by David Owen
But, of course, it is one thing to simulate a race that has been cancelled, quite another to broadcast a computer version of a Grand National that is soon to be run, large as life. Like it or not, the ability of the great machine to see into the future, with slick-looking paper printouts and spools of magnetic tape taking the place of a crystal ball, was on the line. And, while O’Sullevan vested the occasion with his usual effortless charm, concluding it was the first time that ‘the horses have ever finished a lot fresher than the commentator’, the computer flunked the test. Gregory Peck would have liked the result, which had Different Class winning from Rutherfords, Master of Art and Bassnet. But the real-life winner, like Foinavon, failed to feature in the first ten past the computer’s virtual winning-post. It is tempting to imagine the bookies sharing a knowing chuckle over this cutting-edge confirmation of real life’s fathomless complexity.
Another way in which modernity was entering people’s homes was through the medium of colour television. The BBC had effected the first official colour broadcast in Britain from Wimbledon the previous July. TV critic and Conservative politician Julian Critchley remarked that the eye was ‘caught by incidentals such as a bright green towel or a bottle of orange squash’. BBC2 Controller David Attenborough said everything was perfect, ‘the weather, the transmission and the prospects’. The American company RCA was reported to be poised to begin production of colour television tubes at its new £1 million factory in Skelmersdale New Town, not a million miles from Aintree. This technical and cultural revolution still lay in the future as far as the Grand National was concerned, however. Red Alligator’s dominant 1968 victory would be the last to be broadcast on television solely in black and white.
You would not have given much for jockey Brian Fletcher’s chances of riding the Grand National winner if you had seen him 24 hours earlier. He took a crashing fall from a horse called JFK at the first fence of the Mildmay Chase. ‘He didn’t know whether it was Christmas or Easter,’ recalls Stan Mellor, who was down to ride French Kilt, one of the favourites, in the big race. Fletcher, though, was one tough customer, even by the singularly elevated standards of 1960s jump-jockeys. ‘In today’s world, I would never have been allowed to ride in the Grand National,’ he admitted to me. As it was though, he went to Southport, to the ‘sauna baths’, to ‘get myself cleaned out. I was fresh as a pin, but still had a thumping great headache … I remember passing the [winning] post and saying, “Well, Brian, you have done it.” I was on the crest of a wave.’
The result – and the 20-length winning margin, even wider than Foinavon’s the previous year – clearly hardened Fletcher’s conviction that he and Red Alligator would have won in 1967 as well if it weren’t for the pile-up. The third-placed jockey, David Mould, by contrast, concluded from his 1968 experience that Different Class would not have won 12 months earlier even if he had not been capsized by the chaos at the 23rd fence. ‘He didn’t get the trip,’ he told me. ‘He jumped the last three fences on sheer guts. He was absolutely gone.’
As for Foinavon, well, the 1968 National made plain that he had exhausted his fund of Aintree luck. Kitted out with the same highly distinctive blinkers, but with Harvey sporting new orange and blue silks, the shock 1967 winner was far from disgraced, however.
‘He was a hard old ride,’ the jockey recalls. ‘Going down the first straight, he would have pulled up if he could.’ Nearing halfway, though, he had picked up momentum. Then, as they streaked past the stands, misfortune struck. ‘He flew The Chair,’ Harvey continues. ‘I was tracking Bassnet, one of the favourites. Going to the water, I was right up Bassnet’s backside. I thought I should give myself some room, so I gave him a length. Bassnet tripped over the water. His neck came out to the side and tripped Foinavon up. If I had stayed right behind him, I would have got through.’
Harvey permanently damaged his left shoulder in the fall, but Foin-avon was right as rain. He might, indeed, have been inclined to follow the other runners out for the second circuit were it not for Hemsley, who had seen what had happened on a television screen near the entrance to the racecourse and come hurrying out shouting Foinavon’s name. He thinks it was the yellow plastic bucket he was carrying that did the trick. This was the receptacle from which the horse often slurped his eagerly awaited ration of goat’s milk. He may therefore have associated it with a treat. Whether for this, or some other impenetrable, horsey reason, he cantered straight over, more like an obedient gun-dog than a flighty thoroughbred, senses scrambled by the adrenalin-rush of race-day. ‘Cor, you’ve got him well trained!’ said the relative of Harvey’s with whom Hemsley had been standing. Pat Taaffe might have recognised it as the same reflex that had caused him to crop grass at Baldoyle.
Two other horses – Ronald’s Boy and Champion Prince – were brought down in the same incident. One of them, Champion Prince, had exhausted his Aintree luck too. His jockey, Andrew Wates, had just pulled over towards the inside rail and jumped the fence when his horse’s legs were taken away from under him by one of the other victims. ‘It was like being catapulted into the air,’ Wates recalled. He escaped unhurt; Champion Prince sustained a broken neck.
See Notes on Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Last Hurrah
It was just another ordinary late spring day behind the sturdy black steel gates of Blackrath farm. Stud groom Dermot Whelan was in the back field exercising the establishment’s most precious asset on the end of a lunge-line as he had done hundreds of times before. Vulgan, though now 25, was inflamed with the impulses of the season, charging and bucking around like a two-year-old, as he nearly always did.
It was May 1968, Paris was simmering and Frank Latham’s little Kildare stud was at the peak of its fame, with Vulgan entrenched as the leading sire of jumpers in Great Britain and Ireland. Though he was now firmly in the veteran category, the most productive broodmares were still being driven up the white-walled driveway as regularly as ever for their assignations with the pocket-sized stallion. And his strike-rate remained outstanding: four mares in every five who visited him in 1966 were successfully impregnated. Most important of all, his offspring went on and on winning: in the four seasons to 1966/67, his stock won over 160 races. Foinavon’s quota was just four.
Then in the blink of an eye it was over. An over-exuberant kick, a shriek of surprise and anguish and rage and one of those awesomely powerful hind legs had buckled irreparably, its hock shattered. The vet was summoned, but a horseman of Whelan’s experience knew all too well the inescapable verdict. ‘His hock was shaking like a child’s rattlingbox it was in that many bits,’ he told me, the moment still etched on his mind across four decades. ‘When a stallion gets to that age, the hock gets very thin from getting up on the mares. It’s very easy to break a hock. He was still strong as an ox.’ When he was injected, although the drugs knocked him out straight away, it took a quarter of an hour for the great stallion’s heart to stop.
Back in England, Foinavon was preparing for his last race of the season, a three-mile chase of little consequence at the stiff but scenic Northamptonshire course of Towcester. He was pulled up in a race he had finished third in two years before. This meant that in 1967/68 he had run seven races altogether, been pulled up twice, been brought down or fallen twice and finished last three times.
It could have been the end of the road. And yet after his summer break, this time blissfully free of county show-opening duties, and reunited with John Buckingham, the patient, clear-headed rider who had partnered him to Grand National glory, the ten-year-old bounced back to such effect that he pieced together his most consistent run of results for four years. It was to be his last hurrah.
His season opened, just as it had two years earlier, in the West Country. In the space of four weeks, Foinavon and Buckingham contested three races at the Devon & Exeter course on the Haldon Hills. They performed better each time, coming fourth of seven in the horse’s seasonal debut, then third, overhauling one rival on the line. Unlike some
of the other jockeys who rode him, Buckingham seemed content to bide his time, confident that his old partner’s stamina would carry him through the field in the race’s latter stages as others tired. This approach was seen to good advantage in the John Lumley Handicap Chase on 18 September. In a field of just four on a course they now knew intimately, Foinavon and Buckingham hit the front at the second-last fence and stayed on to win by a comfortable two-and-a-half lengths. ‘Foinavon’s first since Aintree,’ said a headline on the front page of the next day’s Sporting Life. ‘Foinavon got into the winner’s enclosure at Devon & Exeter yesterday for the first time since his 1967 Aintree triumph.’
Less than a week later, the pair were involved in one of those sporting match-ups that, while it was hardly Arkle versus Mill House or War Admiral versus Seabiscuit, tend to capture the imagination of the sporting public. ‘It will probably be a long time,’ wrote journalist Len Thomas with little fear of contradiction, ‘before we again see a winner of the Grand National and the runner-up of the same year competing for a mere £580 in a three-mile chase on this course.’
A year and a half after the jockey’s hopes were dashed at Aintree, Josh Gifford and Honey End were finally to have their chance to exact a measure of revenge. If the earlier clash had been in the spotlight of racing’s Broadway, however, the re-match was in the provincial theatre of Plumpton in the Sussex countryside. And, figuratively as well as literally, autumn was setting in.
Foinavon’s recent victory in Devon had actually left such an impression that Sporting Life’s Man on the Spot tipped him once again to get the better of his Ryan Price-trained rival. ‘Foinavon had a poor season last season,’ he wrote. ‘But his form has perked up this season and he won in convincing style at Devon & Exeter recently.’ Honey End had ‘also had a poor season last year and I well remember him running very slovenly in this race last year’. (He finished third.)
On the spot he may have been, but in this case the Sporting Life’s ‘Man’ was also wide of the mark, as Honey End romped home by five lengths from Buckingham’s mount. A mistake at the water was said to have taken ‘much of the steam out of Foinavon’. Problems at waterjumps, indeed, were to be a recurring feature of the gelding’s final races.
The outcome of this duel, however, was at once overshadowed by an incident in the next hurdle race. At the third-last flight, Gifford tumbled from his mount, Hot Ice, but his left foot got stuck in his stirrup, causing him to be dragged ‘several yards’ before he was able to free himself. Carried into the ambulance-room on a stretcher, he was soon smoking and ‘smiling cheerfully’. But a broken ankle was diagnosed. ‘Gifford may be out for a long time,’ said the headline above Thomas’s Sporting Life article.
Deciding when to stop is one of the hardest things for any public figure to get right. Money often has more of a say in the decision than it should. Sometimes it prompts stars to outstay their welcome, which may be why boxers and rockers rarely seem to bow out with grace; sometimes to depart too soon, as when top Flat racehorses are retired to stud well before the racing public is ready.
Owned by the widow of the richest man in England, there was never the slightest chance that money would be permitted to influence Arkle’s retirement date. And when the announcement that lowered the curtain on steeplechasing’s golden age finally came on 8 October, nearly two years after the horse’s last race, it was greeted with relief as well as disappointment and sadness. Anne, Duchess of Westminster, had decided against a Christmas-tide comeback by her great chaser not, she said, because he was unsound but simply because of the passage of time. Just short of his 12th birthday, she had concluded, ‘not even Arkle, with his immense courage, could be expected to reproduce his old brilliance’. When, next day, his great rival Mill House fell in an obscure four-horse race at Ludlow, it seemed to vindicate the decision.
Having finished in the first three in each of his last three starts, there must have seemed little reason why Foinavon should not soldier on. By now, though, he had run nearly twice as many races as Arkle and was only a year younger. When on 4 October he was found to be lame on his off foreleg on arrival at post for the start of a three-mile chase at Wincanton, it could be interpreted, with the benefit of hindsight, as a sign that the end was near for the 1967 Grand National winner too.
With two fences to jump in the Consolation Handicap Chase at the Staffordshire course of Uttoxeter eight days later, you would have said that evidence of decline was becoming more compelling. True, Foinavon was set once again to finish in the first three, but only because half the six-strong field had fallen. Having jumped poorly throughout, he was well adrift of the two leaders as they approached the penultimate obstacle, accompanied by a loose horse.
Admiral Pennant, who had come down at the seventh, had been declared to run in no fewer than three races that day. The riders of the two leaders were about to have reason to wish his trainer had chosen one of the others. According to Sporting Life reporter Doug Newton, Admiral Pennant, running loose, impeded his rivals as they approached the fence. ‘Jenin, who had been three lengths clear, hit the fence and toppled over,’ Newton reported. ‘As Paddynoggin reached the obstacle, the loose horse ran across and carried him out.’
As at Aintree 18 months earlier, Buckingham and Foinavon suddenly found themselves with an unassailable lead in a race they had no right to win. And this time there were just two fences between them and the winning-post. Having navigated his way safely home over half a circuit at Liverpool, Buckingham was not about to slip up here. Spectators in Uttoxeter’s new 1,800-capacity grandstand, opened only in May, raised the roof. ‘The crowd were going mad,’ Buckingham remembers. ‘I never heard such applause.’ Of course, with Foinavon sent off at 9/2 third-favourite, a lot more of those watching in Staffordshire that afternoon backed him than had at Aintree when his triumph produced a confetti of discarded betting slips.
With Apollo 7 in orbit and the opening ceremony for the 1968 Olympic Games in exotic Mexico City about to start, Foinavon’s sixth and last victory was far from big news – even with its faint but unmistakable echo of his and Buckingham’s great day at Liverpool. After 63 races and over 150 miles raced, mostly over steeplechase fences, that would have been the perfect moment to retire, following the last of his sporadic visits to the winner’s enclosure, with the cheers of an enthusiastic Saturday afternoon racing crowd ringing in his ears. It would also have been too good to be true. And so, six weeks later, it was on to Warwick – and a race that had been won two years running earlier in the decade by a horse called Popham Down.
See Notes on Chapter 28
Chapter 29
A Certain Mileage
It is a metaphor that the Kemptons, with their mechanical bent, would have appreciated. ‘A horse,’ said Vincent O’Brien, the great Irish trainer, ‘is like a car: he has only got a certain mileage.’ The particular horse that the master of Ballydoyle had in mind was Nijinsky, a sleek roadster, but the comparison held just as true for jalopies like Foinavon.
Rain-clouds hung low and menacing as the small field of six lined up for the Crudwell Cup, a race that Popham Down had once dominated. It was the second-most valuable contest of the day at Warwick and some useful chasers had been attracted, notably Domacorn, big, black, leggy and error-prone, and San Angelo, the Edward Courage horse who had finished 12th in the 1968 Grand National.
It was late November and Britain was bracing itself glumly for winter while moaning about Chancellor Roy Jenkins’s latest bombshell. This took the form of a swathe of duty increases – petrol and cigarettes, whisky and beer, the usual suspects – announced the previous day. ‘Putting up the price of Christmas,’ said The Times, sounding a factual, but uncharacteristically populist note. ‘Resign!’ bellowed Conservative MPs on the opposition benches.
John Buckingham had extra cause to be despondent. A bright new prospect from the Courage stables was emerging called Spanish Steps. Buckingham, who had schooled the horse, had triumphed on him the previous month on his
first outing of the season, but had then been beaten into second place in a race he admits he should have won. Spanish Steps was running again that afternoon in the big race of the day at Ascot, the Black and White Gold Cup Chase. But this time Buckingham would not be riding: shortly after that defeat, another jockey, Jack Cook, was sitting next to Mrs Courage at a dinner, pitched for the ride and got it. This was part of the game – as Buckingham has acknowledged, any ‘sensible’ jockey would have taken the opportunity. Nonetheless, he says, ‘it broke my heart’.
For the only time in the horse’s last seven races, Buckingham was not riding Foinavon either. Richard Pitman, one of the third-fence fallers at Aintree in 1967, would be his 16th and final jockey. It was to be a breakthrough year for Pitman, but this was not one of the races that contributed to it. With two wins in his last five outings, the form-book must have looked promising to Foinavon’s stand-in jockey. In reality, his mount had reached the end of his tether. After leading to the second fence, he soon fell behind in a race won by Domacorn with News View, yet another son of Vulgan, second. Pitman remembers an ‘incredibly hard’ ride. Another jockey, Tony ‘Geordie’ Mawson, aboard San Angelo, was taken by surprise when his rival nearly stopped in his tracks ahead of him. ‘Foinavon tried to refuse at the water,’ he says. ‘I went into his back and knocked him over the jump. I didn’t expect him to refuse.’
It was more than two months later, on 1 February 1969, that Foinavon, now 11, ran his final race. Like his former stable companion Arkle, this last run came at Kempton Park, a course where he had gone well in the past, in a race – the Royal Mail Handicap Chase – he had contested twice before.