Foinavon
Page 9
According to Atkins, the crunch came after the Newbury race. ‘I just said, “OK – what’s the deal? All jockeys get extra for riding in the National.” Watkins said, “I’m not giving you any extra, you should be lucky to ride in the National.” I thought, “On your bike.” So I had a falling-out with them. I said, “If there’s nothing up front, I’m out of here.”’
Watkins’s mood would not have been improved by his horse’s lacklustre performance in a race, staged in the presence of the Queen Mother, the day before the League Cup final was played for the first time at Atkins’s dad’s local stadium. Up against some good younger horses, Foinavon quickly lost touch and trailed in a remote sixth.
Nine days before this, at Ascot, the horse had been teamed with another new jockey, Bruce Gregory, who was even lighter than Atkins and had once been attached to the mighty Fairlawne operation in Kent, presided over by Major Peter Cazalet. The Queen Mother and Hollywood star Gregory Peck both kept horses in training at Fair-lawne. The Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch, deprived of the 1956 Grand National when mysteriously spreadeagling within yards of the winning-post, was trained by Cazalet. Gregory’s best day in racing had come almost exactly three years before, on 29 February 1964, when he partnered a horse called Out and About to victory in a big race at Newbury, the Mandarin Chase. A lively character, he was also known for his car, a souped-up Volkswagen which, according to fellow jockey Terry Biddlecombe, ‘had a Porsche engine in it’.
Given that jump jockeys at that time thought nothing of clocking up 50,000 miles a year on wintry roads, this was a real asset. He later moved to France and, eventually, Madagascar, where he set up a game fishing business and died, aged 68, in 2013.
The rain had been sluicing down on Ascot – an inch and a quarter in five days. Racing was cleared, nonetheless, to go ahead with one fence omitted. Foinavon appeared to relish the very soft conditions and was disputing the lead with a horse called Cornucopia when he came down at the 11th fence in a fall that left his new partner nursing a dislocated shoulder. ‘Nothing was going better,’ observed Sporting Life’s man on the spot. When stable lad Clifford Booth went down to catch the horse, he came across a man who had been scouring the ground for Foinavon’s bit. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere,’ the man said apologetically. Booth explained that the horse ran without one.
Three weeks later, Cheltenham was bathed in sunshine for the first Gold Cup without Arkle since 1963. His absence, along with that of other equine stars, was keenly felt. ‘Cheltenham without Arkle, Flying-bolt and Salmon Spray,’ bemoaned The Times’s racing correspondent, ‘is rather like England at Wembley without Charlton and Moore or the West Indies without Sobers.’ A competitive field of eight horses had been assembled nonetheless. This consisted of seven of the best steeplechasers around (excluding Tom Dreaper’s two absent superstars) plus Foinavon. His seven rivals had won 12 races between them already that season; his winless streak was now up to 23. In boxing terms, it was like putting a punch-drunk veteran in the ring with Henry Cooper, a verdict reflected in a starting price of no less than 500/1.
Foinavon would not even have a weight advantage to help bridge the class chasm. Each of the entrants would carry 12 stone, a generous enough imposition to enable John Kempton to ride the horse, in his usual bit-less bridle, without resorting to sweatsuits, pee-pills or even hypnotism.
Milling around at the start as they waited for one runner – the grey, Stalbridge Colonist – to be reshod, Kempton chatted amiably with Peter McLoughlin, the Irish jockey Foinavon had carried to his first victory over fences at Punchestown nearly three years before. It was a token of the quality of Dreaper’s string that even with his best two horses sidelined, McLoughlin’s mount, Fort Leney, was favourite to win the race. Dormant, the crippled Arkle’s conqueror at Kempton Park, was also there. So was the broad-backed Mill House, winner of the last Gold Cup before Arkle’s hat-trick, pacing the turf like a bull. To Mill House’s left circled the white-fronted What a Myth, a racehorse with great stamina but questionable jumping skills, ridden by Paul Kelleway, one of the characters of the weighing-room, wearing a distinctive spotted cap. Kelleway once gave fellow jockey Bobby Beasley the shock of his life by snaking his hand through between Beasley’s backside and saddle as they approached the second hurdle at Warwick and catching hold of his crotch. ‘How are you going, matey?’ Kelleway grinned. He did let go before they jumped, however. Woodland Venture, the youngest horse in the race, was sweating up, his right shoulder traced with white foam as he walked around briskly. His jockey Terry Biddlecombe might have been forgiven for getting himself into a similar lather given the week he had had thus far. Two days earlier, a brand-new stirrup-leather had broken precipitating one fall and he had come unstuck again on the eve of Gold Cup day, with his mount, Glenn, kicking him hard above one knee, ‘ripping my breeches and almost castrating me’. That afternoon, before racing began, he had had a painkilling injection. Even then, he had managed to get unshipped once more just 40 minutes before the Gold Cup.
They were running late, so no sooner had Stalbridge Colonist joined his rivals than a roll call of jockeys’ last names was barked out and the bowler-hatted starter urged them to, ‘Come on jockeys, make a line!’ With that, at 12 minutes past four, the flag shot up and the 42nd Cheltenham Gold Cup was under way. And who should burst into the lead over the first of 22 testing fences, but Foinavon, one of the biggest outsiders in the race’s history.
Running downhill around the first left-handed bend away from the crowd, the Berkshire-based no-hoper surged ten lengths clear in his distinctive pale hood. John Kempton, looking like a jockey sculpted by Giacometti so elongated were his limbs, urged him on sporting Cyril Watkins’s unmistakable racing colours: light green and light blue with cross-belts and cap of Mackintosh tartan. Just as Kempton was shaped differently from the other jockeys, so the proportions of Foinavon’s body stood out: not even Mill House had a more powerful shoulder, but his haunches seemed underdeveloped compared with the likes of Woodland Venture and the small but powerful Stalbridge Colonist. He was also jumping with inordinate care, which while no bad policy at Cheltenham, meant that after the water, his rivals were taking a couple of lengths out of his lead with every fence. A poor jump at the 11th, when he hung to his right, enabled Mill House and Woodland Venture to overhaul him. While he regained momentum on the flat, he promptly lost it again going over the water-jump for the second time and was never in touch with the leaders after that.
Mill House, the 1963 winner, whose surge of power as a youngster was once memorably described by Pat Taaffe as ‘oceanic’, was looking well capable of book-ending the Arkle years until, out in the country, he succumbed, almost in slow motion, to his first fall since he was a novice. This left the long-striding Woodland Venture in the lead with five to jump. It was never easy and he was pushed every yard of the way by a typically frenzied finishing burst by Stan Mellor aboard Stalbridge Colonist, but an overjoyed Biddlecombe, bad leg and all, held on to win. The fast-finishing What a Myth was third.
In a surreal moment as he left the unsaddling enclosure, Biddlecombe was confronted by an over-excited and triumphant doctor waving around the hypodermic needle that had allowed him a pain-free ride.
Cheltenham was a reassuringly unostentatious place in those days. Soon after they flashed past the winning-post, the numbers of the first four finishers in the ‘fourth race’ were displayed on a hoisted result-board that a village cricket club would not have been overly proud of. Harry Collins, the victorious owner who had taken an old cow to market so as to be able to wager an extra £100 on his horse, was presented with the trophy by Lady Willoughby de Broke from a glorified kitchen table.
John Kempton, meanwhile, was left to make his way back across the Cotswolds knowing that he only had three weeks left to find a jockey for the Grand National.
See Notes on Chapter 11
Chapter 12
A Jockey to Ride in the National
Easter Monday is traditiona
lly one of the busiest days in the British horse-racing calendar – and 1967 was no exception. A dozen meetings were scheduled from Carlisle to Chepstow, Wetherby to Wincanton. At Huntingdon seven races, none worth more than £700 to the winner, were to be contested by around 60 horses. One of these was Foinavon who, rather than travel to Sussex for a race at Plumpton where he was also entered, was driven up the A1 to Oliver Cromwell’s birthplace to see how he got on with yet another new jockey.
Dave Patrick had previously lived in Compton and so already knew John Kempton. He remembers Foinavon running a ‘half-tidy race’ to finish fourth in the Fitzwilliam Chase, the fourth contest of the day. The race has also lodged in the memory of stable lad Clifford Booth because of an accident that befell another runner who crashed through the wooden rails, sustaining a grisly shoulder wound. ‘The amount of blood that was running down … That has always stuck in my mind,’ Booth says. The unfortunate animal was patched up, nonetheless, by a course vet and driven off in a trailer.
Patrick says that he was offered the Grand National ride on Foinavon after this race, but politely turned it down on the grounds that he had already got a ride. This was on a horse called Bob-a-Job, who, coincidentally, had just come fourth at Plumpton in the race Foinavon would have run in if he had not gone to Huntingdon. Unbeknown to Patrick, he would shortly lose the Grand National ride he thought he had and would never get another chance to take part in the Aintree showpiece. ‘It’s just one of those things,’ he concludes, scoring top marks for stoicism.
The start of the Grand National meeting was now just ten days away and, while Kempton still hadn’t found his jockey, Mirabel Topham was about to be confronted with some unexpected last-ditch problems of her own. On Easter Monday night, vandals struck at Aintree. The damage was concentrated at the far end of the course, site of the main signature fences. The Daily Mirror published a litany of the havoc wreaked. The Canal Turn fence, located right on a corner and hence enabling the bold to gain ground by jumping diagonally across it or seemingly changing direction in mid-air, had been destroyed and would have to be completely rebuilt. The turnstile doors at Becher’s Brook, the most famous fence of all, had been broken open. A wooden bar counter at the Canal Turn stand, adjacent to that part of the course, had been knocked over and broken. Washbasins and toilets had been smashed with bricks. Hurdles had been uprooted and thrown across the racecourse. Sections of posts, railings and link fencing had been pulled out. A pavilion on the Aintree property had been burnt down.
Mrs Topham, already contemplating, no doubt, the unbidden bill that would eventually run well into four figures, proclaimed the situation ‘a tragedy’. The Aintree staff, obliged because of the meeting’s unusually late timing to work through the Easter holiday to get ready for it, were understandably ‘nearly in tears’. Police officers with dogs were detailed to patrol the course round-the-clock in the run-up to the National. ‘We have talked to many boys in the area,’ a police spokesman said sternly later in the week, ‘but so far no arrests have been made.’
Foinavon was not exactly being wrapped in cotton wool ahead of the big race. On 1 April – just five days after his Huntingdon outing and exactly a week before the National – he was scheduled to run yet again, in the aptly named April Fools Handicap Chase. Bruce Gregory, the jockey who had ridden Foinavon for the first time at Ascot in February, had recovered from his dislocated shoulder and it was to him that Kempton now turned in his pursuit of a rider for both Leicester and Liverpool.
There are two explanations as to why Gregory eventually missed out on that date at Aintree, even though he was identified more than once in the press as Foinavon’s expected partner. Money is usually the reason given. The jockey is said, like Ron Atkins before him, to have asked for a special one-off Grand National payment. There is nothing to indicate that Cyril Watkins – who was receiving treatment at the Royal Berkshire Hospital at this time – would have looked any more favourably on Gregory’s demands than those of Atkins. However, Colin Hemsley, the head lad at Foinavon’s stable, traces the decision, at least in part, to a different cause. This was a freak mishap that befell the partnership in that April Fools Day race at Leicester.
Entering the final stages, a storming finish was in prospect, with the top-weight Loyal Fort, who had edged out Foinavon two months before, battling to keep the lead, but being overhauled by Praepostor, a horse five years his junior carrying a lot less weight. Foinavon was on their heels and looking enviably placed with four fences to go when, out of the blue, one of Gregory’s stirrup-leathers snapped. With no support for his foot and the horse wearing his habitual bit-less bridle, this left the jockey high and dry, like a driver whose car loses power, steering and brakes all at the same time. They quickly dropped out of contention and trailed in sixth, nearly 30 lengths behind the winner. Sporting Life reporter Len Thomas was appreciative, nonetheless, of Gregory’s efforts. The jockey, he wrote, ‘must be congratulated on completing the course on Foinavon, who would surely have gone close but for the mishap’. This was not though, it seems, a view universally shared. According to Hemsley, Jack Kempton, the young trainer’s father, felt aggrieved that his jockey had not kept going well enough to finish in the top three and, hence, earn some prize money. It was this, the head lad believes – perhaps allied to whatever payment demands Gregory had made – that triggered a change of heart regarding Aintree. There was now only a week to go and Foinavon was once again without a rider for the severest test in British steeplechasing.
It was some 90 hours after seeing Praepostor home to his comfortable victory in what was his 801st ride as a jockey that John Buckingham picked up the phone. It was ten o’clock on a cloudy Northamptonshire morning and the young horseman was readying himself to attend his uncle’s funeral. The telephone had rung as he was knotting his black tie. The caller was John Kempton and, given the circumstances, he got straight to the point. Would Buckingham be willing to ride Foinavon in the Grand National in three days’ time? Would he ever! At 26, he had still not ridden in the race and, in his unassuming way, had ‘more or less resigned myself to the fact that I never would’. He had once tackled the big Aintree fences in bitter cold the previous year, two days before Anglo’s National victory, but had failed to complete the course. He did also know Foinavon, having ridden him around Cheltenham’s testing circuit about three weeks after that Liverpool disappointment.
Whether it was that solid performance in Gloucestershire or his winning ride at Leicester that prompted Kempton to pick up the phone to Buckingham that morning is impossible to say. His options were, of course, narrowing by the minute, with upwards of 40 jockeys already booked for the Aintree race and many others either injured or supremely unlikely to agree to Cyril Watkins’s terms for embarking on the ride. In any case, the trainer invited him down to Taunton the next day to talk about Liverpool and ride a horse called Sailaway Sailor against 20 rival hurdlers on the leafy Somerset course.
As Buckingham recalls, Kempton told him that Atkins and Gregory had turned down the ride over money and explained that the owner ‘did not want to pay an extra £200 or so just to see the horse pulled up after only a few fences’. Later, he says, Watkins told him that he would pay ‘according to how the horse ran’. This time, however, they had come to the right man – a jockey who so coveted a place on the Grand National start-line that ‘I would have done it for nothing if necessary’. As Sailaway Sailor hit the front three from home, it looked for a moment as though the rider’s euphoria would yield immediate dividends. In the event, it wasn’t to be, with the horse fading on the run-in to finish a close-up fifth.
Next morning, on the eve of the National, a brief interview with Kempton was published by the Daily Mirror, as part of journalist Ron Wills’s regular Spotlight column. In an assessment that must have had many readers tittering over their breakfasts, given that the horse had now not won for more than two years, the young trainer was defiantly upbeat about his gelding’s chances. ‘It’s true Foinavon hasn’t yet tur
ned out as well as we thought he would, but he’s improving,’ Kempton insisted. ‘Foinavon is a funny horse and you want a funny horse at Aintree … Foinavon can do it. He’s a Grand National type. Three miles is always too short for him.’
Wildly optimistic it might have been, but Kempton’s description of Foinavon was not so very different from his most regular Irish jockey Pat Taaffe’s. For Taaffe, Foinavon was eccentric and ‘droll’ and he admitted to ‘quite a soft spot’ for him. The fact remained, though, that the two men had by this time ridden him in a grand total of 26 races without once tasting victory. The earth would surely need to tilt on its axis to put him in with a chance at Aintree against horses like What a Myth, who had beaten him by half the length of Gloucestershire in the Cheltenham Gold Cup; like Freddie, the popular Scottish chaser who had been runner-up the previous two years; and like Honey End, another horse trained in Sussex by the plain-speaking Captain Ryan Price, who was being tipped as a leading contender and whose disposition was so gentle he was nicknamed ‘George’ by his stable lad.
See Notes on Chapter 12
Chapter 13
An Iron Bunk-Bed and two Armchairs Pushed Together
As early-rising Mirror-readers were smiling at John Kempton’s rose-tinted view of Foinavon, two men were flipping a coin. Tony Hutt and Geoff Stocker were the drivers who took the gelding to most of his races. As you might expect in Grand National week, the purpose of the coin-toss was to decide which one of them would transport him to the world’s most famous steeplechase. As you might not expect, it was the loser – Hutt – who got the job.