by David Owen
This was an initiative not without risks. South-west Lancashire was starting to acquire a reputation for hare-coursing, due largely to support from the Earls of Sefton, whose name would come to be linked just as readily with the Grand National. The main steeple-chasing centres, however, were located well to the south in the fox-hunting country of the English Home Counties and the rural Midlands. Word of Lynn’s latest venture had, though, reached the redoubtable Captain Martin Becher, a rider as dominant in that age as A. P. McCoy is in this. He duly won the first race in impressive style on a horse called Milliner and the meeting, held on 24 October, was judged enough of a success to be repeated and expanded the following year.
Emboldened by the favourable reception greeting this experiment and a degree of financial pressure to drum up revenues, Lynn went a step further and decided to stage a steeplechase at Aintree. This ‘Liverpool Grand Steeple-Chase’ was run on 29 February 1836 – 128 years to the day before Foinavon’s maiden victory at Naas. The victor, once again, in a ten-horse race was Captain Becher riding a sturdy chestnut with one white sock called The Duke. In an innovation essential to the sport’s development as a spectator attraction, moreover, the race started and finished in the same place and not by some distant church steeple.
It is the 1839 contest, won by Lottery, the Arkle of his day, which has come to be seen as the first Grand National – not least because this was the race to which the phrase ‘Grand National’ was first applied by a correspondent for Bell’s Life writing under the name of ‘Sam Slick’. But John Pinfold, an Oxford historian who has made extensive scrutiny of contemporary documentation, is convinced that the 1836 race should properly be accorded this honour. ‘This race was run over what to all intents and purposes was the same course as that used today,’ he says. What Lottery’s race did achieve was to establish Aintree as the most popular and prestigious steeplechase in England. This was in part because of the demise of the St Albans Chase, whose timing had clashed with the Liverpool race in 1837, preventing Lynn from building on the success of the 1836 event. It was, furthermore, not until 1839 that Liverpool could be reached by train from both London and steeplechasing’s Midlands heartland. This facilitated both more runners and a bigger crowd.
Then, as now, the Grand National was run over two circuits of the Aintree course – a distance equating throughout the 20th century to four miles and 856 yards. Thirty fences up to 5ft 2in in height are jumped. There are 16 obstacles on each circuit and all must be cleared twice, except for the biggest fence of all, The Chair, and the water-jump. In 1967, the fences were built of thorn, with many dressed with distinctive dark green spruce. Materials, which also included fir and gorse, were gathered from North Wales and Cumberland. From a hunter’s viewpoint, running in a Grand National is the rough equivalent of galloping across 31 250-yard wide fields and clearing a hedge at the end of all but the last.
In terms of both distance and fence size, it is the most gruelling event on the British horse-racing calendar. True, four-and-a-half miles would be far from ultra-long-distance for a human athlete – even with 30 strenuous jumping efforts appended. But a thoroughbred racehorse weighs half a tonne – not far off ten times the weight of Haile Gebrselassie, the great Ethiopian long-distance runner. Horses are also flight animals – they flee danger – and, so far as one can tell, have little if any concept of pacing themselves, though they stick with the herd. In a Grand National, as in other races, they gallop as fast as they can, or as their jockey will allow, completing the course in 9–10 minutes at an average speed of some 30mph. To cap it all, they are humping around an extra 10–12 stone on their backs above their bodyweight.
To be able to do this, any racehorse, be it Arkle or a 100/1 outsider, needs to be able to deliver enormous quantities of oxygen to the 25kg or so of muscle crammed into each of its haunches. One key component of the remarkable biological engine that drives this process is the thoroughbred’s huge lung capacity. A galloping racehorse breathes up to 40 litres of air per second. That adds up to around 20,000 litres of air ventilated while running a Grand National – or about what you or I might breathe in two days. A racehorse’s heart – the pump that circulates the blood – is similarly impressive at several times the size of a cow’s. The spleen also plays a vital role. This organ contains 30 per cent of the animal’s oxygen-carrying red blood cells. When it starts to exercise hard, these cells go into the circulation, in a process that has been referred to by researcher Alberto Minetti as ‘internal blood doping’.
Several of the Aintree fences that Grand National runners are called upon to jump have been endowed with names that are part of British sporting folklore. The most famous of all is Becher’s Brook. First encountered as the sixth fence, about a mile from the start, this is named after the same Captain Becher who won Liverpool’s Grand Steeple-Chase in 1836. Three years later, the good captain got a taste of Aintree’s less hospitable side, when his mount, Conrad, fell and pitched him into the six-foot-wide waterway that was then to be found on the landing side of the fence. Having a keen sense of self-preservation, Becher stayed in the ditch until the other runners had galloped by, muttering, according to one version which, it must be said, has an apocryphal ring, that he never knew water tasted so filthy without brandy.
It is not the brook, which by 2011 was much reduced, that is the source of the fence’s latter-day notoriety, however. It is the big drop on the landing side. This encouraged jockeys to lean far back in their saddles to prevent their mounts from overbalancing and was capable of making riders feel like they were jumping off the edge of the world. Dick Francis, the jockey-turned-thriller writer who was there reporting on the 1967 race for a national newspaper, once recalled that going over Becher’s he found he had ‘an extensive view of Liverpool for what seemed a very long time’. To add to the challenge posed by the obstacle facing Foinavon and the other 1967 runners, there was a steep upward slope on the landing side that seemed to claw the more hesitant jumpers back towards the brook. The drop was most severe for jockeys seeking to navigate the shortest way around the course on the inner.
Two fences further on is the Canal Turn, the five-foot barrier that bore the brunt of the vandalism ahead of the 1967 meeting. This takes its name from the nearby Leeds and Liverpool Canal and from the 90-degree left-hand turn that runners must execute as quickly as possible after clearing the obstacle. No sooner have horses veered around to the west, to run parallel with the canal, than they are confronted by Valentine’s, another five-foot-high fence, sited beside the same brook that Captain Becher fell into. This was named after a horse in the 1840 National who appeared intent on pulling himself up at the obstacle only to execute an extraordinary pirouetting leap that ultimately carried him clear. Lord Sefton’s stand used to be located adjacent to the landing side of Valentine’s.
The Chair is in front of the Aintree grandstands near where a judge’s chair used to be situated. At 5ft 2in, it is the biggest fence on the course and, like the water-jump, must be cleared only once. Guarded on the take-off side by a ditch as wide as a man is tall, the fence can appear even bigger than it actually is because it is much narrower than many of the obstacles that precede it. The solidity of its appearance tends to bring to mind a building as much as a hedge. Amateur rider John Hislop once said it seemed ‘impenetrable as a prison wall’.
For some, particularly at the time of the 1967 National, the first open ditch had a reputation nearly as forbidding as that of The Chair. This was partly because it came so early in the race (the third fence in all), but also because of its size (5ft with a 6ft-wide ditch on the take-off side) and the fact that it was first negotiated when most of the field was still on its feet and bunched. John Lawrence (later Oaksey), the prominent amateur rider, racing journalist and peer of the realm, booked to ride Norther in the 1967 event, wrote that one year, ‘I was not the only participant … who thought it resembled the Grand Canyon.’ It was the favourite fence of Steve Westhead, Aintree’s master fence-builder of the
1960s and 1970s, and was to have been named the Westhead Ditch in his memory, but this hasn’t really caught on.
For all the daunting reputations of the more famous obstacles, however, it is a fence that has never warranted a name that traditionally claims the most fallers. In 2004, it was calculated that the first fence was almost seven times more likely to result in a fall than other plain fences. This is in part because it is the only fence jumped by every horse. There are other factors at play, however. It is, for example, located an unusually long way from the start-line, giving runners plenty of scope to build up speed as they jockey for race position and release the tension that builds up during extensive pre-race formalities. The fence’s most absurd casualty toll came in 1951, when 11 of the 36 runners came to grief there after a botched start. First fence fallers often include some of the more fancied horses in the race – and 1967 was no exception.
Though the broad outline of the course has been unaltered since 1836, there have been many changes to fences and other details. In the early years, for example, one of the obstacles consisted of a stone wall. This was removed for good in 1844. It was not until 1885 that the National was run over a course consisting almost entirely of turf for the first time. Prior to that, horses had contended with all manner of agricultural surfaces, including ploughed terrain. From 1888, all the barriers in the race became proper fences with the elimination of three hurdles that used to be encountered on the home straight.
Much the most significant change of the 1960s came in 1961, when plain fences were sloped on the take-off side to make them more inviting to jump. According to Bobby Beasley, who won the race that year aboard the grey Nicolaus Silver, ‘In the past many horses had fallen as a result of getting too close to the big upright obstacles. Now … a horse had another yard in which to see the fence and time for take off.’ By 1963, The Times’s racing correspondent was asserting that the change in the shaping of the fences had ‘reduced by more than half the number of falls in all races over them’. The number of mistakes being made, he added, had ‘diminished remarkably’.
No matter how the course has been modified over the years, the sheer life-affirming, thrill of racing around the big Liverpool fences on a bold-jumping thoroughbred has remained intact – even for professional jockeys who ride steeplechases most days of their lives. Brough Scott, who as both an ex-Grand National jockey and a fine writer is one of the few capable of capturing and conveying this magic, comments on the look in riders’ eyes after the race. ‘Forget about the winning jockey, all the jockeys who got round will have their eyes ablaze with the experience,’ he says. Dick Francis, equally well qualified, resorted to an image that might be appreciated by yachtsman Chay Blyth, who also attended the 1967 race, to evoke his first experience of riding at Liverpool. It was, he said, ‘like crossing the equator’. He went on, ‘I find I cannot properly describe the ecstasy of Aintree; no one who has not ridden there can understand it.’
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For all the residual doubts over the Grand National’s future, the race that Blyth, Francis, Gregory and Veronique Peck and tens of thousands of others were converging on Liverpool to see in 1967 had an exciting look about it – in spite of a string of noteworthy absentees, equine and human. Arkle would not, of course, be there, nor would he grace any race meeting again. And his old rival Mill House had been scratched from the National field on 28 March. But it was the withdrawal three days later of another horse, Highland Wedding, which created the biggest stir, with the story making the front page of The Times. This was largely because the horse had been installed as favourite for the race and his withdrawal was unexpected, coming after he had hit himself on a foreleg in training. Absent jockeys included Foinavon’s old partner (and Arkle’s) Pat Taaffe; Jeff King, deprived by a fractured skull of the thrill of riding the hard-pulling Rondetto at Aintree; and, for the first time in 16 years, Michael Scudamore, who had won the race on Oxo eight years previously.
With the very biggest chasing stars missing, an open race looked all the more likely. There was, moreover, enough quality in the 44 runners who would go to post for John Lawrence to adjudge this ‘the best Grand National field for years’.
Fifteen or more horses, including Peck’s classy young chaser Different Class, were thought to have a chance. Captain Ryan Price’s What a Myth was the highest-rated performer after his impressive Cheltenham Gold Cup run, and would carry top weight. A number of canny observers, however, were coming out in favour of another Price horse, the gentlemanly Honey End, who appeared well handicapped, had never fallen and would be ridden by the stylish and determined Josh Gifford. The previous year’s first and second, chalk and cheese as they were, were back. Anglo, flash as a show-pony, with his blond tail and prominent white socks, had his backers. So did Freddie, the stocky, if irascible, Scottish trier who never gave in and who tended to run with glycerine-coated tongue hanging out of his mouth like a crofter’s dog. Runner-up for the past two years, he was the people’s choice.
Tim Norman, the jockey who had ridden Anglo to victory 12 months before, had this time chosen a different mount, Kilburn. A winner of three races already that season, in two of which he had beaten Anglo and one Highland Wedding, Kilburn was owned by Madame Borel de Bitche, the English-born widow of a Belgian ambassador who had served in that country’s wartime government-in-exile in London. Unusually for a successful steeplechaser, the horse had been bought as a showjumper but switched to racing after refusing to jump tiny practice fences called cavalletti.
The speedy Solbina was given a squeak of a chance of outperforming stable-companion Anglo and delivering trainer Fred Winter his third consecutive Grand National victory. A few felt similarly that Kapeno might outdo his stablemate Different Class – if only he could get over his aversion to Becher’s Brook. The Fossa, Foinavon’s fellow goat-lover, had run well twice before at Aintree, while both Rondetto and the massive Limeking had their supporters. So did both representatives from Denys Smith’s yard at Bishop Auckland in County Durham. Greek Scholar, a chestnut horse with a perfect white diamond on his forehead, was the mount of Terry Biddlecombe, the champion jockey who still, like his friend and rival Josh Gifford, was striving to win his first Grand National. Red Alligator, a lively outsider, would be ridden by a little-known local teenager called Brian Fletcher.
Another young American-owned horse called Rutherfords appeared to be coming into form at the right moment. It transpired subsequently that his trainer had been so keen to run him that he had kept the horse in the race even though he had slivers of glass in one foot. Finally, there was Bassnet, second in the previous year’s Topham Trophy over the National fences, who had taken over for a time as favourite after Highland Wedding’s withdrawal.
If there was much dispute over the identity of the likeliest winner of the next day’s big race, however, pundits were unanimous on one point: you could rule out Foinavon.
See Notes on Chapter 14
Chapter 15
A Typical Day for Something Terrible to Happen
By 7am the ground in front of Aintree’s empty, white stands was reverberating with drumming hooves, as John Buckingham and others cantered the horses they hoped would soon be carrying them to Grand National glory. Early morning exercise sessions could be an exhilarating experience at Liverpool, the air fresh, the turf glistening with dew, the mind alive with the challenge of converting a lifetime’s dreams into reality. Saturday 8 April 1967, though, had dawned very grey and very wet. Says Pat Buckley, who won the 1963 National on Ayala and this time around would be riding Limeking for mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty, ‘It was a typical day for something terrible to happen.’
Peter O’Sullevan was there at 7am too, surveying the scene, on the lookout for distinguishing marks on the horses that might inform his comments later in the day. Race-time would find the BBC’s number one commentator in position on top of the main stand, keeping the broadcaster’s millions-strong international audience apprised of the story unfolding, with the h
elp of his hand-annotated racecard and a small black and white monitor screen.
This would be the eighth televised Grand National. The BBC had finally overcome Mrs Topham’s misgivings about the impact of live television coverage on attendance figures at the course in late 1959. The first Grand National of the 1960s thus became the first to be broadcast in this way, ending a 17-month hiatus that had followed another landmark: the live screening of a less prestigious Aintree steeplechase after Watch With Mother, on 6 November 1958. Such wariness about embracing the medium on the part of sports rights-holders might seem antiquated today, but Mrs Topham was far from alone in fearing the consequences of letting the television cameras in. Only that week, as Foinavon was being drilled in Berkshire over John Kempton’s spruce-clad practice-fence, Football League chairmen had taken less than half an hour to turn down a BBC live television proposal worth £781,000. In the event, Mrs Topham and her colleagues found that, while gate receipts in 1960 were indeed down, profit was up – by £2,000. Their still tentative conclusion? ‘So far, television had generally paid us.’
By 1967, the great majority of people who watched the race in real time did so on television. Against perhaps 50,000 on the course, the BBC estimated that there would be 50 million television viewers getting coverage in a range of European countries. Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia was to have been included until technical difficulties intervened. Canadians would see the race live for the first time, as a signal was bounced across the Atlantic by satellite ‘by way of Fucine in Italy’. This made it even more of a pity that the former favourite, the Canadian-owned Highland Wedding, would not after all be running, although the horse’s owner, Charles Burns, had come to Liverpool regardless.
The drama and spectacle of the Grand National was, as became immediately apparent, just made for television – even in the black-and-white era. Forty or more handsome thoroughbreds poured at high-speed over towering fences, their jockeys striving manfully to exercise even a modicum of control. The wonders of technology brought viewers far closer to the action than they could ever hope to be at the course – and kept them in the thick of things throughout. The story of the race, meanwhile, was narrated by an expert commentary team, spearheaded by the incomparable O’Sullevan, whose voice somehow combined velocity with utter clarity and whose snap judgements and observations were rarely wide of the mark. A taste of the race’s dramatic character had been available before television via newsreels shown to cinema audiences. But live coverage, combined with the rapid spread of betting-shops in the 1960s, enabled people to indulge themselves in an extra frisson of excitement not available in their local Gaumont: they could back a horse and then follow its progress in every detail while baying it on in the privacy and comfort of their own sitting rooms.