Foinavon

by David Owen

  I have been told about three houses in England and Wales called Foinavon: one in Compton, one on a cliff overlooking the sea in Criccieth and one in South Yorkshire. The last of these was built by Sam and Joyce Sowerby who ran a poultry and egg business on Doncaster Corn Exchange market. Sam was also a course bookmaker, and in the bookmakers’ draw for the 1967 Grand National he drew Foinavon. The Sowerbys were, I am told, so disappointed with their horse that they informed any customers who enquired that they had got Honey End, the favourite. This draw must have been valuable because they used the winnings to build a house, Foinavon, on a smallholding they owned near Doncaster. Sowerby would rescue ponies and donkeys and keep them at the site while they awaited permanent homes.

  Much the best-known backer of the winner was another man with a house called Foinaven (though in his case named after the Scottish mountain), Chay Blyth. The future round-the-world yachtsman ‘just had to have a bit on’. Birmingham-based David Radford, like the Sowerbys, drew Foinavon in a sweepstake. He tried to sell the ticket to colleagues who had been unable to participate and actually bet on Honey End. Luckily for him, no one would accept his offer. The Sunday Times said a ‘Sussex man’ had picked the first three horses in the correct order and collected £1,125 for a one-shilling (5p) stake. The Sunday Post declared Jack Haggerty, a Glasgow barman, the ‘luckiest punter of the day’ for scooping £625 with a £2 bet. Wiltshire farmer Ernest Sharps got less favourable odds, but must have matched those winnings with his £5 each-way bet. The wager was inspired by a dual coincidence: the farm straddled the river Avon and its 100-acre size matched Foinavon’s starting-price. Sharps used his windfall to acquire more acres and hence, presumably would have had to scour the racecards of future Nationals for outsiders with even bigger prices.

  Alan Whitehead, a Daily Mirror reader and engineering apprentice at Metal Box, about ten minutes’ walk from the racecourse, had come across the interview with John Kempton published in Ron Wills’s column. It was his custom to read the paper while having lunch at his bench next to a short cut to the staff canteen. With the National just 24 hours away, it was the main topic of conversation and he kept being asked for tips by those walking past. At first, he had answered Bassnet, but by the time he had digested the interview, he was getting ‘a bit fed-up’ with repeatedly being asked the same question. So he started saying that, according to what he had just read, Foinavon was going to win. Whitehead had planned to go to the race with a friend, but they were put off by the weather. Instead, he went to the local bookie where he bet £2 to win on Bassnet – and sixpence (2½p) each-way on Foinavon. He collected just over £3.

  Bob Knight, a painter and decorator from Romford, was perhaps the one man in the country who placed a bet on Foinavon yet ended up feeling as if he had missed out. In the weeks running up to the race, Knight had a recurring dream of Foinavon winning the National. He felt someone was telling him to back it and kept pointing out to his family that the odds were 500/1 ante-post. The household was not well-off and Knight’s wife would not normally have supported such an out-and-out punt. Yet so insistent was the dream that she encouraged her husband to have a really sizeable wager. In the event, he could not bring himself to take such a risk with the family finances and made do with an affordable bet of a shilling or two each-way. One of Knight’s sons had gone to Margate to watch a football match and was unaware that he had scaled down his bet. When he heard what was happening at Aintree on the radio, ‘I was jumping up and down and telling everyone my dad had won a fortune.’ He found a phone-box and called home as soon as the race was over, only to be told the disappointing news. Not surprisingly, the first time this son went to Aintree, he was more interested in seeing the 23rd fence than Becher’s Brook or The Chair.

  There were other hard-luck stories. A bookie in the Banbury area agreed to let a customer place a bet even though the race had started. It was a hefty each-way wager on Foinavon. In Wealdstone, the reason for Alan Sweeney’s reticence became clear soon after Dennis Lewell had finished calculating his winnings as Foinavon passed the winning-post. Sweeney had been so convinced that Lewell’s selection stood no chance that he had kept his half-a-crown (12½p), stood the bet himself and now couldn’t afford to pay up. As their friend Graham Sharpe, also present, recalled, there was a stunned silence before Lewell, who at least got his money back, went through the motions of being annoyed. His heart wasn’t really in it, however, and the three teenagers trooped off to play football.

  In the FA Cup quarter-final at Nottingham, Everton had failed to hang on to their half-time lead, going down 3–2 to Forest in a thriller in front of a full house of 47,500, with a young forward called Ian Storey-Moore scoring a hat-trick. It had made ultimately frustrating watching for Michael Walters and his fellow Everton fans. Then again, Walters had the considerable consolation of having won the National sweepstake conducted on the coach on the way to the game. After a while, though, when the stranger who supervised the sweepstake had still not reappeared at the coach, which was waiting to take them back home, it started to dawn on Walters that he would have to face up to another piece of bad news: the sweepstake man had absconded.

  See Notes on Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Well Done, Foinavon

  As a weary Tony Hutt, Woodbine on his lip, turned at last into the lane that led down to Chatham Stables and the Ridgeway beyond, scores of village children gave a high-pitched cheer and started waving their Union Jacks. It was Sunday lunchtime, nearly 24 hours after Foinavon’s scarcely believable victory, and the unlikely hero was making his triumphant return.

  In an early sign that winning the world’s most famous steeplechase was not going to sweep away all life’s problems, however, the morning after the Kemptons’ day of days had been surprisingly fraught. There were two issues. The first was the condition of the horse. In Liverpool first thing, on going to load him into the horsebox that Hutt had driven through the night to pick them up, stable lad Clifford Booth had found the gelding ‘lame as anything’. This meant there was no question of parading him through part of the village of Compton, as originally intended. Instead, people would have to come to the yard. The second issue was the time of Foinavon’s arrival. The post-race visit to the Grand National winner’s stable was a tradition for the press, anxious for a fresh angle for their Monday morning stories, as much as local well-wishers. And with a victor as surprising as this, a big turnout was guaranteed. It would not do to keep the men from the Telegraph and the Mail waiting for hours on end in the middle of nowhere in the now dry but still far from spring-like weather conditions. As a result Hutt and Booth had to stop and phone in progress reports from red telephone boxes along the way at regular intervals, stuffing shillings and silver sixpences into the slot.

  In the end, the hassle was worth it. The villagers, including a group of 11 children crammed on top of a Land Rover with its spare tyre on the bonnet and a sign reading ‘WELL DONE FOINAVON’ across the front, had a memorable afternoon and the Kemptons got a salvo of the sort of publicity you just cannot buy. Foinavon’s lameness – caused by a strained suspensory ligament in a foreleg no doubt as a result of the exertions of the race – had eased during the long journey, enabling him to be walked off the horsebox without undue fuss. An evocative photograph of the scene graced the front page of The Times the following morning. Flanked by excited locals, the horse, displaying the blue Grand National ribbon bestowed on him by Tim Brookshaw, is being led carefully up the driveway into the yard by Booth, sporting flat cap and tie. Beside them, John Kempton, in a distinctive and rather dashing check jacket, is keeping a firm grasp on Susie the white goat. ‘The one-speed winner of the Grand National was too stiff to parade through his flag-bedecked village,’ James Lewthwaite of the Mail informed his readers. ‘So the villagers came to see him.’ The Telegraph sagely advised that each week the horse consumed ‘a dozen packets of Polos’. Kempton, for his part, confided that, while he might be one-paced, Foinavon jumped ‘like a cat’ and
was ‘tremendously intelligent’. Once settled into his 30mph gallop, he added, ‘nothing can change it. If somebody tries to speed him up, he goes all over the place.’

  Behind-the-scenes, the yard’s other equine residents were getting agitated at the unaccustomed intrusion. Head lad Colin Hemsley spent most of the afternoon making sure that the visitors kept their distance, in particular from Three Dons, the prized but excitable colt who was recuperating from his successful efforts at Worcester. By about 3.30pm, their curiosity sated, the villagers had drifted away and Hemsley and Booth started to settle the horses down for the night. At the same time, wage-packets for by far the most successful week the yard would ever know were distributed. As Booth picked up his envelope, Jack Kempton took it and extracted the £3 he had given him to tide him over in Liverpool. ‘I was on £5 for the week – and £2 10s (£2.50)of that was the digs money I gave my mum,’ Booth recalls. It was another small indication that not as much was going to change at Chatham Stables as you might think.

  Newspaper opinion on the race was remarkably polarised. The Times racing correspondent Michael Phillips declared it ‘a sad chapter in the history of National Hunt racing’. His downbeat assessment was widely shared. The Daily Mirror’s Peter Wilson observed tartly that he had ‘rarely seen a less satisfactory Grand National – and I have seen about 25.’ Hotspur in the Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, struck a more pragmatic tone, emphasising that ‘most visitors left Aintree insufficiently informed, besides being wet and out of pocket.’ Yet the News of the World had proclaimed the pile-up ‘the most fantastic moment in the most fantastic horse race ever run’, publishing a large front-page photograph, snapped by ‘News of the World reader John Williams of Southport’, of ‘that second of sensation which brought millions of you out of your TV chairs’. And Don Cox writing in the Sun, ‘the independent newspaper’ as it styled itself then, argued forcefully against changing the rules to try to prevent such accidents happening. ‘We must accept the Grand National for what it is … or let it die!’ Cox wrote. ‘The National is there, we must accept what happened on Saturday as part of the risks that jockeys take and we as punters share.’

  Ron Wills’s Spotlight column, which had run that short interview with John Kempton on the eve of the race, now seemed almost bashful about what it could have portrayed as a major coup. True, the phrase ‘The column that gave you Foinavon’ had been added, but in surprisingly small type. The accompanying text showed similar restraint, describing Kempton’s Aintree hero with scrupulous accuracy as ‘the horse Spotlight DIDN’T write off as a no-hoper’. At Mullingar, the small Irish racecourse-town, a resident recalls that a moral dimension had been introduced into the story via a newspaper headline along the lines of ‘Lazy Horse Wins Grand National’. ‘Well, there’s hope for some of you then’, one of the sisters at a local convent school was heard to remark to her class when the topic was broached the following week.

  For a really considered assessment of the 1967 Grand National and its legacy, the racing public had to wait a few days longer for the appearance of the first issue of Horse and Hound to post-date the race on 15 April. The article contributed by John Lawrence to the magazine that day was witty, erudite, original, authoritative, all of the above. It would have constituted sports journalism at its best even without the ingredient that gave its writer an unfair edge over other contemporary chroniclers of the great pile-up: as Norther’s jockey, he was slap bang in the thick of it.

  It is worth dwelling on some of the points raised in Lawrence’s tour de force. First, he had recalled a precedent in the shape of the 1928 Grand National won by another long-odds plodder, Tipperary Tim. On that occasion, the Canal Turn alone, then an open-ditch, accounted for more than half of the 42-strong field. Only one other horse finished – and it had to be remounted to do so. Given that a further 17 runners ultimately trailed Foinavon home in 1967, the earlier race undoubtedly had a greater attrition rate. Newsreel footage suggests, however, that the 1928 pile-up was not as spectacular.

  Lawrence gave short shrift to calls for a tightening up of qualification standards for the National, arguing that loose horses were the issue and ‘loose good horses are just as dangerous as loose bad ones’. He went on, ‘The answer surely is to get the loose horses out of the way as quickly as possible – and that means doing away with (or leaving wide gaps in) the inside rail.’ He was not the first one to argue this case. In the wake of the 1928 incident, The Times, no less, suggested extending and enlarging exits from the course, ‘so as to reduce the number of riderless horses remaining in the race for lack of an obvious way of escape.’

  The journalist-jockey also underlined how ‘heartily thankful’ all involved should be that the 1967 pile-up happened where it did and not a fence earlier, at Becher’s Brook. ‘Popham Down could just as easily have chosen Becher’s,’ he wrote, ‘and had he done so, the probable results do not really bear thinking about.’ Nonetheless, there was ‘absolutely nothing wrong with the race … The occasional total turnup, however painful at the time, is perhaps a salutary reminder that this is still the National – a contest in which literally anything can happen.’ This was, he added, ‘the best Grand National field for years and would have produced a magnificent race. Fate decreed differently – but there will be other days.’

  Finally, like commentator Peter O’Sullevan, Lawrence had seen enough steeplechasing to know how much credit the winning horse and jockey deserved for sidestepping the chaos and making it to the winning-post intact, even if their victory was widely seen as a fluke. ‘It is true,’ he wrote, ‘in a way, that Foinavon won the National because he was too slow … But that does not detract either from John Buckingham’s cool horsemanship or from Foinavon’s courage.’ In a couple of years’ time, he went on, in common with other jockeys, ‘I expect I shall feel pretty certain that Norther “should” have won – but the name in the record books will still be Foinavon and that, really, is that.’

  As his mount was making his way gingerly back to his stable in Berkshire, the cool horseman in question was heading for London for his brush with show business – and feeling anything but cool at the prospect.

  For all his new status as a Grand National winner, Buckingham’s Sunday morning had indeed started with a shift at the stables on the Courage estate. Unlike any previous shift, however, this one culminated, fittingly enough, with a champagne celebration. Later, when he arrived at the Palladium, Bob Monkhouse, the show’s compère, took him into his dressing-room and showed him a big board detailing their planned routine. The smooth-as-silk comedian explained that he, Monkhouse, would go on stage sporting top hat and binoculars, talk about having been up to the Grand National and say that Foinavon had won. He would then call Buckingham out onto the stage.

  You might have thought that a man capable of navigating a stubborn half-tonne animal over 30 fearsome obstacles with bedlam a possible consequence of the slightest mishap would take a little scripted banter in his stride. Not so. ‘I was more nervous than I had been at any other time of my life, and they virtually had to push me on to the stage!’ he later recalled. ‘Thank God you can’t see anything because of the lights.’ Nervous or not, he steeled himself and did his duty, even delivering a punchline that, while not worthy of Morecambe and Wise, did the job by providing a cheesy link to the next act on. ‘How did Freddie jump?’ Monkhouse inquired with mock seriousness. ‘He didn’t jump very well today,’ the novice stand-up replied, ‘but he will be jumping well tonight.’ Another question from Monkhouse, ‘Are you talking about Freddie the horse?’ ‘No, Freddie and the Dreamers!’ Cue the arrival onstage of the well-known pop group fronted by the bouncy, bespectacled – and jockey-sized – Freddie Garrity.

  Less than 24 hours after that, Buckingham was back on the treadmill, going all the way to Wye for ride number 806 – a horse called Easter Speaker in the Dover Handicap Chase over two miles, value £340. They came in seventh and last. Next day, it was the train to Plumpton, the tight Sussex course next to the
railway station, where he had a second and two thirds – and Ron Atkins and Bruce Gregory, two of the jockeys who had ridden Foinavon and might have had the ride at Aintree had things panned out differently, caught up with and congratulated him. It was on the way to Plumpton that Buckingham got another taste of the consequences of his new-found celebrity. First, the mother of an importuning small boy asked him for his autograph on the Underground. Then, at Victoria Station, the barber where he dropped in for a haircut and shave declined payment, saying, ‘That’s all right, Mr Buckingham, there’ll be no charge.’ There were undoubtedly many more autographs to sign between then and 27 May, when he partnered Jolly Signal in an obscure hurdle race at Towcester. But that was his next winner, seven weeks to the day after his greatest triumph. For Buckingham, like the staff at Chatham Stables, the rhythm of life after Aintree would carry on much as before.

  After the frenzy of post-race interviews, during which they pledged to keep Foinavon ‘for ever’, the Watkinses set about celebrating their good fortune – with gusto. A few days after their dinner at the George, their local silver-service hotel, Cyril hosted a black-tie party at the Savoy with oysters on the menu and dancing. Some time after that, there was another glitzy London celebration, this time at the Talk of the Town, the well-known cabaret-restaurant on Charing Cross Road.

  For Cyril’s erstwhile partner, Mac Bennellick, there was the very considerable consolation of half the prize money, along with the satisfaction of being designated one of three ‘Faces in the News This Week’ by the Havering Recorder. (The other two were Patricia Lefevre, Romford’s new carnival queen, and Dennis Simmons, who lost both legs in a road accident but still marked his 45th birthday by swimming two lengths of the Harold Hill Pool.) ‘Mr Watkins and I have always had a complete understanding on the question of prize money won by any of our horses,’ Bennellick told the Recorder’s reporter, adding, ‘I would rather have won the National than the Derby.’