Foinavon
Page 12
And it has to be said that the BBC did an exceptional job. One example of how the broadcaster made every effort to bring viewers the most dramatic pictures possible was its so-called ‘roving-eye’. This was a camera mounted on a vehicle – initially a standard BBC van, later an adapted station wagon – that kept pace with the horses while they were racing. As Ray Lakeland, the BBC man who produced all the early Grand National broadcasts, recalls, the idea was conceived with the Lincolnshire Handicap, a Flat race run over a straight mile, in mind – and was not without its teething problems. Lincoln racecourse, as he explains, was beside a road which used to be closed on race-days. ‘I had this bright idea, because the road was parallel to the track, that we might use a sort of mobile camera,’ Lakeland says. ‘I persuaded our engineers to put a camera on top of their camera van … I thought I had better give it a bit of a start so I placed it half a furlong along from the start and set it off at the same time as the horses set off. Within about four strides, they overtook it. I didn’t realise that a horse can go from nought to 30mph in about three strides.’ Once they had got the logistics right, however, the idea worked.
One of the few similarities between Lincoln and Aintree was that the Liverpool venue also had a tarmac road beside the racecourse – in this case the Grand Prix racing circuit opened in 1954. If this was good enough for Jack Brabham and Stirling Moss, it would certainly enable the ‘roving eye’ to operate. Indeed, this key ingredient of the BBC’s Grand National coverage is a rare example of something beneficial to horse racing coming as a direct result of the introduction of motor racing at Aintree. (Another came when stable manager Ossie Dale was able to offer the head lad of Nicolaus Silver, the 1961 Grand National winner, a can of Castrol engine-oil to substitute for the horse’s regular hoof-oil which had been mislaid. As Dale observed, ‘It proved as effective with the horse as for its true purpose.’)
The first use of the ‘roving eye’ at a National earned Lakeland a summons from the stewards for positioning it too close to the horses. ‘There was Lord Derby in the middle, Lord Sefton to his left and Lord Cadogan to his right,’ the BBC man recalls. Thereafter, the standard instruction was for the device, which was equipped with a zoom lens, to keep half a fence ahead of the leaders. The mobility that the ‘eye’ afforded was a particularly valuable asset in grey, rainswept conditions like those pertaining in 1967, which made the images obtained from camera positions further removed from the action indistinct. The tool’s value was also greatly enhanced by the skills of Don ‘Mac’ Mackay, its regular operator, a short man whose working garb included a skull-hugging pre-war flying helmet. This was necessary to hold his earphones in position as he was keeping pace with the fastest horses in the field.
Come showtime, while his main man O’Sullevan was as high up as you could get at Aintree, Lakeland was hunkered down in the telegraph office under the County Stand, sitting, poised as a concert pianist, at his control panel, with 20 monitors – one for each camera-position – glowing in front of him. The sheer size of the racecourse made technical arrangements all the more complicated. Each camera was limited to about 400 yards of cable, after which picture quality would deteriorate. This meant that at least two further mobile control units had to be stationed at strategic points. Similarly, while O’Sullevan was perfectly positioned to describe the finish of the race, his contribution was supplemented by a team of commentators at other vantage-points. In 1967, for example, the key commentary position adjacent to Becher’s Brook at the far end of the course was to be manned by Michael O’Hehir, the course commentator from Baldoyle.
Having done his wartime service in a tank regiment in North Africa and Italy, Lakeland, a self-confessed ‘seat of the pants guy’, could handle pressure. Even so, the period of transmission was a time of unremitting tension, with the story-line impossible to predict and infinite scope for something to go wrong. On one occasion, a commentator stationed in a position overlooking the course some 40 feet up was struck by vertigo and dropped his microphone just as he was being cued to go on air. ‘You would come out of the control room and you would twang you were so tense,’ Lakeland says. Cigarette consumption was off the scale.
Cyril Watkins was up early on Grand National morning too. Whereas other owners like Gregory Peck and Charles Burns had come thousands of miles to be at Aintree, Foinavon’s owner would emulate millions of once-a-year punters with no special connection to that year’s race by watching it at home on television. There were a number of reasons for this.
First, the long wait for Foinavon’s first win in England was starting to tell even on him. In the run-up to Liverpool, he had concluded that his light green and Mackintosh tartan colours must be bringing the horse bad luck and so had decided to change them. In the big race, Buckingham would be sporting decidedly sombre new black silks, enlivened, like a Wall Street trader of the Ivan Boesky era, by bright red and yellow ‘braces’, or vertical stripes. Had he known about it, the switch would certainly have met with the approval of Sidney Spofforth, chef patissier at the Liverpool Adelphi. Among Spofforth’s duties on one of the busiest evenings of his year would be to adorn chocolate horses, earmarked for the hotel’s traditional post-Grand National banquet, with the colours of the leading finishers. ‘We will just have to pray that the winner does not carry tartan colours,’ Spofforth joked to a local newspaper reporter as the big day approached. ‘Anything else we can cope with.’
Watkins’s second reason for staying at home was that, as his recent hospital visits indicated, he was not in the best of health. Most significant of all, however, was the fact that it was FA Cup quarter-finals day. This meant a busy weekend for the football pools industry from which he made his living. The previous evening would have been spent, like most Fridays during the season, in the office behind his Tilehurst pet-shop, just up the road from an imposing red brick United Reformed Church. There he awaited the arrival of the Littlewoods agents who worked the area he held the concession for, with their bundles of completed coupons and weekly takings garnered from local homes and workplaces. The process of ensuring all was in order – with coupons dispatched, ironically, to Liverpool, where the company was headquartered – was long and finicky and would not be completed until well into Saturday morning. Only then could he get into his pillar-box red Jag, make his way back home to Finchampstead and allow his mind to drift off to Aintree and the bets he had placed, more in hope than expectation, on his recalcitrant chaser.
A bleary-eyed Tony Hutt, meanwhile, had made it back from Mersey-side in his cream-coloured horsebox and was setting out for Worcester with the Kemptons’ big hope for the weekend, Three Dons, on board. The chestnut colt had won a hurdle race at Huntingdon on Easter Monday – just half an hour after Foinavon’s one and only outing with Dave Patrick – and now, like McCrimmon before him, was in the brief transition period during which he was still eligible for novice races. That Huntingdon result had been the yard’s first victory of the entire 1966/67 season. That, together with the imminent loss of Three Dons’s novice status, plus the fact that he could make the weight the colt had been allotted to carry, explains why John Kempton chose to go to Worcester not Aintree, delegating the long and probably fruitless trek to Liverpool to his father Jack.
Three Dons, then, was at that moment the star of the yard, a status he underlined by exhibiting a star’s temperament. Head lad Colin Hemsley, the apple of whose eye he was, was the only member of the stable’s entourage who could venture anywhere near him without risk of getting bitten or kicked. ‘When I went away, the others used to drop his food over his stable-door because they wouldn’t go in with him,’ Hemsley says. By way of mitigation, the colt had a star’s looks too. ‘He absolutely glowed,’ according to Hemsley. Owner Frank Reynolds, who lived at Balsall Common near Coventry and was managing director of a company called the Commando Group, thought so much of him he bought a car with the registration mark DON333.
Clearly, when Three Dons ran, it had to be Hemsley who accompanied him
to the races – which ruled the head lad out of going to Liverpool that day too. For one horrible moment, though, when he and Hutt reached the Cotswolds, Hemsley feared that their carefully laid plans were in jeopardy. There was snow on the ground: what if the Worcester meeting was called off? Fortunately, the snow turned out to be confined to high ground. Long before they turned into the narrow road that led to the stable entrance on the opposite side of the racecourse from the old Grand Stand Hotel, Hemsley’s fears had evaporated.
After morning exercise, Buckingham went to walk the course with his brother Tom before heading back to his digs, while other jockeys drove back to Southport where they were staying in close proximity to the local Turkish baths. According to champion jockey Terry Biddlecombe, who had won two of the three National Hunt races the previous day and was due to ride the moderately fancied Greek Scholar in the National, there would be ‘at least ten or twelve jockeys in there who really had to get the weight off.’ At about 9.30am, a bustling old masseur would go out and bring back champagne or fresh orange juice, ‘which refreshed everybody’. At 11am, they would all pile out, in order to check out of their seaside hotels before the noon deadline.
Buckingham kept being told by his landlady that he was going to win. He didn’t take it too seriously, thinking, ‘Oh yes, you know, she’s just saying that’. Two Irishmen staying at the house had the same confidence in him; they backed Foinavon.
Back in the marble-lined luxury of the Liverpool Adelphi, guests were whiling away the morning beneath an avalanche of newspapers. Along with a wide assortment of tips for one or other of the more fancied runners, they might have noticed a small item about Tim Durant, a 67-year-old American whose colourful past included spells as a stockbroker and a rider in cowboy movies. For his latest adventure, Durant was aiming to become the oldest man to finish a Grand National, aboard a 100/1 shot called Aerial III. This was in spite of undergoing an operation to remove a cancerous lump from his ankle. His attempt had become one of the talking-points of the race. Now came news that the ‘Galloping Grandad’, as Durant had become known, had sent a telegram to Ladbrokes, the London bookmaker, asking, ‘Will you lay me £60 at 15/1 against Aerial III finishing in Grand National?’ The sporting reply, from the company’s chairman, was also published. ‘We lay you £60 at 15/1 against Aerial III finishing,’ it read. ‘Will throw in case of champagne if you survive Becher’s twice.’
Those who took the trouble to scrutinise Charles Benson’s Horse-by-Horse Guide in the Daily Express – headlined ‘Mug or maestro … this page is on your side!’ – might, meanwhile, have noticed, perhaps with a wry smile, how curtly he dismissed another outsider. ‘Foinavon has no chance,’ he advised sagaciously. ‘Not the boldest of jumpers, he can be safely ignored even in a race noted for shocks.’
See Notes on Chapter 15
Chapter 16
‘Johnny, What’s This You’re Riding?’
The atmosphere was building as John Buckingham crossed the Ormskirk Road and re-entered the racecourse. A succession of special trains, including one, from Grimsby and Cleethorpes, that was steam-hauled, had pulled into the nearby railway station and disgorged groups of Scots, Geordies, Londoners and Brummies who joined local racegoers milling around the sodden facilities. Trilby-hatted bookies under large umbrellas vied for bets on the first race of the day, the Liverpool Hurdle. Though it was hardly the weather for high fashion, trouser-suits were numerous among the more traditional headscarves and sheepskin coats. Colours were as varied as the Grand National parade itself: citron-yellow to navy blue, lime-green to orange.
It was lunchtime for any normal human being, but there are sound, practical reasons why jump jockeys don’t really do lunch. As Buckingham explained some time later, ‘I never have lunch when I’m riding. I don’t think anybody does … If you have an accident, you see, you have probably got to have some sort of an operation – and anyway, you couldn’t ride on a full stomach.’ Ten of the 44 Grand National jockeys, including most of the big names, had mounts in the curtain-raising hurdle race, but Buckingham was not one of them. So he waited.
Up at the far end of the course, John Pinfold, the future historian, then a teenager from Woolton, was attending his first Grand National accompanied by his father, who worked for Whitbread, the brewer. Regular viewers of the annual BBC broadcasts, they had decided this time to drive the five miles to see the race in the flesh for fear that it might be discontinued. They had paid the princely sum of 14 shillings for parking and right of admittance to the small, recently vandalised concrete stand adjacent to the Canal Turn fence. The crowd in this area, far from the main grandstand, was a mixed bunch, combining local Scousers, the county set with their shooting-sticks and car-boot picnics, and a smattering of moralistic stump orators, standing on soapboxes inveighing against gambling and the wages of sin.
Pinfold remembers that one of these characters, more eloquent than most, had attracted ‘quite a little crowd’ of young men around him. All, it seemed, was going swimmingly until he disclosed, as it turned out injudiciously, that before finding God he had been a Liverpool policeman. At this revelation, the preacher’s audience moved as one, as if impelled by some invisible force, carried their haranguer to the fence at the edge of the racecourse and deposited him with a splash into the canal on the other side.
Another member of the sizeable crowd gathering at this end of the course was Michael Daley, also a Liverpool teenager. He and his two friends, wearing fashionable dark blue ‘mod macs’, were trying to secure a vantage-point next to Becher’s Brook from which to watch the race. So slippery and muddy were the conditions, however, that they gave up, opting to stand instead by the small unnamed fence between Becher’s and the Canal Turn. In the Fazackerley railway yard behind and above them, meanwhile, another train had by this time pulled into a berth usually reserved for the loading of flat-bed wagons with sections of track required to carry out repairs. This was the so-called ‘officers’ special’, for retired railway employees, which trundled the six miles from Liverpool Exchange station on Grand National day every year and trundled back after the race. It was no good, of course, if you wanted to see the finish, which would be fought out a good mile away. But the carriages were excellently placed to watch the National’s most spectacular sight: the field streaming over Becher’s Brook. Some passengers, moreover, were sitting warm and dry barely 20 yards from the fence where Michael Daley and his friends had taken up station, the fence usually referred to as the ‘one after Becher’s’.
At eight minutes past two, with more than an hour still to go before the Grand National was due to start, the bold-jumping Jupiter Boy flashed past the winning-post leaving blond-haired Terry Biddlecombe to celebrate his third Aintree winner in two days. A hundred miles south of there at Worcester’s pancake-flat racecourse beside the River Severn at the same instant, 18-year-old Graham Goode – later to become a household name with Channel 4 – was preparing to deliver his first solo live commentary at a race-meeting. Fittingly, it was a novices’ hurdle. Among the nine runners and riders heading to post were a blinkered Three Dons and John Kempton, carrying a distinctive whip with a large leather flap on the end. It was an important moment for the small yard, with the trainer’s mother Molly – who had also come to Worcester – betting a significant sum on the outcome, on the strength of the colt’s victory at Huntingdon on Easter Monday. Sadly, there was only a small crowd to witness Goode’s maiden commentary, with the biting wind and rain keeping many away.
The unusual whip – known in the trade as a ‘bull’s pizzle stick’ – was a calculated move to bring out the best in a temperamental animal. Three Dons, like many racehorses, needed encouragement to move into overdrive. Yet he stopped running when hit with an orthodox racing whip. The idea of the big flap was to produce an implement that would yield a resounding crack when brought down on the horse’s rump without hurting him. That afternoon, it worked like a charm. Sent off at 5/1 third-favourite, Three Dons overhauled the favourite, a hor
se called Threadbare, approaching the last and cruised home four lengths clear. Delighted head lad Colin Hemsley proceeded to lead his favourite horse into the winners’ enclosure, a sweat-rug neatly rolled under one arm, a yellow bucket in his left hand. After making sure Three Dons was comfortable, Kempton and Hemsley made for the single-storey green-and-white building that housed the jockeys’ room. There, a small television set in the corner, away from the wall-mounted wooden saddle-racks, would enable them to watch the big race from Liverpool.
Buckingham was spending the final tense minutes before the race formalities began collecting autographs on behalf of a female racegoer. He went around all 43 of his fellow Grand National jockeys – no easy task when conditions were so cramped that, according to Richard Pitman who, like Buckingham, was about to ride in the great race for the first time, ‘you only had enough room for one buttock on the bench.’ Like others before and since, Buckingham was struck by the unaccustomed quiet. ‘The lads were all sitting down,’ he recalled, ‘whereas they’d normally be larking about.’ Pitman, though ‘not very religious’, says he always went to church on the way to the course. ‘I don’t know why really,’ he adds – although, ‘no end of jockeys, even the blasphemers, will ask for the good Lord’s help at some stage in a race. “Just let me get over the next and I’ll be good for the rest of my life.”’ The air in the confined space was heady with the mingled aromas of sweat and leather, cigarette smoke and embrocation. John Lawrence may have been indulging in his pre-race regimen of glucose and orange quarters. Demand for the toilet would undoubtedly have been heavy. According to Biddlecombe, ‘I have never seen so many trying to have a last “go” – if you had held a tablespoon under them they could not have filled it.’ How the valets tending the jockeys managed to ensure that everyone was equipped with the correct colours and gear in such circumstances is a mystery, one suspects, known only to them.