshire farm boy who had left school aged ten. The likes of Gifford cheerfully accommodated accomplished gentleman amateur jockeys like John Lawrence, the noted journalist. But there was no doubting who was in charge. Beginners and no-hopers were tolerated, provided they didn’t get ideas above their station and stayed out of the way. The equation was complicated because young apprentices aspiring to carve out careers as jockeys would often start off as amateur riders. This could spark a degree of friction with the old pros, whose rides they were, in some cases, taking and whom the best apprentices were destined eventually to supplant.
This is not to pretend there was any shortage of sports in 1960s’ Britain whose most accomplished performers were working-class heroes. But steeplechasing was unusual in that toffs and farm-boys were out there, shoulder to shoulder, battling first for survival then against each other, jammed into the same cramped weighing-rooms and even exchanging occasional jokes.
Of course, this scrambling of social stations lasted only as long as the race itself. Once they had passed the winning-post, jockeys were back under their trainers’ thumbs, being held accountable for their every action in the race by men who, in those days, very often held military rank and were intolerant of insubordination. The trainers, in turn, were answerable to their horses’ owners, many of whom, starting with the Queen Mother, inhabited society’s uppermost echelons and traditionally governed the sport. The command structure of the racing industry, in other words, was establishment through and through. The Grand National, though, could be seen as a rollicking nine-and-a-half-minute parody of the classless society.
While both Howard and Irby made it to the Aintree start-line in 1967, John Kempton didn’t. He was still pursuing his riding devotedly enough to have piloted Foinavon to fourth place at Lingfield on 20 January – the day before he married Patricia. He had by now recognised, however, that the horse had little prospect of running well at Liverpool unless he carried the weight actually allotted to him by the handicapper. This would be 10 stone – simply too light for the tall trainer no matter how diligent or imaginative he was with his wasting methods. This meant though that he and Watkins would need to find and retain a lightweight jockey for the Grand National. This explains why, in the weeks leading up to the big race, the gelding was asked to carry a succession of new partners.
At Kempton Park on 4 February, his jockey was Ron Atkins, a Londoner whose father had a shoe-shop opposite Wembley Stadium. Atkins was several inches shorter than Kempton, but had powerful shoulders befitting the flyweight boxer he nearly became. Like Foinavon’s trainer, he was a man who liked to think things through for himself. His strong inclination was to speak his mind. With his long brown hair, he probably came as close to embracing the ‘groovy’ new Carnaby Street chic as any professional jockey in that period. He also showed a precocious appreciation of the power of branding, riding in a skullcap emblazoned with his initials, though he says this was partly to stop his helmet being purloined. This all resulted in him acquiring a reputation as a non-conformist who, as safety officer for the Jockeys’ Association, would play a big part in years to come in driving up the sport’s woeful safety standards. As the crocuses poked through in 1967, however, Atkins was an up-and-coming rider who had yet to try his hand at a Grand National.
In a competitive field, he conjured one of Foinavon’s best performances to date in England, though he still feels he could have won. Since the King George VI Chase on Boxing Day, Kempton had been using blinkers on the horse to restrict his peripheral vision and ‘keep his concentration on the jumping’. The new jockey was still expected to operate with a bit-less bridle, however. Turning for home, Foinavon was up with the leaders, but starting to tire. ‘He was tending to duck the issue a little bit, hiding behind the other horses,’ Atkins recalls. ‘I was trying to get him out. If I could get him away from the backsides of the horses in front of me, I was pretty sure that I would get up.’ Atkins, who served his apprenticeship on the flat under the tutelage of top jockeys such as Joe Mercer and Scobie Breasley, was accustomed, however, to the more reliable control over his mount that an orthodox metal bit, pressing against the horse’s sensitive mouth, can provide. ‘Scobie used to say to me, “Treat your reins like cotton; if you p
ull too hard they’ll break and then you have no control.” Joe used to say it was like fly-fishing for trout. “You can catch a 10lb trout on a 3lb line. How? Because you play with it. When you’ve got a horse with a bit-less bridle on, it takes you two or three rides to sort him out.”’
Atkins did manoeuvre the horse into position to mount a challenge, but he was up against the experienced Josh Gifford on a horse called Loyal Fort, the 6/4 favourite. He pushed them all the way, but passed the winning-post a length in arrears. An objection, lodged against the winner for crossing, was overruled. ‘I got off the horse and said, “With a rubber bit I’m pretty sure he would have won because I would have had a bit more control”,’ Atkins says. ‘That upset the owner; I know it did.’ Given the length of time Watkins had now been waiting for his horse to win, his frustration was perhaps understandable.
Atkins does not remember any mention of Aintree being made on that occasion. Though when he was asked to ride Foinavon again a month later at Newbury, the horse’s local course, the subject was very much a live issue. ‘I thought, “Is he the ride for me? Hmmm, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it”,’ he says.
It was the norm at this time for jockeys to receive an additional fee for riding in the Grand National. A payment of £200 – the amount Atkins got for riding a horse called Some Slipper to 13th place in the race the following year – was commonplace. If successful, the rider stood to make a lot more: Bobby Beasley bought a small farm with the £2,000 ‘present’ he received in 1961 after winning the race on Nicolaus Silver, the last grey victor until Neptune Collonges in 2012. This was unwelcome news for Cyril Watkins who had not exactly been inundated with prize money during his brief tenure as a racehorse owner, at least not since his winning start with McCrimmon. Since erstwhile partner Mac Bennellick had got cold feet in the autumn, moreover, Watkins had been left to pay the bills for stabling and training their horses alone. He had no intention whatsoever of shelling out a sum that was more than the value of many small races to some jockey who, in his view, should be grateful for the ride.