by David Owen
There was one other victim, who can be seen just ahead of the cowed, crouching form of Meon Valley, caught in the act of hauling himself laboriously back to his feet. This was a ten-year-old bay gelding called Popham Down who, following the late withdrawal of Mill House, was the only representative in the field prepared by Fulke Walwyn, the five-times champion National Hunt trainer. As Meon Valley is rising, Popham Down’s jockey Macer Gifford is beginning his terminal descent, feet first, over his mount’s left shoulder. From the positions of those involved, it looks as though Meon Valley may somehow have interfered with his rival as he galloped past, prompting Gifford to lose his balance and topple from the saddle.
Watching in horror from the grandstand, her Zeiss binoculars trained unflaggingly on Gifford’s royal-blue-and-gold check cap, was Mrs Charles Turriff, Popham Down’s owner. At 27, the former Georgina Lewis was one of the youngest owners on the jump-racing circuit. This was by no means her sole accomplishment. She knew how to fly a helicopter, owned a stud farm near Wantage and competed in point-to-points, having been taught to race-ride by Fred Winter. She had attended finishing school in Gstaad, was dressed by Norman Hartnell and was acquainted with everyone from the Queen Mother to the senior stable lads at Walwyn’s Lambourn yard. Her husband, Charles, was the man behind the Turriff construction and engineering company. The couple travelled widely, visiting industrial centres from the United States to the Middle East and also Sudan, where Turriff had a huge contract to build a town and 26 villages for people displaced by the Aswan Dam. The company also built office blocks, such as the Turriff Building, a skyscraper on London’s Great West Road.
Mrs Turriff’s – and Popham Down’s – most memorable day in racing had come three years before, on 18 April 1964, when the seven-year-old had won the Scottish Grand National. The victory was obtained at the expense of Freddie in a thrilling race that saw the pair of them locked in combat over a long distance. Together over the last, Popham Down finally made his sizeable weight advantage tell on the run-in to win by half a length. It was said that the Bogside crowd’s uninhibited roar was audible in Arran. Mrs Turriff remembers flying to Bogside in a private plane and staying with a member of the Shanks family of Armitage Shanks fame. By the end of the race, she was paralysed with excitement and had to be lifted down from the stand in her elegant blue-grey suit by Walwyn and another spectator.
That was as good as it got for this horse who was foaled at a farm on the Marlborough Downs and spotted by his owner at the well-known Manton yard then run by George Todd, where her husband used to keep a string of Flat racers. He continued, nonetheless, to win decent races, including Warwick’s Crudwell Cup in both 1964 and 1965. Nearly five months after the second of these victories, he was a quietly fancied 22/1 shot for the 1966 Grand National, only to come down at Becher’s Brook, sending regular jockey Willie Robinson somersaulting. This was, of course, a big let-down for the Turriffs, looking on from the box of Alex Bird, the well-known punter at whose moated Alderley Edge house they had spent the previous night.
Robinson says he had hoped to win the Mildmay Memorial Handicap Chase on him one year at Sandown, ‘That was his type of race.’ In 1965, however, the pair fell in a running of the race won by Freddie, his old Bogside rival; in 1967, the two-day meeting incorporating the Mildmay, in early January, was frosted off. Robinson was to have reason to wish that the next fixture at the Esher course on 10 and 11 February had been abandoned too. In a hurdle race, his mount Kirriemuir crashed through the wing of the final flight, leaving the jockey with a broken leg. This left Robinson unavailable for Popham Down’s ill-fated second attempt on the Grand National – and while Johnny Haine, his Scottish Grand National partner, rode him, again at Sandown, ten days before the Big Race, by this time Jeff King had also been injured, meaning Haine’s services would be required to ride the strong-pulling Rondetto, King’s regular mount, at Aintree.
It was as a result of this painful and all too typical game of musical saddles that Macer Gifford ended up sitting, however briefly, on Popham Down’s back at Liverpool. Josh’s younger brother, Macer, was at that time enjoying a run of success with a steeplechaser called Larbawn, owned and trained in Warwickshire by Michael Marsh, another of Mrs Turriff’s many acquaintances. ‘Macer suited certain horses,’ Josh told me. ‘They used to run for him.’
A popular figure, the younger Gifford brother was looking set to become a farmer, until ‘out of the blue’ he told Josh he had been offered a ride in a so-called members’ race at Water Newton. ‘I said, “Go on then – grab it!”’ Gifford said, recalling how he put some breeches and boots in the post for him and then thought, ‘Christ! Have I done the right thing?’ He need not have worried. When they spoke that evening, it turned out Macer had finished third and last in the members’ race, but picked up two ‘spare’ rides and won on both. ‘That was it,’ Gifford said. ‘He was bitten.’
Though he was subsequently champion amateur jockey, Macer never attained the stature of his brother as a professional – few did. He died well before his time from motor-neurone disease.
Through her binoculars, Mrs Turriff – attired for the day in a specially made pink suit that matched her racing colours – watched anxiously as the now riderless Popham Down continued gamely on his way. By the time he was back in his stable lad’s grasp, she would have bitten out all of the fingers of her gloves.
See Notes on Chapter 17
Chapter 18
A Blanking of the Mind
The spectacle of 40 or more mounted thoroughbreds streaming over a steeplechase fence is as thrilling as anything in sport. Yet racing exacts a heavy toll on its participants, human and equine. All first-fence casualties at Aintree that day got up unscathed. Back at the winner’s enclosure, however, spectators would soon have cause to reflect on the risk jockeys run every time they swing themselves up into the saddle.
The blue Grand National ribbon was to be hung around the winner’s neck by an impeccably groomed man in a sheepskin jacket who walked with a cane in each hand. Tim Brookshaw was a former jockey who had finished second in the 1959 Grand National, in a celebrated ride that saw him negotiate the last eight fences without the benefit of stirrups. This was after his right iron had broken on landing over Becher’s Brook. Liverpool was also where Brookshaw had suffered a life-changing injury, breaking his back in a hurdle race in December 1963. Terry Biddlecombe, who won the race, saw Brookshaw fall ‘straight onto his chest’ after his mount had crashed through a wing of the fifth flight, whereupon his legs ‘jackknifed upwards towards his head,’ bending his torso in a way it was never meant to be bent.
In a sport of hard men, Brookshaw was admired universally for his uncompromising riding style which was married to an amiable disposition. Arkle’s jockey Pat Taaffe ‘never met a man more nonchalant or casual over the high fences’. Brookshaw, the Irishman said, had ‘only one method of going into a fence, kick, kick, kick and keep on kicking’. John Buckingham remembers him as ‘absolutely fearless’. Going into the last obstacle in a race, he would give his mount ‘one smack to take off, one in mid-air and one when he landed’. But Brookshaw was also the jockey who took the trouble to sit down and reassure Foinavon’s future partner before his first-ever ride, at Wolverhampton – no doubt with his trademark greeting, ‘How now, brown cow?’
Though you had to be unlucky to suffer an injury as debilitating as Brookshaw’s, every rider thundering over Aintree’s sodden turf that day knew that his next fracture was probably just around the corner. Here is an inventory of the career injury-records of some of the top jockeys of that time:
David Mould – broken collarbone (twelve times), leg fracture (four times), broken ribs, a punctured lung, damaged vertebrae. ‘I was long and skinny,’ he told me, ‘I broke.’
Biddlecombe – ‘I broke 47 bones and lost a kidney.’
Taaffe – fractured skull, fractured thigh, dislocated shoulder, broken collarbone (three times), broken leg, broken arm, broken ribs, broken wrist.
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Barry Brogan – broken jawbones (both sides), broken cheekbones (both), broken nose, broken foot, broken thumbs (both), broken wrist, collarbone, shoulder and ribs (every one on his left-hand side).
Buckingham’s tally, accumulated over 1,300-odd rides – he broke a collarbone, shoulder, arm, ribs, thumb, knee and ankle, and damaged his kidneys – almost makes it look like he got off lightly. Yet even he had to endure a nightmarishly comical drive after the final ride of his career in May 1971, when he fell off a horse called The Leaf at Wetherby, injuring his right knee. Another jockey, who Buckingham was driving home, had a broken left leg. They headed back south with Buckingham’s left foot operating accelerator and brake, while the other jockey, from the passenger-seat, worked the clutch with his good right leg.
The sheer size of fences and field made the National a high-risk race for jockeys. It was only three years since Paddy Farrell had fractured his spine at The Chair in a fall that left his mount, Border Flight, suspended on his back on the fence above the spot where his stricken jockey was lying. Thankfully, quick-thinking spectators managed to pull Farrell clear before the half-tonne horse slid thrashing to the ground.
Ron Atkins remembers the scene among the jockeys after his first National ride, when he finished 13th. ‘It was like the Battle of the Somme,’ he says. ‘That was the first thing that hit me after we’d finished: everybody was still slapping each other on the back, but it dawned on me – there were quite a lot of guys got hurt here.’ After the 1965 race, Brough Scott, who sustained a suspected fractured clavicle, found himself in an ambulance being transferred to Walton Hospital with ‘various people who were worse off than me’. These included Johnny Lehane, who was ‘really quite badly hurt’, and the Duke of Albuquerque, the persevering Spanish amateur rider, who was whisked off behind the hospital-curtains groaning about his knee. Entries for that year in the Aintree jockeys’ book, which lists all injuries, show that no fewer than 11 of the 47 jockeys received treatment after the race, with Lehane given ‘¼ morphine’. After suffering another heavy fall in his seventh and final National ride in 1976, aged 57, the grand old Spanish duke reckoned he had sustained over a hundred fractures at Aintree alone.
Only one jockey – James Wynne in 1862 – has actually been killed in the Grand National and rider fatalities in jumps racing in general in the post-war era have been infrequent, though not unknown. Doug Barrott’s death in May 1973 after a fall at Newcastle in a very prominent race, the Whitbread Gold Cup, is still perhaps the most widely remembered example. Fatalities in the sport did, however, happen often enough in the 1950s and 1960s for jockeys to be mindful of the risks they were running. Six decades on, Michael Scudamore still remembers how ‘a boy called Ivor Beckinsale’ was riding in front of him in a race at Wolverhampton when he hit a concrete upright. ‘I didn’t know until next morning it killed him.’ Scudamore says that after this, ‘we asked for and got’ a falling-area to the inside of the course, allowing horses and jockeys to roll out of harm’s way unobstructed. Nonetheless, it does make you wonder why, by 1967, safety wasn’t taken a little more seriously.
Attitudes were different then. The sport was populated by military men who had known the reality of war and to whom, in comparison, the occasional broken bone suffered by those paid to do a much-coveted job must have seemed a trifling matter. Other sports were more dangerous too. Motor racing’s attrition-rate at the time was, in retrospect, appalling: within a month of the 1967 Grand National, Lorenzo Bandini, the talented Italian driver, had sustained fatal injuries in a fiery accident at the Monaco Grand Prix.
The shared perils did engender a special kinship between jump-jockeys, even the bitterest rivals. Riders were often first to visit their fallen colleagues in hospital – sometimes for the eminently practical purpose of reuniting them with clothes and personal effects left hanging on their weighing-room peg. After Stan Mellor’s mount trod on him in the course of another Liverpool fall, Biddlecombe and Bobby Beasley walked through the hospital ward where he had been taken, but failed at first to recognise their injured colleague whose head was ‘swollen like a football’. Jockeys were also a superstitious bunch, in stubborn defiance of a large body of evidence suggesting that their quirks and rituals made not the slightest difference to the horrors that befell them. According to Pat Buckley, ‘We would never put on a new set of colours without throwing them on the floor and having the jockeys step on them.’ The 1972 Grand National winner, Graham Thorner, famously wore the underpants he had on that day in all his races for years to come.
In spite of the physical dangers they face, jump-jockeys tend to play down the suggestion that they must be imbued with raw courage in industrial quantities. I don’t think this is false modesty. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the drug-like hold that the desire to race-ride exerts on them, at least before the often harsh reality is drummed home. ‘Being a jockey is something that you want to do desperately,’ a reflective Jeremy Speid-Soote told me. ‘It would almost be something that you need to do.’ By this token, race-riding, much like writing, is a calling, not merely a profession. And since they are compelled to race, and therefore to fall, jump-jockeys are obliged simply to accept injury as an inevitability (what the French call une fatalité). They have no choice in the matter, so courage doesn’t enter into it. As Pat Taaffe put it, writing in 1972, ‘We will fall on an average once in every 15 rides and most of these falls will be painless. It’s just the odd one where you get hurt … You don’t need a great deal of courage to ride under these conditions. It’s more a blanking of the mind.’
This stoical attitude, combined with the precarious financial circumstances of all but a fortunate few, meant that professional jockeys reacted in an unusual way when they did get hurt. ‘You don’t lie on the other side of a fence thinking, “Ooh! I broke my leg. Oh deary me”,’ as Mellor, the first man to ride more than 1,000 winners over jumps, told me. ‘You’re thinking, “Damn it! I’ll miss that bloody ride on Friday now. And I won’t be able to go to such-and-such a course on Saturday. And that bugger will get in on that horse’.” The way he puts it, a fractured limb for a jockey is a bit like a cancelled train for a commuter.
It was in the mid-to-late 1960s that thinking on safety did finally start to advance, under the influence of riders like Atkins and John Lawrence. It was in the aftermath of Brookshaw’s and Farrell’s accidents indeed, that Lawrence came up with the idea that has become the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. Not that every innovation made such a lot of difference. Buckley remembers riding while wearing ‘a piece of polystyrene’ on his back, ‘fastened with a Velcro strap around the waist’. This, he said, was ‘almost useless’. At least jockeys in the 1967 Grand National were equipped with proper hard helmets secured with chinstraps, as opposed to the cork ‘skid-lids’ that were standard headgear until only a few years before. Both Buckley and Buckingham can recall requiring head-stitches in wounds sustained while wearing the old-style caps. Says Buckingham, ‘They never even numbed it.’
The bones of horses can also break when subjected to the rigours of Aintree. And since thoroughbreds cannot be immobilised like a human patient, injuries that are no more than a painful inconvenience for jockeys – a broken leg, say, or a broken shoulder – can often amount to a death-sentence for their mounts. A list of equine fatalities attributable to the Grand National, compiled by Mick Mutlow, a specialist on the race, runs to more than 100 names, starting with Dictator in 1839. One of these deaths occurred in 1967 at the third fence, the big open-ditch.
As the 41 survivors galloped towards the six-foot-wide ditch guarding this fence, Princeful, Castle Falls and Penvulgo were leading the way. Foinavon was no longer prominent. ‘I took a pull after the first fence,’ Buckingham recalls, ‘and they were gone like bats out of hell.’
In around eighth or tenth place going over the obstacle was a horse called April Rose ridden by Major Piers Bengough, an Eton-educated cavalry officer who would go on to serve as the Queen’s representative at Ascot ra
cecourse. The pairing had finished 11th in 1965. Indeed, April Rose had jumped more than 200 Aintree fences over the years without once falling. According to Bengough, the horse had ‘the most economical action jumping a fence. He would hardly pick his legs up, yet somehow the Liverpool fences suited him.’ The 12-year-old gelding, who was trained by Bassnet’s trainer Alec Kilpatrick, looked to have negotiated yet another Aintree barrier. A stride or two past the fence, however, the tall black-and-silver-clad figure of Bengough toppled over the horse’s right shoulder, leaving his sure-footed mount to carry on without him.
With a fence so formidable, you can encounter big trouble if your horse doesn’t take off from the correct distance away from the ditch, as two more jockeys discovered to their cost. John Edwards, another amateur rider, says that his mount, Dun Widdy, took off a stride too soon, yanking the reins out of his hands and sending them flying over the horse’s head. He took a further stride on landing and trod on one rein, detaching it from the bit. ‘I only had one rein and no steering,’ Edwards recalls. ‘I was a total passenger. All I could do was go with the others.’ Edwards managed somehow to stay in the saddle for one full circuit and to pull the horse up after the water-jump. The story has a silver lining: having run only half a National, Dun Widdy was fresh enough to win a race at Cheltenham on Edwards’s 21st birthday five days later.
Richard Pitman’s mount Dorimont would normally have been partnered by owner Bill Shand Kydd, a keen horseman and powerboatracer who was related, via their respective marriages, to Lord Lucan. But Shand Kydd – who had loaned Pitman a white Rolls-Royce to transport his bride Jenny to church on their wedding-day – had recently broken a collarbone twice in the space of a fortnight and was out of action.
In a symptom of his inexperience and, no doubt, excitement, Grand National debutant Pitman had forgotten that the fence he was approaching at speed was an open ditch. He remembered ‘too late’. Dorimont stood off a stride, launched himself and ‘to my horror started his descent before the fence had been reached. The noise was deafening as we crashed to the ground.’ Afterwards, Pitman remembers wishing, like a cricketer bowled out for a duck, that time could be wound back, ‘just so that I could have a second chance to prove myself.’