by David Owen
The second Sunday after the race, Bennellick and Watkins visited Compton together to see their now famous horse. ‘We were there for about an hour and a half or two hours,’ Booth remembers. ‘They gave me £2.’
See Notes on Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The World of William Hickey
It is one of those photographs that demands a second look. Yes, that really is Buckingham Palace in the background, which means that the three pedestrians holding up the 1960s traffic are at the top of The Mall. But why are they accompanied by a horse and a nanny goat in a jacket? The animals add a comic touch to what might otherwise be a faintly menacing scene. These are not military men, but they must surely have a certain standing for a mounted policeman to be stopping traffic for them in this precise location. And then there are those uniform, dark Reservoir Dogs-style ties.
The giveaway is the horse’s rider. He is dressed in the same distinctive jockey’s silks he was wearing when he burst out of obscurity at Aintree 17 days before. Now John Buckingham, along with Foinavon, his owner and his main handlers from Compton, are on their way to meet a member of the royal family.
It is an eye-catching and unorthodox way of arriving for a St James’s Palace reception in the presence of Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that the Grand National-winning team had been roped into a publicity stunt. The reception marked the launch of National Cancer Day Ascot, a charity race meeting due to take place at the end of September. About 300 guests had been invited in total, including a good sprinkling of dukes, ladies, earls and other establishment figures.
The newspapers lapped it up, with the Mail describing Foinavon as ‘the first horse to be guest of honour at a royal palace’. The duchess, evidently a good sport, went outside to greet the unlikely Liverpool hero, and feed him some carrots. Susie the nanny goat, unusually, spurned the offer of real food, but took a fancy to a piece of plastic grass that had been laid out with the aim of beautifying the occasion. Not everyone in Foinavon’s retinue made it into the reception. One who did was the Rolls-Royce-driving scrap-metal dealer and long-time supporter of the yard, Gordon Passey. Some time later, Foinavon’s horsebox-drivers, who had been waiting outside, saw Passey coming back towards them carrying something in his hands. ‘This was the best I could do for you,’ he said, holding them out so they could see what he had. They were full of peeled prawns. ‘I’ve just gone off fish,’ murmured one of the drivers. Nonetheless, it was a considerate gesture.
That this was the grandest occasion graced by Foinavon’s presence, there can be no doubt. But the newly minted equine celebrity was to do an awful lot of this sort of thing in the months following his shock National victory. Already he had been paraded around the Reading Football Club stadium at Elm Park, proving as unperturbed by the noise of the crowd, there to watch the home team take on Workington in the old third division, as by the chaos he had encountered at Aintree at the 23rd fence. Soon there would be visits to a rugby ground at Sunbury-on-Thames, to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he started a donkey derby at the racecourse involving jockeys and Coventry City footballers, and to Malvern, where he was scheduled to open the Pony of the Year Show. Other engagements were slated to include a show at Shaftesbury in Dorset, the Royal Duchy of Cornwall Show and the Wokingham Carnival. There was also a photo-shoot in Compton for the 1968 Schweppes racing calendar in which Foinavon would be Mr April. Burnished like a mahogany sideboard, the horse posed, ears pricked, with Buckingham on his back again in full Grand National garb. Susie had left her mark here too, flattening a small bush that acted as the yard’s centrepiece. ‘We had it all held up with string,’ stable lad Clifford Booth remembered. ‘If you look very closely, you can see the string that was holding it all together.’
‘Since Foinavon surprised everybody, including himself, by avoiding all the setbacks of the Aintree track, he has become more socially acceptable than even his old stablemate Arkle,’ commented the Daily Express. This article was headlined, ‘Foinavon moves into the World of William Hickey’, traditional nom de plume of the newspaper’s gossip columnist.
This was just fine with Cyril Watkins, who appeared to relish his new status as Grand National-winning owner. ‘He is the most popular horse in the country at the moment,’ Watkins proudly told one reporter. ‘He’s booked up for charity appearances every Saturday until the end of September. He won’t be racing again this year.’
However, the effect of Foinavon’s crowded social calendar back at Chatham Stables as the weather improved and the days lengthened was altogether less benign.
To put it bluntly, the frequent jaunts to one event or another in England’s leafier shires became a distraction the small yard with its still meagre resources could ill afford. The extra work – and extensive travelling – were not appreciated by staff, whose hours were already long and anti-social. And because the functions were, for the most part, charitable, it was usually difficult for the Kemptons to recoup their expenses, let alone charge any sort of appearance fee. Of course, they recognised that the causes they were helping were good and were happy to do their bit, acknowledging that fortune had smiled on them at Liverpool. But, at the same time, they felt hemmed in, unable to say ‘No’ for fear of appearing uncaring or making Watkins look bad, while all too aware that these extra-curricular commitments were a source of friction in the yard and risked undermining any chance they had of building on the victory to improve their racing operation.
In truth, there were other tensions too. On 21 January, John Kempton had married Patricia Minter at St Mary’s Church in the nearby village of Shaw-cum-Donnington. The couple rented a small house a few miles away from Chatham Stables, so John was no longer quite so close to the horses. The intention was that this arrangement would be temporary, with John and Trish eventually taking over the bungalow across from the yard while John’s parents went to live at the small house. But this never actually happened. ‘It was always going to be “This year, this week, next week”,’ John Kempton recalls. Over time, the failure of the move to take place imposed increasing strain on relations between John and his father.
Engines rather than horses had always been the two men’s shared passion. They would often be seen working on some car together, occasionally a classic, their tools laid out neatly like surgical instruments. Now, there was no longer time for such pleasurable pursuits.
It was at about this time that Clifford Booth left, going to work for Fred Winter in one of the elite National Hunt yards of the era. Adding to the pressure, the Kemptons had had another small stable-block installed, anticipating inquiries from new owners attracted by all the post-Grand National publicity. These vacancies now needed filling. On 17 August, the Evening News & Star reported that Kempton was advertising for more horses to train. ‘But unlike most trainers, he wants bad ones – jumpers who can’t jump properly or horses who are difficult to manage. He thinks there are more Foinavons about … and would like the chance to prove it.’ It was an original pitch, seeking to highlight his and Colin Hemsley’s knack for equine psychoanalysis, and some occupants did eventually move into the new block. But the glory day at Aintree never did yield much of a dividend in terms of new business. The nature of Foinavon’s victory was, it seems, just too outlandish for outside owners to conclude that the skills of the horse’s training team had much to do with it.
By the end of the summer, Foinavon fever had cooled sufficiently for the horse to leave the world of William Hickey and go back into training. The yard had had a couple of winners by then, which was two more than they had mustered by a similar stage of the previous season. No sooner had the equine celebrity made his belated seasonal debut on 1 November at his local course at Newbury, however – a solid but pedestrian fourth place in a three-mile chase won by Bassnet – than a new problem arose. And this time its impact was industry-wide.
It was actually a few days before that race, on 25 October, that the first case of foot-and-mouth disease was
diagnosed in Shropshire. This was not particularly unusual at the time. Yet five weeks later, on 28 November 1967, with the worst such epizootic of the century now raging, all horse racing in Britain was cancelled until further notice. It did not resume until 5 January.
See Notes on Chapter 26
Chapter 27
10 Million to One
More than 60 race-meetings in Britain and Ireland were lost before something approaching normality was restored. More to the point, well over 400,000 farm animals were destroyed, with the prime dairy country of Cheshire losing nearly a third of its cattle. The geographic spread of the devastation was smaller than in 2001, the next occasion on which the UK endured a serious foot-and-mouth outbreak. But in afflicted areas, the deadening effect on day-to-day life was all too similar.
Over the five weeks when there was no racing at all, bookmaker William Hill said it stood to drop £1 million a week in turnover. At Aintree, the chief concern was over whether the field for the 1968 Grand National would be unacceptably weakened by the absence of horses deprived of the chance to qualify for the race. Mrs Topham and her colleagues actually asked the National Hunt stewards if they would agree to a fortnight’s extension of the usual early January cut-off point. In the event though this idea was discarded, there being only two extra qualifying races in the proposed lengthened period. When the handicap was published on 25 January, there was a more than adequate list of 102 entries. On it were 27 of the 1967 field, including the first three home: Foinavon, Honey End and Red Alligator.
This was the start of tougher times all round for Britain, with the long post-war boom petering out. Ten days before horse racing was halted, on 18 November, came the shock of devaluation. This was the occasion of Harold Wilson’s famous ‘pound in your pocket’ broadcast. The prime minister told a shaken nation that the cut, from $2.80 to $2.40 in the value of the pound, ‘does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.’ Among the things it did mean was that imported goods would cost more – as Mrs Topham was soon to discover to her cost. A discussion with a Colonel Livingstone Learmouth about catering arrangements for the 1968 spring meeting yielded the doubtless unwelcome news that Letheby & Christopher would have to raise prices, ‘since devaluation had automatically increased prices of champagne’ and other imports. The cost of the Grand National trophy would be higher than in 1967 too.
It was fully three months on from his first outing of the season in early November before Foinavon again found himself travelling to a racecourse. It was a marathon journey, all the way to Newcastle for the Eider Chase, one of very few races in the calendar apart from the National that was over four miles long. Highland Wedding, a leading fancy for the 1967 National prior to his injury, had won the last two runnings. He had not come to attempt a hat-trick. Instead, Foinavon would be up against Red Alligator, the local Bishop Auckland-based horse which jockey Brian Fletcher was convinced would have won the 1967 Grand National had the pile-up not intervened, and Master of Art, another leading National prospect trained in Sussex by Captain Ryan Price. Johnny Lehane had been booked to ride Cyril Watkins and Mac Bennellick’s gelding, who would be carrying just 9st 7lb.
If the threat from foot-and-mouth disease was subsiding, however, racing still had to contend with Britain’s capricious climate. On wakening on Saturday morning, head lad Colin Hemsley was dismayed to find that the landscape had turned white. The snow and frost meant that not only had they undertaken a 500-mile round-trip for nothing, but that he would probably have to repay some of the four days’ worth of expenses he had brought with him from Berkshire. Since he had already spent the bulk of the money on a mini shopping-spree for his wife at C&A, this came as an unwelcome realisation.
It took Foinavon’s training team almost a further three weeks to finally get another race into his legs. On another bitterly cold day at Ascot, he trailed in last of six having gone to post as top weight. Few would even have noticed, sports fans’ attention being fixed at the time on the accident that had befallen Middlesex cricketer Fred Titmus in the Caribbean. The mishap cost the off-spinner four toes.
The Grand National was now just five weeks away and Foinavon had managed only two outings since his victory in the previous year’s race, finishing last and last. He squeezed in two more runs before his return to Aintree, but showed nothing to suggest there was the slightest prospect of his emulating Reynoldstown, the last horse to win two consecutive Nationals, in 1935 and 1936.
After another long trip to West Yorkshire, he was again last of four finishers in a three-and-a-half-mile chase at Wetherby. But the race did offer grounds for hoping he was running into better form, as he came in a semi-respectable 16 lengths behind the winner, Rutherfords – a horse with sound National credentials, as he had demonstrated, for 22 fences, 11 months earlier. These hopes were largely extinguished the following week at Sandown. Having jumped off in front, Foinavon was soon overhauled and eventually pulled up by Lehane. The race was won by Different Class, another of his past – and future – Aintree rivals.
Three days later, as the Cheltenham festival got under way in blustery but clear conditions, the world of politics once again imposed itself on racing. The first Budget by Roy Jenkins, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had replaced Jim Callaghan soon after the pound was devalued, was an absolute stinker. And among a series of tax hikes that The Times judged ‘nasty but necessary’ was a doubling to 5 per cent of the betting duty levied on stake money. Jenkins described this as ‘the maximum’ he was advised the tax could bear at that moment.
As in 1967, the identity of Foinavon’s Liverpool jockey was not settled until a few days before the race. His winning partner, John Buckingham, was not expected to be available this time around, since his employer, Edward Courage, would be running a horse called San Angelo at Aintree and would want the jockey to ride him. In fact, Buckingham broke an arm falling from a John Kempton-trained horse called Churby at Worcester on 12 March. Sidelined as a result, he ended up watching the National from a vantage-point beside The Chair.
Lehane appeared to be next in line, having ridden Foinavon, albeit without success, in two of his races in the run-up to Liverpool. He had been expected to partner him at Wetherby as well. However, he had suffered a fall in the first race of the day and did not ride again that afternoon. A Midlands-based jockey called Phil Harvey had stepped into the breach and piloted him to his most impressive – or least unimpressive – run of the season. Whether dissatisfaction with Lehane’s subsequent performance at Sandown was a factor, or if there was haggling over the jockey’s fee as in 1967, one cannot be sure. But over the last week before the National, it became clear that Harvey, not Lehane, was going to get the Aintree ride.
As the sport’s leading lights converged once again on Merseyside, the future of the racecourse was still technically open to question. There was a sense, though, that while it remained unknown who the new long-term owners would actually be, the threat that Becher’s Brook might be paved over and the Grand National forced to move or die had been averted. As the three-day meeting was in progress, a story broke that Liverpool Corporation was to pay £1.5 million to take over the racecourse. The story was denied, although Sports Minister Denis Howell acknowledged that discussions were ‘moving along’. Michael Phillips, The Times racing correspondent, reported that the National took place in a ‘much better atmosphere’ than for several years. ‘There was a feeling that, in spite of all the denials, the future of the great race and its birthplace was safe,’ he wrote.
After the prolonged cold snap, the weather was as spectacular as it had been atrocious the previous year. ‘Summer in spring continued yesterday,’ read a front-page picture caption in The Times on Grand National morning. A temperature of 76.3°F was recorded in Suffolk. If there was a reminder of the mounting industrial and economic problems confronting the country, it was a Liverpool bus strike that was in its third week as the meeting got under way. The strike was said to
explain why Liverpool Football Club had not sold out their allocation of tickets for the impending away game at Manchester United, their bitter rivals. It also cast doubt on the wisdom of the decision by Mrs Topham and her colleagues to advertise the National meeting on 5 million bus tickets.
One man especially glad of the fine weather was Colin Hemsley, assigned to look after Foinavon this year. He arrived in Liverpool only to find that no one had booked him a bed for the night. So he slept in the horsebox, prior to getting up at dawn and exercising the horse over Aintree’s vast open spaces. Having had to miss his great moment the previous year, John Kempton reached the racecourse good and early this time around. It was a special day for the young trainer whose horse had defied the odds last time, even though he was under no illusion about the likelihood of lightning striking twice. ‘I know it’s about 10 million to one against it happening again,’ he had told one journalist. ‘But that doesn’t matter. There is a special privilege in even entering a horse for this unique race and I shall be delighted if Foinavon finishes in the first ten – if only to silence the knockers.’
One memorable new product of the times had discounted the gelding’s chances of achieving even a top-ten placing. The dawning realisation that the future prosperity of industrialised societies such as Britain would depend on harnessing new technology was stimulating interest in computers. Not the sleek, ultra-light laptops of today, but vast whirring, beeping machines fresh from the realm of science fiction. This growing fascination, plus the hiatus in the jumps-racing season forced by the foot-and-mouth epizootic, had created a propitious environment in which to try something new: computerised horse races. The voice of racing, Peter O’Sullevan, had been deployed to commentate on a computer version of the Massey Ferguson Gold Cup, usually run at Cheltenham in December, when no racing was taking place. This was a pleasing enough bit of fun, with an Atlas Computer capable of 500,000 calculations a second producing a wholly plausible result.