by David Owen
‘I just galloped into them,’ Buckingham told me. At that stage, he still had one clear blue eye fastened firmly on the chocolate-and-white hooped cap of Josh Gifford, a few lengths ahead. ‘Josh went into it and refused. I swung across and missed Josh’s quarters. There was a small gap in the fence that was unaffected by the pile-up and we approached it at a 45-degree angle. Foinavon had reduced to a canter and jumped it off his hocks like a showjumper. I kicked on away from the fence.’ The new leaders passed under the noses of Stan Mellor and John Lawrence standing at the outside rail. ‘Stan Mellor was saying, “Go on Buck! You’ll win.”’ Even so, the penny didn’t drop that he was in front until he had jumped the next fence, the Canal Turn, negotiated the right-angled corner and surveyed the approach to Valentine’s. ‘There was nothing there. I couldn’t believe it.’
On one level, this feat of navigation was the product of outrageous good fortune: had Buckingham and Foinavon chosen any other route, or run the first three-quarters of the race any faster, their path would almost certainly have been blocked. Yet this was a pairing that bracketed a sensible, clear-thinking horseman with an unusually placid thoroughbred. Both deserve some credit. Buckingham, though hardly at the top of his sport, was an experienced jockey in the middle of his 805th ride. He had shown evidence of his coolness and independent-mindedness before, once winning a ten-horse race at Market Rasen after all his rivals had gone the wrong way and been disqualified. As for Foinavon, Pat Taaffe, twice a Grand National-winner and the jockey who had ridden him in most of his early jumps-races, subsequently had this to say, ‘I think if you’d asked me to pick a horse in that race to find a way through I would have chosen Foinavon. The others might panic, but not this one.’
Among the jockeys who noticed Foinavon thread his way through were Gifford and Brian Fletcher. According to Gifford, Honey End, the favourite, was ‘jumping like a buck’, but ‘absolutely froze’ when he saw the ‘tragedy’ – note the choice of word. Gifford went on: ‘I turned around three or four times. I thought, “Don’t panic, don’t panic” … I was turning around to wait to do something sensible and Johnny came by me. If I had waited another split-second, I’m not saying [Honey End] would have jumped it, but I’d have had a lead.’ Fletcher, the teenager from the north-east riding his first Grand National on Red Alligator, was just behind the leaders as the pile-up happened and had no time to avoid being sucked in. ‘I was thrown off the horse, but I kept hold of him and at the third attempt I was able to jump back on – he was a tall, rangy horse, so it wasn’t easy,’ Fletcher said. ‘I saw John jumping the fence because, as I was scrambling to get back on my horse, I saw this thing come from nowhere. I was trying to get a clear piece of space to jump back up.’ Fletcher finally got over the wrecked obstacle at the third attempt. Though Red Alligator was full of running, once Fletcher had got his bearings he realised he was a long way behind.
There was one other runner who managed to clear the 23rd fence at the first time of asking that afternoon. Tellingly, he had been even further back in the field than Foinavon. In fact, Packed Home, the US Ambassador to Ireland’s horse, had been dead last at Becher’s, the previous fence. Jockey Tommy Carberry, moreover, had been thinking about pulling up when he saw ‘this carry-on in front of me’ with ‘more coming back towards me than going away from me’. He went straight up to the fence, jumped and duly landed on the other side. ‘I was more surprised than the horse,’ Carberry said. ‘It was like the waters of the Red Sea parting.’
Carberry was one of a trio of Irish jockeys who, discounting the incapacitated Kirtle Lad, were first over in pursuit of the already distant Foinavon. The other two were Francis Shortt on a horse called Aussie and Jackie Cullen riding Quintin Bay, the old rival Foinavon had edged out to win the Foxrock Cup at Leopardstown two years before, in the race that qualified him to run in a Grand National.
Five years earlier, Shortt had been responsible for the best performance Pat Taaffe ever saw from a jockey at Liverpool, bringing Fredith’s Son home in fifth place in the 1962 National. Taaffe wrote, ‘This was the sort of ride you wouldn’t have wished on your worst enemy. Fredith’s Son didn’t jump a single fence correctly. He jumped them crookedly, landed parallel to the fence, twisted and did just about everything but fall … I don’t believe there was any other jockey in the world who could have completed the course with him.’
In 1967, Shortt acknowledges that he ‘wasn’t going all that sweetly’ when lying 16th at Becher’s, some way behind the leaders. ‘My goose was nearly cooked,’ he says. And yet, once the pile-up developed, he came within an ace of stealing Buckingham’s thunder, nearly squeezing through on the inside when Foinavon was still, if not a speck on the horizon, then a good few strides away. As the Irish Field reported, Shortt ‘had time to pick his passage through to a gap in the fence. He was about to shoot through the gap when a loose horse, running down the fence, crashed into him. A split-second earlier, he would have been through and away.’ As it was, he got over at the third attempt, with a leg full of thorns and Cullen just in front of him.
Hard on the heels of this Irish trio was Terry Biddlecombe on Greek Scholar, the handsome chestnut with the distinctive white diamond on his forehead, who, the jockey says, ‘always wanted to please’. Just behind the leaders on the inside, Greek Scholar landed on top of the fence giving Biddlecombe grounds to hope they would be ‘knocked over’ to the other side by the horses behind them. As it was, the jockey had to turn around, back off and execute a small circle. Castle Falls’ rider Stan Hayhurst then remembers the pair walking through what was left of the fence, with the effervescent Biddlecombe shouting, ‘Come on lads! There’s only one gone on.’
Looking on from the stand, the teenage Pinfold had a camera with him. Like other spectators, however, he was so transfixed by what he was witnessing that he didn’t think to take a snap of Foinavon jumping the Canal Turn, surrounded by three loose horses, even though the runaway leader passed just feet in front of him. ‘I did take one of the next couple,’ he says.
The men in the jockeys’ room at Worcester racecourse were similarly spellbound as O’Hehir distilled the drama into vivid commentary. ‘He’s about 50, 100 yards in front of everything else. They’re all pulling up …’ Beside himself with excitement, John Kempton leapt up onto a table to get a better view. In his office in Rainham, a flabbergasted Mac Bennellick, Foinavon’s former co-owner, could hardly believe his eyes – or that he hadn’t staked a penny on the horse. In Buckingham’s home village of Chipping Warden, the football match being played by the village team was abruptly halted so players could see if the local man held on to his lead. At home in Finchampstead, Cyril Watkins, perhaps rueing his decision not to try to get to Aintree, could not bear to watch. He retreated to the garden with Shoes and Socks, his Airedale terriers.
In Wealdstone, north-west London, 17-year-old Dennis Lewell was thrilled to bits. A few hours previously he had entrusted his friend Alan Sweeney with half-a-crown to place on Foinavon. Sweeney looked old enough to do business in the local bookie with no questions asked. Strangely, the wider Foinavon’s lead stretched, and the more excited Lewell got, the more uncharacteristically quiet Sweeney became.
In the TV room on the Orion oil rig, two of Eric Brown’s colleagues – the important one and the roustabout who had purchased the real Foinavon ticket in his sweepstake – were now roaring the horse home. Brown was desperately hoping one of the chasing pack would catch up while pondering how he was going to cope with being the equivalent of almost two weeks’ wages out of pocket.
The issue now for Buckingham was keeping the horse going and on his feet over six tough fences in his unwonted state of glorious isolation. He talked to his mount. He pushed and kicked. He urged him on once or twice when he tried to duck out. He sweated pints, in spite of the foul day. He never stopped working. And all the time, underpinning the beat of his racing heart, he heard the drumming of Foinavon’s hooves and felt the rhythmic motion of his flanks underneath him.
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The last mile of the race resembled the plot of a spaghetti western, with Buckingham the bandit escaping with the loot, as author Vian Smith first observed, and the rest of the field the chasing posse. Biddlecombe went for broke on Greek Scholar, the first fancied horse to set off in pursuit, and caught up with the Irish contingent as they all converged on an inviting hole in the 28th fence, the third from home. Honey End was also eating up the ground near the inside rail, though Gifford narrowly avoided a very nasty moment when Popham Down crashed back onto the racecourse a few yards behind him, splintering the rail on impact. The loose horse had sneaked through the narrow gap before the 23rd that he had perhaps had his eye on all along while chaos was raging.
Going over Anchor Bridge and crossing the Melling Road for the fourth and final time, Greek Scholar moved into second, but Foinavon still had a healthy lead. It was on the long run to the second-last, with Honey End charging ahead like a six-furlong sprinter under Gifford’s desperate urging, that you began to think they might just catch him – to the joyous relief of an army of punters. Buckingham jumped the last, sensibly enough, with particular deliberation, and the gap had been whittled down so much by this point that commentator Peter O’Sullevan declared, ‘It may still be a race.’ It was at about this time though, listening on the car radio at that Edinburgh point-to-point, that George Pottinger’s frustration at not following his 750/1 hunch got the better of him. He hit the dashboard with his fist.
Pottinger’s instincts turned out to be well-founded. Having reached the Elbow and regained the rail, Foinavon gathered himself and started pulling away for the first time since the chasing pack had finally conquered the ‘one after Becher’s’. Honey End had shot his bolt and it was Red Alligator, having surged through from towards the back of the field, who was finishing fastest of all up Aintree’s famously strength-sapping run-in. After a final glance back, Buckingham reached the winning-post, whereupon it looked like all remaining strength drained instantly from his body. He had 15 lengths in hand. A deeply disappointed Gifford held on to second on Honey End from the fast-finishing Red Alligator with Greek Scholar a tired fourth. The US Ambassador to Ireland’s horse Packed Home, the only other finisher to clear the 23rd first time, clung on dourly to fifth, in spite of a broken pedal bone. Popham Down crossed the line along with another loose horse in around eighth place, just in front of the gallant Nobby Howard, in his National Velvet colours, on Scottish Final.
See Notes on Chapter 22
Chapter 23
‘They Might Call This the Foinavon Fence’
For many followers of the race, Foinavon’s shock victory triggered reactions ranging from astonishment to despair. Unlike the FA Cup where feats of giant-killing are widely celebrated, upsets on this scale in racing tend not to be much appreciated. They leave too many out of pocket. The spectrum of emotions felt by those actually connected to the horse was, of course, very different.
On the turf in front of Aintree’s stands, an exultant Clifford Booth hurled the sheets he had been carrying into the air and set off to catch Foinavon and lead him in. With the less than pristine clarity of the Aintree sound-system at that time, it was only when he caught sight of his horse passing the Elbow that he had realised he was in the lead. A couple of minutes later, as he clutched the left-hand rein by the gelding’s hot muzzle, Booth heard an unfamiliar voice, ‘Here you are, son. You lost these.’ The voice belonged to a policeman. The jettisoned quarter-sheets had landed on his head and dislodged his helmet.
In the jockeys’ room at Worcester racecourse, John Kempton jumped into the air with what one witness remembers as an ‘extraordinary screech’. The table on which he was standing creaked and groaned and, Kempton thinks, ‘broke a bit’. He dashed out of the room in a state of high excitement. Driver Tony Hutt realised instantly that Foinavon’s shock victory meant he would have to go and bring him back from Liverpool after all. He braced himself for another long journey through the night. In the event, head lad Colin Hemsley drove the horsebox carrying Three Dons back from Worcester to Compton, enabling Hutt to have a nap in the vehicle before unloading Foinavon’s stable companion and heading north.
On venturing back in from his garden in Berkshire, Cyril Watkins found his wife Iris in tears. She had sat through the tense closing stages as the horse agonisingly picked his way one by one over the last six fences, although she did have to ‘hide my face in my jumper once or twice’, as one might during the scariest bits of a horror film. She later chided her husband affectionately as ‘a big coward’. The telephone started to ring. And ring. One of these calls was from the flabbergasted Mac Bennellick. The message was effectively, ‘Thank God you had the guts to go through with it.’ Flush with the success of his bets, as well as the victory itself, Watkins told his erstwhile partner there and then that he would give him half the first-place prize money of £15,879 and 10 shillings. This was even though Bennellick had surrendered his half-share in the horse. ‘I think it’s the decent thing to do,’ Watkins said. ‘We have been good friends for years.’ Arrangements were swiftly made for a celebratory dinner with family and locally based friends that evening at The George, a silver-service hotel in nearby Reading. This would be the first of a number of events hosted by the gratified owner to mark Foinavon’s victory.
In Leamington Spa with her grandparents, Ann Buckingham could not stop shouting, ‘He’s won! He’s won!’ ‘I must have said it 50 times,’ she later recalled. Her grandparents, like Iris Watkins, were overcome with emotion. At another address on the same street, Ann’s sister, like Cyril, couldn’t bear to watch and had gone up to the bedroom while the race was on. ‘She didn’t watch at all. She just couldn’t stand it.’ As befits a moment of high drama in a family house in the heart of England, almost the first intelligible sentence uttered was, ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’ Soon the telegrams started to arrive. And the visitors.
Back in Liverpool, the Adelphi Hotel’s Sidney Spofforth and Peter Laiolo, his fellow chef, were already hard at work on the chocolate horses for that night’s banquet, oblivious to the narrow escape they had just had. Were it not for Foinavon’s last-gasp change of colours, as spotted by Michael O’Hehir, Spofforth would have been left to reflect that his prayer for a winner devoid of tartan had gone unanswered. As it was, not only were John Buckingham’s silks well within their creative compass, but the colours of the second man home, Josh Gifford, were easy-peasy – chocolate and white. Even so, they had no time to lose, with diners unlikely to linger long at Aintree on such an inclement afternoon.
Gifford was one of a number of jockeys who were convinced, understandably, that they would have won had it not been for the pile-up. ‘I thought I’d catch him until I got to the Melling Road,’ he said, ‘and then I ran out of steam.’ Another of these was Red Alligator’s teenage rider Brian Fletcher, who went on to become one of the great Grand National horsemen, with a record of three wins, one second and two thirds from nine starts. ‘I am adamant to this day that I would have won in 1967 if I had got a clear run around,’ he told me. ‘Another couple of furlongs and I’m sure I would have caught him.’
Seeing how much ground Red Alligator lost at the 23rd fence and how much he subsequently made back up, it is hard to disagree with Fletcher’s assessment.
John Buckingham, drained but elated, was escorted in towards the winner’s enclosure by two police officers, cloaked as well as mounted. While many were still cursing their luck, or trying to ascertain just what had happened at the far end of the course, first-fence faller David Nicholson at once congratulated Buckingham for a ‘tremendously determined feat of horsemanship’. Peter O’Sullevan, the BBC’s lead commentator and, then as now, a voice of unimpeachable authority on racing, also proffered credit where credit was plainly due. ‘Here’s the one that got away, that streaked away,’ he told viewers. ‘A really enterprising piece of jockeyship by young John Buckingham.’ Not that he was under any illusion that Foinavon had undergone a sudden transformation into Champion
the Wonder Horse. ‘It really looked a waste of time for this one to be in the field,’ he continued. ‘Totally outclassed in the Cheltenham Gold Cup in which he just led the field on sufferance until the business started.’
With his girths undone and saddle removed, the extent of the gelding’s exertions became clear as he panted hard and steamed like a New York subway grate. He made life a little bit hard for the sheepskin-jacketed Tim Brookshaw, nodding his head vigorously when the time came to don the blue ribbon in what was an oddly undecorous ceremony. This ended with the former jockey, who had intimated that he would be having ‘a few bob’ on Honey End, losing his balance and taking a tumble. As Booth circled with the horse, David Coleman, the regular presenter of Grandstand, the BBC’s flagship Saturday afternoon sports programme, entered the enclosure for a sequence of live interviews. The first was with a wide-eyed Buckingham, who had already donned his jacket and trilby for the occasion. ‘Everything seemed to stop in front of me,’ he said, an edge of incredulity in his voice, like a man who fears he might wake up at any moment. ‘I managed to pull onto the outside. I nearly got stopped by two loose horses … After he jumped it, we were just out on our own. I couldn’t believe it. It was wonderful.’ They were joined by a stoical but ‘terribly disappointed’ Gifford, still in his jockey’s colours, a curl of blue cigarette smoke pluming from one hand. ‘When I got to Canal Turn, loose horses were three-deep and some coming back at me,’ he said, in a first indication that, in his shock, he had misidentified the culpable fence. He later lost a small bet on the subject on the long journey home. ‘Well, you couldn’t dream it was going to be that fence, could you? I mean it’s so small after jumping Becher’s.’ It was, of course, a further cruel irony that it should be his brother Macer’s horse that caused the pile-up.