by David Owen
There are two reasons why this superficially glamorous journey did not appeal to either man. First, it would take a long time, probably upwards of five hours. Second, as soon as Foinavon was unloaded at Aintree, the driver would have to turn around and come straight back. This was because the Kemptons had another horse running on Grand National day – at Worcester, beside the River Severn. This horse, a chestnut colt called Three Dons, of whom the Kemptons had high hopes, would need to be driven to his race the following morning. Hutt’s plan was to ask another local horse transport firm to bring Foinavon back. The 16-year-old stable lad, Clifford Booth, would stay overnight in Liverpool and tend to the horse on race-day.
And so at around ten o’clock on Friday morning, it was the tall figure of Hutt, a Woodbine on his lip, who turned down the lane by the Red Lion pub in his cream-coloured Newbury Racehorse Transport horsebox. After executing a precise three-point turn, so as to be facing the right way when his cargo embarked, he pulled up outside the gateway into Chatham Stables. Hutt, the son of a stud groom, was an ideal driver, as he had been among horses all his life and knew instinctively how to handle his highly strung passengers in any situation. Like many others in racing at this time, he had also tasted military action, in his case in Korea with the Gloucestershire Regiment, the so-called ‘Glorious Glosters’. The vehicle’s arrival would have been heralded from some distance away in the quiet Berkshire countryside by the insistent putter of its two-stroke diesel engine. ‘You could hear it coming,’ recalls Colin Hemsley, the Kemptons’ head lad. ‘It was a Commer with a big exhaust.’
The process of loading up was brisk and well choreographed from frequent practice – and also because a strong north wind and gunmetal grey clouds had brought a wintry edge to the day. An old laundry-basket with a padlocked top was already out at the side of the lane where the horsebox had pulled in. This contained rugs, quarter-sheets, spare lead-reins, spare bridle, sponges, the first-aid kit – everything the horse might need at Liverpool. The contents had been checked and double-checked to ensure nothing was forgotten. Extra travelling garments were loaded loose into the box, so as to be easily accessible if Foinavon got hot or cold in transit. Waiting on a wheelbarrow to be carted up the driveway and stowed onboard were Hemsley’s carefully prepared batches of feed for the three days away: quantities of chaff, corn, hay and bran, some glucose for his eve-of-race feed in Liverpool that evening and pure oats for his pre-Grand National breakfast – the equivalent of the Apollo astronauts’ launch-day steak and eggs.
Most important of all was the racing tack, minus the saddle, which was the jockey’s responsibility. Much of this was with the jockey’s silks in the trainer’s colour bag, which looked like a briefcase with a special brass name-plate affixed. Even more thought than usual had gone into this. For one thing, Foinavon was to run with a rubber bit fitted to his bridle. Kempton and Hemsley felt this was only fair on jockey John Buckingham, given the sheer size of the fences, the inevitable hurly-burly of a race with 44 runners and the fact he had only ridden the horse once before.
And then there were the blinkers. Foinavon had been running regularly in orthodox closed-cup blinkers since the King George VI Chase in December. The trainer and head lad were worried, though, that with such a large field clustered around him, it might be counterproductive to restrict their horse’s field of vision quite so severely. There was also the risk that clods of mud might become lodged in the eye-pieces. In the days leading up to the race, Kempton had therefore arranged to have a special set of blinkers with huge, open eye-pieces made up. Fashioned in his mother Molly’s yellow-and-black racing colours, these would prevent the horse seeing what was going on behind, but not around, him. That week, after their Leicester debacle, they put them on him and practised jumping him over a fence, camouflaged with dark-green spruce to resemble Aintree. He seemed as imperturbable as ever.
Once everything else was loaded, Booth strode across the yard to fetch the horse, wrapped up in a Witney blanket and travelling bandages, along with Susie the goat. Since Kempton and Hemsley would be going to Worcester not Aintree, Foinavon already had his racing plates fitted. These lightweight racing shoes had been fashioned, as usual, by Kempton himself at his small open-air forge beside the bungalow. In a typically Heath Robinson-esque touch, the trainer had rigged up a vacuum-cleaner, set permanently on blow and operated with a string like a bathroom light-switch, to heat up the coke to the point where the metal became pliable. The plates were affixed cold in the horse’s box. The trainer had a portable anvil for final adjustments, but was such a good judge that these were generally very minor.
Hemsley and Kempton were off exercising two of the other horses on the nearby Ridgeway, while the trainer’s father was to join Booth at Liverpool the next day. At last the teenager jumped up into the passenger seat in his flat cap, half-length jacket and smart race-day trousers and, in a cloud of diesel fumes, they were on their way.
An excited John Buckingham was setting off at about the same time from Chipping Warden, his Northamptonshire village, with brother Tom. He too had been due to spend Saturday at Worcester before receiving Kempton’s last-gasp invitation to ride Foinavon, but had managed to extricate himself from this commitment. What had proved harder was finding a bed for the night on Merseyside at such short notice. After several phone calls, some acquaintances who lived in a small house just across the road from the racecourse said he and Tom could kip there, though it wouldn’t be very comfortable. This turned out to be an understatement. In the circumstances, his wife Ann decided not to make the journey. She would watch the race with her grandmother in Leamington Spa.
The day’s showpiece sporting occasion, a solemn one, was taking place 200 miles south of Liverpool. At Westminster Abbey, a memorial service was being held for Sir Frank Worrell, the first black man appointed West Indies cricket captain, who had died in Jamaica the previous month, aged just 42. With the prime minister expected in Kirkby for his frozen-food factory visit; he was represented at the service by the ever-dependable Denis Howell.
It was also, however, the second day of Aintree’s spring meeting – the sole event at the course that season. And as Buckingham and Hutt ploughed their separate furrows along the unlovely trunk roads of the English Midlands, at a little after 2pm, an event of some significance occurred in the first race of the day, the Thursby Selling Plate. This was a distinctly unpromising five-furlong sprint for two-year-olds, worth all of £300. As it turned out, though, the nine runners contrived a thrilling spectacle for their shivering audience, with the result eventually called a dead heat between Curlicue and a little-fancied 5/1 shot whose jockey, Paul Cook, was wearing the black-and-pink quartered colours of Maurice Kingsley, a Manchester manufacturer. Eight years later this horse was sent off at significantly shorter odds for a Grand National. What the sparse audience had just witnessed was the first Aintree victory, albeit a shared one, by Red Rum.
These were conspicuously good times for the port city of Liverpool. A wave of big-company investment had made it less dependent on its famous docks, with manufacturing – as it turned out, briefly – taking over as the largest sector in the local economy for the first time. In addition to the sort of food-industry plants being visited that day by Harold Wilson, carmakers were largely responsible for the good times, with three new factories creating 30,000 jobs between 1962 and 1967. The boom had a cultural dimension too, with the staggering worldwide success of the Beatles attracting talent scouts to the city and sending its ‘cool’ quotient through the roof. As Red Rum and Curlicue flashed past the winning-post together, the Fab Four were actually nearing completion of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their masterpiece, in a London studio.
The city had become rampant on the football field too. In the four seasons culminating with 1965/66, one or other of its two big clubs – Liverpool and Everton – had won the league championship three times and the FA Cup twice. Tens of thousands of local sports fans, indeed, would be spending Grand National da
y, not at Aintree but in Nottingham watching Everton take on a classy Forest side in an FA Cup quarter-final.
Everton players Alan Ball and Alex Young had been among what the man from The Times described as ‘the thimbleful of spectators’ present for the start of the three-day meeting on Thursday afternoon. Not even these local heroes or the welcome sight of a fresh coat of paint on the stands had been able to distract attention from other problems, however. As a 23-strong field lined up for the Topham Trophy, a popular race run over the Grand National fences, part of the starting mechanism came away in starter Alec Marsh’s hand. He ended up resorting to the old-fashioned flag method to send the runners on their way some eight minutes late. There was a false start in one of the Flat races on the card when half the starting-gate failed to rise. Shortcomings were also noted with the loudspeaker system. As it later transpired, even the paint job left Mrs Topham and her colleagues dissatisfied. Meeting three weeks after Grand National day, the Tophams board regretted that the contractor had been forced to ‘withdraw their best labour and institute local’. This had been ‘extremely careless’. There were, Tophams said, ‘many faults to rectify before the final payment was made’.
Given the thrills and spills endemic to jumps racing, it was inevitable that accidents over the first two days of the meeting would affect jockeys booked to ride in the big race on Saturday afternoon. Within a couple of minutes of that delayed start to the Topham Trophy, a quartet of National jockeys were splayed across a patch of Aintree’s famously springy turf, victims of the formidable 5ft 2in Chair, probably the second-most intimidating fence on the course after Becher’s Brook. On this occasion, no serious damage was done, although one of the four – the Irish rider Johnny Lehane – was later said to be nursing sore ribs. The Aintree jockeys’ book notes that a crepe bandage was applied. Macer Gifford, due to ride a horse called Popham Down in the National, was another to suffer a fall, though his came on the meeting’s second day, while John Buckingham, Tony Hutt and Foinavon were heading north.
By far the most serious incident, though, was the one that befell Eddie Harty and a four-year-old hurdler called Spearhead in the very first jumps race of the meeting, the Lancashire Hurdle. Harty, a versatile enough horseman to have worked as a cowboy in the United States for two years as well as representing Ireland in the three-day event at the 1960 Rome Olympics, had just taken up the running two from home and was going well. At the second-last flight, however, his mount put his feet through the top of the hurdle and came crashing down. Harty was left with a broken collarbone and thumb; Spearhead a broken neck. On the morning of the National, the Irish Independent – besides publishing a third instalment of Populorum Progressio, Pope Paul VI’s recent encyclical – found room to mention that Harty would ride with ‘a heavily bandaged hand’. This was to prove a handicap of some significance.
It was a relieved Clifford Booth who jumped down from the passenger seat when the cream-coloured horsebox pulled up beside the bustling Aintree stable-yards. The young man found that time crawled by on the way to the races and the trek to Liverpool had been his longest confinement yet in Foinavon’s ponderous conveyance. With many of that day’s runners heading home and other National entrants arriving, the scene was as busy as a railway station forecourt, as short men with stout shoes and weatherbeaten faces strode purposefully about in different directions, some with skittish young racehorses in tow. With Tony Hutt facing a long drive home in gathering gloom, the teenage stable lad was going to have to learn the ropes on his own, a gelding in one hand, a goat in the other.
There was, though, a presiding authority in the shape of stable manager Ossie Dale, who had clocked up nearly a decade and a half with the Tophams by this time and had seen it all before. Such was Dale’s devotion to duty that in Grand National week, he always slept in the loft above his busy office in Paddock Yard. He had catered for plenty of travelling goats in his time. True, they had once had an escapee, but it was found next morning at the station across the road from the racecourse, grazing contentedly on the morning newspapers that had been dumped on the platform.
Soon enough, Foinavon (and Susie) had been assigned box number 98 in New Yard, Aintree’s biggest stable-complex. Many of the horse’s National rivals were already in residence. Some of the Irish contingent, including Leedsy, whom some fancied as a capable outsider, had arrived on Wednesday night after enduring a rough flight from Dublin. Freddie’s owner Reg Tweedie, a Kelso livestock farmer who had ridden in the 1940 National, ending up with blood-splashed breeches after his mount broke a blood vessel, had decided, by contrast, to bring his star chaser to Aintree only at the last moment. Scotland’s big hope was accordingly spending the night before his third and final tilt at steeple-chasing’s greatest prize in a box at nearby Haydock Park.
Booth was found an iron bunk-bed in a large dormitory for stable-lads at the Sefton Arms Hotel beside the racecourse. At about 4am, he remembers hearing a rustling of nearby bedclothes and assuming it was time to get up. In fact, this was the sound of his neighbour, one of the most experienced lads on the circuit, returning from a night out. The Buckingham brothers, meanwhile, had got to their lodgings just after nine – and found them all that they had been promised. After sandwiches and coffee, they were in ‘bed’ – which in John’s case meant two armchairs pushed together – by 10.15pm. ‘Funnily enough, I slept,’ he says.
Another Friday evening arrival in the city was Gregory Peck, the Hollywood film-star, whose horse, Different Class, was among the favourites for the big race. It is safe to say that Peck did not spend the night on two armchairs pushed together. He and his wife Veronique were among the great and good of the racing establishment ensconced in the splendour of Liverpool’s very own palace hotel – the Adelphi. Built more than fifty years before for the launch of the Titanic, this marble-lined edifice still took the breath away with its opulence and scale, from its wood-panelled bedrooms to its gargantuan Grand Lounge. The 51-year-old actor had never seen Different Class race before and was hoping his presence at Aintree would not bring the horse bad luck. ‘It’s a chance I have to take,’ he told a local reporter. ‘The Grand National I felt I just had to see. I had to be here for this … I have loved this race since I first came here in 1950. I think it’s the greatest sporting event in the world.’ It was four years since the couple had made their last trip to the National. On that occasion Peck’s horse, Owen’s Sedge, a striking grey, could manage no better than seventh place. Just nine days after this disappointment, and 6,000 miles away, Peck had had a different kind of triumph to savour, capturing the Oscar for best actor for his role as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
That evening, as Clifford Booth slept in his iron bunk-bed and the Buckingham brothers tucked into their sandwiches, the Pecks were dancing in the Adelphi when John Gaines, a US horseman who had recently bought the 1966 Grand National winner Anglo, approached them. ‘What about a $500 side-bet, horse against horse?’ Gaines, who was later to be credited with founding the Breeders’ Cup, the richest North American race meeting, proposed. Peck smiled and extended his hand, ‘You’re on,’ he said.
See Notes on Chapter 13
Chapter 14
The Ecstasy of Aintree
The race regarded by Gregory Peck as the greatest sporting event in the world is not quite as old as steeplechasing itself. This is believed to have originated in 18th-century Ireland in the form of match races between two riders, usually hunters, across open country from point A to point B, often a church steeple. The Grand National is, though, among the more venerable contests in British sport, pre-dating the Football League, cricket’s County Championship and even, by one year, the Victorian era.
It does not, however, pre-date the classic races of the Flat-racing calendar, the Oaks, the Derby and, oldest of all, the St Leger, first run in 1776. Indeed, the sport of steeplechasing might not have developed in its modern form had it not been obliged to co-exist with Flat racing and its many influential patrons.
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br /> By the start of the 19th century, it had become the custom for the cards of regular – Flat – race meetings to include flat races for hunting horses. This, though, posed a problem: how to ensure that speedy, lightweight Flat racing horses were excluded? Organisers of a race meeting at Bedford in 1811 had the idea of erecting a number of artificial barriers to be cleared by the participants – an effective deterrent since regular racehorses would not have been taught how to jump. In the event, there were only two runners, though the occasion proved popular enough to attract a crowd then estimated at 40,000. According to the writer, Elizabeth Eliot, this was ‘the first example of the development of steeple-chasing through a line – Flat racing – a race for hunters, and the revolt of the hunters against the race horses.’
In the 1830s, a St Albans hotel proprietor called Tom Coleman, often referred to as the ‘father of steeplechasing’, oversaw the next big step in the sport’s development: the institution of a regular, annual, steeple-chasing fixture. Writes Eliot, ‘Up to this date, 1830/31, steeplechases had been run spasmodically when one gentleman took it into his head to challenge another gentleman.’ Coleman began this move away from impulse races towards properly organised, pre-arranged meetings.
It was in 1834, at the height of the St Albans Chase’s success, that the first jumps races, over hurdles, were staged at Aintree. This was a new venture for William Lynn, landlord of Liverpool’s Waterloo Hotel, the man who, five years earlier, had established the new course. In those early years, Lynn had faced competition from another Flat course at nearby Maghull, which staged its first races in 1827. It was the closure of Maghull – and the monopoly of Flat racing in the local area bequeathed to Lynn as a result – that appears to have persuaded him to attempt to broaden Aintree’s range of attractions.