by David Owen
The absence of the winning owner on Grand National day was not unprecedented: neither Kilmore’s owners in 1962 nor Ayala’s the following year made it to Aintree. But for the trainer to be absent as well was highly unusual. Happily, Jack Kempton, John’s father, was at the racecourse and ready to step into the breach, plummy vowels much in evidence, field-glasses around his neck. ‘We have never had a long enough trip for him,’ he told Coleman and his international audience, exuding bonhomie. ‘We always thought he would stay for ever, but he hadn’t got a colossal amount of foot.’ Popham Down’s owner, of course, was at Liverpool and, after the race, approached Kempton suggesting light-heartedly that she was owed half the prize-money in view of her horse’s role in what had happened. Foinavon’s former owner, Anne, the Duchess of Westminster, was also there and, according to John Lawrence – who must presumably have been rushing from weighing-room to press-room or telephone at the time – ‘greeted those who sympathised with the words, “If he was still mine, he probably would have been running the Mullingar.”’
Before coverage of the National was brought to a close – and Ever-ton fans informed that their team was 1–0 up at half-time in the FA Cup tie in Nottingham – there was time for a short piece to camera by the stocky figure of O’Hehir standing beside the wreckage of the 23rd fence. As souvenir-hunters prepared to move in and collect pieces of gorse to act as keepsakes of a momentous day, the commentator, who had already covered himself in glory amid the chaos of the race, pulled out another prediction that has turned out to be bang on the money. ‘They might call this the Foinavon fence,’ he mused.
By this time it was becoming clear that all 28 men and 30 half-tonne quadrupeds who careered into the pile-up had somehow survived their ordeal more or less unscathed. The only name in the jockeys’ book that was there to list all injuries was that of Stan Mellor, hurled onto the fence as the mêlée began. And he was well enough to win that last Flat race of the afternoon. Nobby Howard’s horse Scottish Final had picked up a nick on one leg and the jockey was on his way out of the weighing-room to tend to him when the clerk of the scales asked him to escort a man to the stables. It was Gregory Peck. ‘He was saying, “Did you see my horse? Was it going well at the time?”’ Howard remembers. He duly located Different Class for the Hollywood star and left to tend to his own horse.
Back in the weighing-room, Buckingham had ordered champagne for the jockeys. Swallowing his disappointment, Gifford – who had earlier admitted to Coleman with commendable candour that he had been hoping Buckingham would fall in the race’s closing stages – opened the first bottle, stuck half-a-crown in the cork and handed it to the winner, saying simply, ‘Well done, John’. An envelope in the rack, addressed to The Winner, The Grand National was also drawn to Buckingham’s attention. Inside was an invitation to appear on Sunday evening on The London Palladium Show, a variety show broadcast by ATV and compèred that night by Bob Monkhouse. This was the first sign that with victory had come, for a limited time, a new status: minor celebrity. As soon became clear, this was to apply to Foinavon as much as the man who steered him through the most spectacular pile-up in Aintree’s history.
By this time, the course was emptying fast. John Pinfold, hooked for life as a result of what he had witnessed, was on his way back to Woolton, a sprig of gorse from the 23rd fence safely in his possession. Michael Daley and his mod mac-wearing friends were facing a dressing-down from their mums and dads. This was on account of whitewash from the railings at the top end of the course – the part vandalised over Easter – which had somehow found its way onto their clothes. Sun columnist Clement Freud, who had backed The Fossa ante-post at a tempting 200/1, was soon to discover that his house had been burgled.
Clifford Booth, facing another night on-site before Hutt arrived with the horsebox to pick him up, had been handed three pounds to tide him over by Jack Kempton. ‘He said, “That will get you home,”’ Booth recalled. ‘And he said, “I’m not giving you any more because you’ll only go spending it getting drunk or something.”’ In spite of his landlady’s suggestion of a night out in Liverpool, Buckingham and his brother were soon heading home to Northamptonshire, having phoned ahead to say they were on their way. On arriving they found that the neighbours had been busy, stringing up flags and renaming the house ‘Buckingham Palace’ with freshly daubed paint. They spent the rest of the night partying in the Rose and Crown, Buckingham’s local pub. It was probably just as well that the victorious jockey and his brother returned from Aintree when they did. A newly minted celeb he might be, but he was still expected at work on the Courage estate on Sunday morning.
The absence of any of the winner’s chief connections meant that the Adelphi Hotel’s traditional Grand National gala dinner lacked much of its usual sparkle, for all of Spofforth and Laiolo’s efforts. ‘There were none of the usual riotous scenes,’ wrote a ‘Daily Post Woman Reporter’ with perhaps a tinge of disappointment discernible in her prose. ‘As compared with former years, the atmosphere was almost subdued,’ the journalist continued, going on to describe how the black, red and yellow ribbons on the traditional owner’s top table were removed and replaced with more subtle red and yellow floral decorations in black bowls. The 350–400 guests were treated to a menu that included huitres natures, chauchat suprême de volaille beau rivage and tartelette aux fraises Becher’s Brook, with the strawberries flown in from California. The ‘tall, tousle-haired’ trainer Toby Balding was there with the injured Highland Wedding’s Canadian owner Charles Burns and was commended for his ‘enthusiastic’ dancing. But while Balding’s pleasure in the occasion was shared by other members of the racing fraternity, ‘one missed the energetic performances by the diminutive jockeys of the Twist which had been a feature in former years of this celebration.’
Beyond the Adelphi and the Rose and Crown, much of the country had switched focus to a younger and very different cultural institution, the Eurovision Song Contest, being broadcast that night from Vienna’s Hofburg Palace with commentary by one Rolf Harris. In a win every bit as clear-cut as Foinavon’s, Sandie Shaw, the bare-footed pop star from Dagenham, trounced the opposition with the unashamedly cheesy ‘Puppet on a String’. Sean Dunphy, a Baldoyle-based Irishman, came second and Vicky Leandros, singing the enchanting ‘L’Amour est Bleu’ for Luxembourg, only fourth. It was the United Kingdom’s first win in the contest’s 12th year. Buckingham and Foinavon faced competition as the day’s biggest newsmakers.
See Notes on Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Foinavon and the Women
During the 2010 football World Cup, Paul the Octopus became the most famous cephalopod in recorded history by predicting the outcome of matches. Well, the 1967 Grand National had its own Paul the Octopus. Her name was Peggy and she was a black half-breed Labrador from Thames Ditton.
On the day of the race, Peggy’s owner Josephine Morris followed her usual practice by cutting out the names of the 44 runners and scattering them on the kitchen floor. Peggy was then admitted and asked to make her selection. Foinavon was the name on the first piece of paper she touched. At this point, Mrs Morris’s son Christopher, a student accountant, read out the highly unflattering assessment of the horse’s chances published in their morning paper. Mrs Morris, however, would not be deterred. She insisted that her son pop down to her local bookmaker to place her usual bet of £10 each-way on Peggy’s selection. The tip seemed so fanciful that the idea of simply pocketing the stake did flash across Morris’s mind. Fortunately he resisted the impulse: the gift his mother handed him from her winnings was the equivalent of nearly a year’s wages for him at the time.
Several million people bet on the National that year. Yet only a tiny fraction emulated Peggy in singling out the winner.
The fourth floor of the Tote’s New Bridge Street headquarters in London was where bets placed on any given race – from all over the country apart from the racecourse itself – were totted up and payouts calculated. Staff there were bracing themselves
for the annual deluge of post-Grand National work when the pile-up occurred and Foin-avon broke clear. One bet settler, Peter Chapman – one of the few staff members who neither smoked nor worked night-shifts as a telephone-exchange operator – remembers the reaction of his boss, Tony Barker, an East Ender with a centre-parting and a good war record that he never talked about, when Foinavon crossed the line. ‘Tony came running back from the TV screen shouting, “Look at this!”’ Chapman, who had never seen him so animated, recalled, ‘He held up the slips for bets that had come in nationwide on Foinavon. I’d guess there were somewhere between 10 and 20. Then another shout, ‘We’ve got nothing to do!”’
In contrast to bookmakers, who seek to attract punters’ money by setting odds for each runner before a race, Tote payouts are calculated once the market is closed. They reflect the total staked on the winner as a proportion of the overall sum bet on the race. The smaller the amount gambled nationwide on the victor, the bigger the payout to each winning punter. So little had been bet that day via the Tote on Foinavon that the organisation paid a remarkable £445 for every pound staked on the horse to win.
Not everyone with money riding on Foinavon used the Tote. Many racegoers took advantage of the on-course bookies whose umbrellas stood out along the rails among the Aintree crowds. Others, no doubt far outnumbering the punters who placed specific wagers on the horse, drew the ‘Foinavon’ ticket in workplace sweepstakes, such as the one that left Eric Brown out of pocket on the Orion oil rig. And many, like Christopher Morris, visited a licensed betting-shop.
These high-street bookmakers, though they had taken the country by storm, were a recent innovation. The first had opened less than six years previously, on May Day 1961, with the entry into force of the new Betting and Gaming Act. This finally legalised off-course cash betting. Prior to that, betting was supposedly regulated by the Street Betting Act of 1906, whose intention was, as far as possible, to localise the activity on racecourses. It became an offence, therefore, to loiter in public places for the purpose of bookmaking or making and settling bets. Cue the arrival of a public telephone service and an example – by no means the first, or last – of a new technology making an ass of the law. The telephone made it possible, for the relatively well-off at least, to get around the restriction on off-course betting quite lawfully by setting up a credit account with a bookmaker and phoning bets in. Millions of working-class gamblers and the bookmakers who served them got around the law in a different way: by ignoring it. But in doing so, they ran the risk of prosecution. The result, as acknowledged by Home Secretary Rab Butler, when the new bill was debated by the House of Commons in November 1959, was ‘differential treatment for different social classes of the community’. Butler cited a Royal Commission estimating that about half a million people bet off-course by telephone on credit with an average weekly stake of between £2 10 shillings (£2.50) and £3 10 shillings (£3.50). This compared with no fewer than 3.5 million who, in effect, flouted the law by betting in cash, with their average weekly stake a mere eight shillings (40p). The law, Butler admitted, had been brought ‘into contempt’. Little wonder that Labour MP George Thomson described the situation before the reform as ‘almost a classic example of one law for the rich and one for the poor.’
Betting shops, by spreading like wildfire – 7,000 opened in May 1961 alone – had changed all that by 1967. But a whiff of disrepute still lingered from the days when cash bets were routinely transacted on the sly in darkened doorways in the poorer parts of town. Nor were the new outlets, with their chalkboards and tense, smoke-filled interiors, exactly inviting. Not for nothing did Manchester MP Eric Johnson observe, ‘the Bill seems to say that we are to make betting in a betting-office legal, provided that we make that office as uncomfortable as possible’. Derby day and Grand National day were still probably the only two occasions in the year when members of the English middle-classes could be seen in a betting-shop without some risk of disapproval from their peers. And while plenty of women bet on the 1967 Grand National, the usual practice, as with the Morrises, seems to have been for the bets actually to be placed by men. This was in spite of a reservation expressed by Lord Silkin during passage of the bill that, ‘we are going to introduce wives to the mysteries of betting’.
One of the betting-slips in Tony Barker’s hand would have related to Cyril Watkins’s last-minute Tote wager. Taking into account the two ante-post bets – totalling £16 each-way – that he placed with bookmakers, I very much doubt that anyone won more on Foinavon that day than his owner. By my estimate, his winnings must have been comfortably over £10,000, a very substantial sum in 1967 – and he told one journalist that Iris, his wife, had won £1,250 into the bargain.
It was, of course, a magnificent result for the bookies. According to William Hill, ‘We could not have picked a better winner.’ A Glasgow bookmaker called John Banks was reported to have made £25,000 on the race. Even so, a sprinkling of lucky, or supremely insightful, individuals around the country did manage to back Foinavon. And a strikingly high proportion of those were women.
In Liverpool, Lucy Geddes managed to win twice over on the horse, even though she was not a lover of the Grand National. First off, one of her daughters came home from work on the eve of the race with two tickets for a sweepstake at Ayrton Saunders, a pharmaceutical wholesaler. One ticket, for one of the favourites, her daughter kept; the other, for Foinavon, she presented to her mum. Mrs Geddes then had to endure an evening of light-hearted ribbing from the men of the house about what a hopeless case she had been given. She said nothing at the time, but on the morning of the race when her husband asked which horse she wanted him to back for her, she replied, ‘Foinavon’. That evening, she was able to repay the previous day’s mickey taking with interest.
Helen Dillon, a regular London-based punter with interests in five-card stud and 18th-century English porcelain, spent Grand National day with friends at their oast-house in East Hoathly, a village in Sussex. She noticed that an elderly local woman called Lily, who helped in the house, was pacing around and muttering, ‘Foinavon’s going to win, Foinavon’s going to win.’ Dillon rang the Tote and put on a four shillings (20p) each-way bet. After being paid her winnings, she was at a cocktail party in Flood Street when she met a woman with a stall at Chelsea Antiques Market. She asked her if she would like to share the stall. Within a week, she had taken up residence, together with her modest porcelain collection.
A Liverpool supermarket worker called Vivian Humphries and four friends had the bright idea of using a Ouija board to find the winner the week before the race. Gathered among the cereal boxes in the shop’s storeroom, the glass they were using duly spelled out the first letters of ‘Foinavon’. Four of them, three of whom were women, staked five shillings (25p) each-way, while the fifth attendee wagered double that. He won enough for a tape-recorder, while Humphries herself bought a leather coat with her winnings. They were too scared to try it again the following year.
Other women who gambled successfully on the horse included Nan Toone, a £9-a-week shoe-machinist and mother of three from Leicestershire, who staked four shillings on a racing pools coupon with the first three finishers in the right order. Then there was Martyne Millington, also from Leicestershire, who won a VIP day at Aintree in a Daily Mirror competition and followed that up by earning £52 from Foinavon’s victory. A nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital where Cyril Watkins had been admitted also risked a few shillings on her patient’s horse and treated colleagues to cream cakes for tea when the bet paid off.
Another pocket of support for the rank outsider came from the network of Avon ladies who sold beauty products door-to-door, helped by one of the decade’s most enduring catchphrases, ‘Ding dong, Avon calling!’ This was primarily because of the coincidence of the horse’s name. It is not altogether surprising that Avon lady Alison Grant should have staked a shilling each-way on Foinavon: she is also John Buckingham’s sister-in-law. But she told me that a Stratford-based manager of hers c
alled Yvonne Jones had a much bigger bet. The horse was also said to have attracted wagers from staff at the company’s operations in Corby. Back in Liverpool, Margaret Nolan had ‘about 2/6d’ (12½p) each-way on Foinavon, not because she was an Avon lady herself, but because a colleague at work in the Liver Building had recently become one. She spent the race at the swings in the local park with her nephews and didn’t hear the result. When she got back, the men who had earlier been pulling her leg about her choice were stunned. She won about the equivalent of a week’s wages. ‘It was absolutely hilarious,’ she says.
Foinavon’s youngest backer may also have been a girl. According to a blog posted in 2010, in 1967 the then nine-year-old Patricia Rogers staked ‘two bob’ (10p) on the horse since she thought it had the nicest name. She also had to put up with plenty of teasing, but stuck to her guns – and won ‘ten whole pounds’. As she wrote, ‘Ten pounds was a lot of money to a nine-year-old girl in 1967, it meant a drawer full of chocolate and a whole new wardrobe for my Sindy doll’. Eleven-year-old John Warham also picked out the winner after Foinavon got a mention in a regional news programme he was watching. With his dad away at the football, his winning sixpence (2½p) each-way bet was laid by his grandmother. And 13-year-old milk-boy Nigel Everett had a shilling each-way too, after taking a break in a steamy-windowed Mitcham café and reading in a paper that Foinavon jumped ‘like another Arkle’, or words to that effect. Tom Sculley, the milkman Everett assisted on his round, had a rather larger bet.