by David Owen
Pitman would get his second chance – and complete the course – 12 months later. But for a horse called Vulcano, this latest crack at the National – his third – would be his last.
Two years earlier, Vulcano had won the race at Baldoyle in which Foinavon had blotted his copybook so badly. He was then sold to Enid Chanelle who had built a successful retail business specialising in stylish but affordable women’s fashion. A noted beauty, who was painted in oils by Sir William Russell Flint, Miss Chanelle was also a well-known public figure in her own right. She compèred the first fashion show at the Royal Albert Hall and hosted a television programme called Dream Girls. Vulcano was moved across the Irish Sea and installed in Captain Ryan Price’s yard in Sussex. In the 1965 Grand National, he was pulled up a few fences from home; the following year, he showed decent stamina in the soft going and finished ninth. For the 1967 race, however, the yard’s main focus was on Honey End. Vulcano was a largely ignored 40/1 chance, although he was tipped to win on the day of the race by the sports editor of the Irish Independent.
What happened to him that grey afternoon is a textbook illustration of how calamity can strike at any time in the National, and with almost no warning. All had seemed to be going smoothly, with Speid-Soote, his jockey, choosing a line near the inner and the horse jumping proficiently. Then Dorimont came crashing down. According to Speid-Soote, ‘my little man had nowhere to go, but he jumped it well’. On landing perilously close to the fallen horse’s flailing hooves, however, Vulcano was kicked on the stifle, a bone at the front of the hind leg. Says Speid-Soote, ‘It was very clear something bad was wrong, so I pulled him up and jumped off.’
The horse’s adrenalin was pumping and, with the rest of the field receding into the distance, it was hard to make him stand still. Nonetheless, the gloomy prognosis was swiftly delivered and, once his saddle had been removed, Vulcano was put down there and then beside the great spruce fence. Speid-Soote, feeling ‘very sick’, was met by the side of the course by Price, who would later have to break the bad news to Miss Chanelle. ‘It’s not a nice job and the vets hate doing it,’ Speid-Soote reflects. ‘The only thing I do think and hope is that for a few minutes the adrenalin is really, really rushing and possibly they don’t get the pain that they would get after ten minutes. The one you must feel sorriest for is the girl or lad who looks after the horse and has an empty stable the next morning.’ The episode appears to have earned Tophams a reprimand from the RSPCA. Minutes of the company’s October 1967 board meeting allude to the travelling inspectors report ‘sent to us by the HQ’. It was generally agreed, the minutes note, that the racecourse vet would have to be consulted over ‘Vulcano’s shooting without the use of approved screens’.
Dorimont himself was killed at Doncaster within a year, in a fall that Shand Kydd, who was riding him in a hunters’ chase, remembers knocked him unconscious. He was ‘a lovely old thing’, he says.
See Notes on Chapter 18
Chapter 19
A Small Blue-And-White Drinking Mug
Leading the way over Becher’s Brook was Penvulgo, another of Vulgan’s progeny, ridden by the extrovert Cork-born jockey, Johnny Lehane, popularly known as ‘Tumper’.
Less than two-and-a-half years later, in the stillness of early morning, at the obscure Devon yard where he had recently found work, Lehane appears to have drunk a musty-smelling liquid from what the police called a ‘small blue-and-white drinking mug’. The liquid was Gramoxone W – paraquat. Having urged his employer’s wife to get help, a vomiting Lehane, going downhill fast, was later rushed to hospital in Exeter, but found to be dead on arrival. He was 35.
What would drive a man who, much of the time, was, as his friend Terry Biddlecombe said, ‘the happiest little jockey you could wish to meet’ to condemn himself in this way to a painful and pitifully premature death? It is hard to be sure: not even the coroner, who recorded an open verdict, was altogether satisfied that Lehane meant to kill himself. ‘My reason for saying this,’ he explained, ‘is that, apparently, having drunk this stuff, he set off and started enlisting help as if either he was going to be sorry for what he had done or, alternatively, because this was a way of drawing attention to himself because his hopes perhaps had gone astray.’ Lehane’s employer told the inquest that the ex-jockey said he had been drinking that night. And an engagement to a Honiton woman was in the process of being broken off. A lethal dose of paraquat can be very small. It is possible that this was more a misguided, drunken impulse than an act of despair.
The greatest day of Lehane’s career had come three days before his 24th birthday, on 7 April 1958, when he rode a horse called Gold Legend to victory in the Irish Grand National. Soon afterwards, he followed the example of many of his compatriots, whether jockeys or not, by crossing the Irish Sea to try his luck in England. At first, things went well: Lehane finished fourth in the jockeys’ championship two years running, with contemporaries remembering him as an outstanding natural horseman. But after steering Aintree specialist Mr What home third, in wet and wintry conditions, in the 1962 Grand National, his fortunes changed. It started to become clear that his most successful days were behind him.
In a sport full of strong characters, Lehane appeared to be one of the strongest. He had a flair for nicknames (although the origins of his own were unclear) and, like many other leading jockeys of the day, partied at least as hard as he rode. Biddlecombe remembers him crawling around the floor looking for his false teeth at his 21st birthday party. The Irishman was also on hand for a holiday in Majorca during which Biddlecombe and Josh Gifford went water-skiing in the sea on wooden lavatory seats.
Lehane was known too for his exceptional generosity. According to Richard Pitman, ‘He delighted in buying drinks for everybody in the local whether he knew them or not. He would give toys to children in the street and presents to older people.’ Tim Norman, for one, has reason to be thankful that this characteristic could also stretch to passing on spare rides to rival jockeys. ‘If it wasn’t for Johnny Lehane, I wouldn’t have ridden Anglo,’ the 1966 Grand National-winner told me, explaining how the Irishman walked into the weighing-room at Cheltenham in the week before Christmas 1965 and offered him a ride he could not take advantage of the following day on one of Fred Winter’s horses at Windsor. That was Anglo – and Norman duly rode him to victory both on the banks of the Thames and, more importantly, at Aintree three months later. Anglo was not the only Grand National-winner Lehane rode. But though he was sometimes in the right place when it came to Liverpool horses, he never managed to be so at the right time.
The other side of the coin, insofar as his generosity was concerned, is that when he did have cash, it burned a hole in his pocket. ‘When he had money, he couldn’t keep it, he used to squander it,’ Biddlecombe told me. And his lifestyle seems to have been peripatetic even by the standard of jockeys who thought little of driving 50–70,000 miles a season. According to Pitman: ‘He had friends in every part of the country and would stay a short while with each, leaving behind him enough clothes to kit three men.’ Another jockey told me that the boot of Lehane’s car was ‘just a mass of dirty clothes’.
There was also a darker, thin-skinned side to Lehane’s personality. Bobby Beasley, another Irish jockey, whose taste for booze drove him to alcoholism, recalled a curious incident when he found Lehane ‘giving his horse a fair old hiding’ down at the start of a novice chase – a category of race viewed with apprehension by riders due to the inexperience of their mounts. When Beasley asked his rival what he thought he was doing, Lehane grinned and said he would ‘rather frighten them before they frighten me.’ According to Biddlecombe, though he was a sincere friend, Lehane ‘took life seriously from time to time’ and was ‘sensitive to a degree’, becoming ‘really depressed’ if he had a run of losing rides. ‘I sometimes took him by the shoulders to shake him out of it.’
This more fragile side of Lehane’s nature must have made it difficult to cope with the implacable highs and lows tha
t are a jump-jockey’s lot. But, when his career ended and he could no longer sweep away the darkness by doing anything as clear-cut as notching a winner, well, perhaps it just hung over him. Perhaps in those grim moments as he drank weedkiller from the small blue and white drinking mug, life had taken on the appearance of an unbreakable run of losing rides.
Lehane died on 6 September 1969. On 8 April 1967, however, the flame of ambition still burned as he led the field over the most famous fence in steeplechasing while nurturing hopes of steering home the first Grand National winner to be trained within 50 miles of Liverpool for 18 years.
With an unbroken view of the fence, Lehane and Penvulgo met Becher’s perfectly, the Irishman knowing better than to be tempted by the treacherous inside line. Spared the severest drop and with his jockey thrusting his weight backwards to help him, Penvulgo scrambled for just a step or two on landing before getting back into his stride. In second place, Roy Edwards and Princeful took the obstacle just to the leader’s inside. And on they went, thrilled and relieved to have Aintree’s signature fence behind them, Lehane’s white cap and gloves standing out in the afternoon gloom.
Trained in Cheshire by Dick Francis’s elder brother Doug, Penvulgo was to race over Becher’s once more, in March 1968. This time the encounter had a sombre outcome. When well in contention in the Topham Trophy, ridden on this occasion by a jockey called Jimmy Morrissey, the horse got Becher’s wrong and shattered the bones behind both knees. This meant, in the words of Sporting Life, that ‘to all intents and purposes only his hind legs were operational’. And yet Penvulgo cleared eight more Aintree fences and laboured home fourth of 16. Not surprisingly, on dismounting, his jockey said the horse seemed terribly groggy. X-rays then revealed the injuries. A decision was taken to put him down.
Of the 38 runners who made it to Becher’s in the 1967 Grand National, all bar one negotiated it successfully, even John Edwards with his single rein. There were one or two close calls. ‘I nearly fell,’ Scottish Final’s jockey Nobby Howard told me. ‘He stood off too far, but he found a leg.’ In the end, though, the sole victim was a horse named Border Fury ridden by another amateur jockey, David Crossley Cooke.
Lying in about 30th place and on the wide outside, Border Fury started to tack noticeably to the inner in the last few strides before the fence. He cleared it comfortably enough, but at an angle, making the landing particularly hard to judge. He duly crumpled and rolled ineluctably over onto his right flank, impeding Limeking and forcing John Cook’s mount Ross Sea to execute a neat sidestep. If there was a consolation for Crossley Cooke – who eventually remounted and watched the rest of the race on horseback on the inside of the course – it was that there can rarely have been a more gentle fall at Becher’s.
Clearing the fence just ahead of Crossley Cooke as gravity took over, the riderless and blinkered Popham Down was starting to make progress up through the field. Slap bang in the middle of the course and the middle of the pack was Foinavon, jumping solidly. Another jockey had told John Buckingham that he wouldn’t recognise the fence as Becher’s as he was galloping into it. It was good advice. ‘When you get halfway over it – agh. That’s Becher’s,’ Buckingham recalled. ‘I mean the drop on the other side. You have to sit right back, like going over a mountain. One thing about Liverpool – the fences are so much bigger there. And you can feel the horses really going back and heaving over. You can feel the extra effort.’
Next up, though, was a fence widely regarded as the closest thing Aintree had to a soft touch. It was the fence where Michael Daley and his mates were standing, a fence so little regarded that its only name was a reference-point to its daunting neighbour. Next up was the ‘one after Becher’s’.
See Notes on Chapter 19
Chapter 20
An Understandable Slayer
It is often said that the ‘one after Becher’s’ is the smallest fence on the Grand National course. This needs qualifying slightly: both the first and last fences were – at 4ft 6in in 1967 – exactly the same height; the water-jump is technically the lowest fence of all, at just 2ft 6in, but this is, in effect, a long-jump for horses, with a 15-foot spring required to touch down on dry land.
What it is probably true to say is that, at 3.27pm or so on that dreary afternoon, as the 37 remaining runners thundered towards it, the gorse-dressed seventh fence was the most disdained obstacle on the Grand National course. This was attributable chiefly to its location, in the midst of Aintree’s most daunting hazards, directly after Becher’s and before the Canal Turn and Valentine’s Brook. For Dick Francis, the former jockey turned journalist and racing-thriller writer, it was ‘innocuous and simple: just a fence between Becher’s and Canal Turn. No more.’ In the previous year’s race, it had caught out only Flamecap, a long-odds outsider; in 1965, only a horse called Leslie. Foinavon’s trainer John Kempton’s race had actually ended there in one of the two Nationals he had contested as a jockey on Seas End, in 1962. But that was because he had opted to pull his tired mount up there; it was not the result of the fence bamboozling them.
However, as Francis also knew all too well, this had not always been the way things were at Liverpool. There had been a time, a decade or more earlier, when the Grand National’s seventh fence warranted the very greatest respect. During this period, he wrote, it was ‘an understandable slayer. I fell there twice myself … It used to lie in a slight dip and it trapped a horse or two on every circuit.’
Earlier still, in 1938, the fence would have prevented the making of Grand National history were it not for a chivalrous gesture by Fred Rimell, a jockey riding a horse called Provocative. A length ahead of Rimell going over the obstacle was Bruce Hobbs, aged 17 years and three months, aboard Battleship, an unusually small chestnut stallion. When Battleship pitched on landing, his young rider shot over his shoulder and would have hit the turf but for the intervention of Rimell, who grabbed him by the seat of his pants and hauled him back into the saddle with the immortal words, ‘Where do you think you’re going, mate?’ As luck would have it, Provocative then fell at the Canal Turn, the very next fence, while Hobbs drove Battleship on to the narrowest of victories. In doing so, he became the youngest jockey to win a National, while his bloody-nosed mount became the first National-winning horse to be both American-owned and -bred.
In the four Nationals between 1949 and 1952, the ‘one after Becher’s’ ended the chances of no fewer than 22 runners – the sort of toll you would expect of Becher’s itself. At this time, however, not only did the fence lie in a dip, it was almost five feet high.
It was the grim Grand National of 1954 that led to the fence’s apparent emasculation. No fewer than four of the 29 runners died. Afterwards, the furore – anticipating more recent controversies about the race’s toughness or, as some would have it, cruelty – was such that questions were asked in the House of Commons and the home secretary invited members of the National Hunt Committee to meet him. The RSPCA also made proposals. Around six weeks before the 1955 National, Mrs Topham announced steps to ease the hazards on the course, focusing on fences six (Becher’s) and seven. At Becher’s, the ditch was simply made more shallow, in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of injury to horses which fell back into it. Alterations to the ‘one after Becher’s’ were more substantial. As The Times reported, ‘At number seven fence … the height has been lowered by six inches to bring it to 4ft 6in, the minimum allowed by rule number 44 of the National Hunt Rules. This is a plain thorn fence which the runners meet just after turning left-handed, and facing towards the canal. The reduction will give some relief just after the runners have negotiated Becher’s.’
A Mr A.W. Moss, chief secretary of the RSPCA, welcomed the changes, while observing that ‘only by the test of this year’s race will one be able to judge whether these modifications have the desired effect.’ The League Against Cruel Sport did not feel satisfied that enough had yet been done to prevent ‘the distressing casualties among competing horses which have so shocked the Briti
sh public in recent years.’ The jockeys who rode the first two home in the 1954 race begged to differ. ‘I did not think it was necessary to alter any of the jumps at Aintree,’ said Bryan Marshall. ‘There is nothing wrong with the course; they should have left it alone,’ said George Slack.
Even at the minimum height, the seventh fence ended the hopes of a further three runners – 10 per cent of the field – in the 1955 National, which was run in conditions so wet that the water-jump was omitted.
Ahead of the 1957 race, the RSPCA actually recommended that the seventh fence be removed altogether. This was to make room for the re-siting of the following fence, the Canal Turn, famous for the sharp, 90-degree change in direction runners are required to effect, either while clearing the obstacle or immediately thereafter. Eight days before Grand National day Mrs Topham announced the rejection of the RSPCA’s latest recommendations. The National Hunt stewards, she said, had gone carefully into the question and, apart from a comment that the seventh fence should be lifted from a hollow, had nothing further to add. Were the Canal Turn fence indeed to be moved back, she added with trademark pugnacity, it might well prove more dangerous.
It was the removal of this ‘slight dip’ alluded to by Dick Francis that appeared to make the difference. In the intervening decade, casualties at the fence had been few and far between.
There was at least one man in the 1967 Grand National field who retained a healthy respect for the ‘one after Becher’s’, however. For Terry Biddlecombe, it was ‘a trick fence’ that looked like ‘a baby hurdle’. This meant it was not respected by the horses who, he said, ‘flatten out over it’. When Norther, the horse running beside him at Aintree that day made a small mistake there on the first circuit, Biddlecombe shouted sympathetically across to his jockey, John Lawrence, in his West Country burr, ‘That’s a bastard, isn’t it?’ At the time, the close proximity of the Canal Turn would have rendered a longer discussion hazardous. But as the patrician Lawrence was to observe pithily in Horse and Hound the following week, ‘Just how big a bastard neither he nor I could know!’