Foinavon

by David Owen

  The television cameras were at Kempton. The story of the day, though, was not the inexorable silting up of Foinavon’s carburettors, but the return of Persian War after a hock injury. The hurdler was probably the closest thing jumps-racing had left to a horse with Arkle-like star quality.

  Foinavon’s race was soon run: a mistake at the third, in the rear of the sparse four-horse field by the fifth, down at the tenth – the problematical water-jump. Reunited one last time with the horse who had carried him to immortality, Buckingham could tell well before their fall that the spark had gone. ‘He jumped the water, which was just past the stands, then did the splits,’ he says. ‘I felt the horse wasn’t enjoying himself at all – it was obvious. I told them I didn’t want to ride him any more. I think the horse had had enough.’

  See Notes on Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Ghosts and the Great Pools Swindle

  Two old steel wheels, lichen-stained and mounted on bricks, have been wired to the wooden fence that now separates the bungalow from the L-shaped stable-block. A metal chimney stack has started to corrode. Battleship-grey paint still coats the stable-doors. Rain pours down and the air is thick with ghosts.

  It is 9 April 2012 – 45 years to the day since Foinavon returned from Liverpool as the most famous horse in England, posed for photographs and walked stiffly past the pressmen and locals to his stable on my left. You would never guess that this bedraggled yard, with a traffic cone and two green wheelbarrows on one side and a three-step mounting-block on the other, had once housed a Grand National winner. Nor that a patch of grass by the fence, where two seed-trays lie waterlogged, is his burial plot.

  Foinavon was duly retired after that feeble last run at Kempton Park and lived on contentedly enough at Chatham Stables for a couple of summers. In April 1970, he was said to be spending ‘grazing hours’ with the Kemptons’ other Grand National horse, Seas End, then 18 years old. A horse’s digestive system is a surprisingly delicate part of its anatomy. When it stops racing, the transition from the energy intensive diet it has consumed for years to a regime appropriate to its new, more sedentary lifestyle must be carefully managed. In those days, this meant replacing the oats that the horse would have required when in work with the correct balance of bran, grass and other low energy foodstuffs. This would often have entailed a certain hard-heartedness: the retired chaser might crave its accustomed diet, particularly when, as in Foinavon’s case, it still lived among active racehorses munching their way through pounds of oats every week. The consequences of indulging the animal, though, could be severe. ‘If you give a racehorse that is not working oats, he becomes uncontrollable, or he gets colic,’ Colin Hemsley, the former head lad at the stable, told me. Then as now, colic – severe abdominal pain – could be a death sentence for horses.

  Unfortunately, while the yard enjoyed some success in the aftermath of Foinavon’s retirement, the underlying tensions were proving more and more disruptive. A frustrated Hemsley, tired of Jack Kempton’s condescending attitude and frequent attempts to intervene in racing matters he did not really comprehend, took the opportunity to leave in 1970, when offered a plum post with George Beeby, another local trainer. John Kempton eventually grew so fed up with waiting to move into the bungalow beside the yard with Trish, his wife, that he departed too, accepting a job as assistant to David Barons, an up-and-coming trainer based in South Devon. This left John’s parents to keep Chatham Stables ticking over as best they could. At some point, as they were struggling to cope, it seems that Foinavon’s retirement diet went awry and the horse contracted colic with fatal consequences. Like Arkle, he was just 13. He was buried in the yard beneath the centrepiece that had been held up with string in 1967, when the cameraman taking shots of the burnished horse for the Schweppes racing calendar came to call.

  John Kempton stayed with Barons’s expanding operation for around five years. During the couple’s third year in the West Country, a farmer-friend who had once been an amateur jockey, introduced them to scuba diving. From then on the sea began to exert its pull, as well as their desire to be their own bosses. ‘We had the bright idea of buying a boat and taking diving parties out,’ Kempton says. ‘Even though the yard was quite successful, we had this hankering to work for ourselves. We had a house in Kingsbridge that came with the job, which meant we could take out a mortgage to buy a 42-foot boat. We launched off with that. The first year, we just did it in the summer, during jumps-racing’s rest season. I taught myself navigation around the kitchen table.’

  They attracted sufficient custom that first summer to take the plunge and turn their back on racing for good. The business proved viable enough to sustain them for 28 years, far longer than the time John Kempton had worked with horses. Throughout this period, they spent nearly the whole summer at sea, shuttling back and forth from the Channel Islands and Scilly Isles, returning to base each Friday night to re-stock and pick up new passengers. ‘We went from the 42-footer to a 55- and then a 65-foot boat,’ Kempton says. ‘It was very hard work because we used to take 10 or 12 people at a time and cater for them three meals a day. Trish had the rough end of the stick because she would be cooking solidly all winter as well as working the boat. The business worked because she did it so well. People kept coming back year after year.’

  Jack Kempton took out his own trainer’s licence and managed one winner – a horse called Tandem at Towcester on 27 May 1972. Hems-ley, who had reluctantly left Beeby’s to work in a pressed steel factory by then, because he needed a job capable of supporting a mortgage, remembers answering a knock on his door one spring evening. To his surprise it was Jack Kempton who asked him sheepishly if he would school the horse, a difficult character that Hemsley knew from his time at the yard, before the race. This he agreed to do.

  In the minutes before the off, the horse gave jockey Tony ‘Geordie’ Mawson a taste of what to expect, dumping him on the lush Northamptonshire turf in front of the grandstand. ‘He was the type of horse if you asked him to go left he wanted to go right,’ Mawson recalls. ‘He wouldn’t parade properly, so I let him go down to the start and got fined £10 for my trouble.’ Perhaps not surprisingly after these antics, Tandem went off a distant 33/1 outsider in a five-horse race.

  ‘I got him out very quickly and led going to the first,’ says Mawson, who retains a detailed recollection of the unexpected victory. ‘I just sat on him and let him run. He slammed the brakes on before the first but jumped it. He did exactly the same before the second and third. I realised then I was as safe as houses because he was really looking after himself. The fourth was the ditch. I let him slam the brakes on then belted him one. He took off so fast I nearly fell off backwards.’

  The pair were still clear tackling the demanding climb before the finish, but Stan Mellor, riding one of the favourites, Main Hill, was gaining ground. Mawson describes how he manoeuvred his mount to block the former champion’s attempts to pass on both the inside and the outer. ‘Then I took off and won by miles.’

  That was as good as it got for Jack Kempton as a racehorse trainer. Two days later, Tandem ran again and trailed in fifth. After they had finished, one of the other jockeys asked Tandem’s rider how he had managed to win a race on the horse. ‘I always believed every horse had a key,’ Mawson says. ‘it was just a question of finding it.’

  If any jockey could be said to have unlocked the secret of making Foin-avon run well, it was of course John Buckingham, who managed three wins, a second, a third and a fourth in his eight rides on the horse with which his name will always be associated.

  Buckingham rode in the Grand National on three more occasions, finishing every time, although he did suffer a particularly disappointing fall on his last appearance in 1971. Riding Limeburner in the race for the second time, he was in with a chance when coming down at the second from home. He remounted to finish 12th.

  He remained a well-known figure in the weighing-room for many years after his painful last fall at Wetherby a month or so later
, notching up three decades as a valet, working most of this time with his brother Tom. For all the more genteel associations of the word, this was as demanding a trade in its own way as being a jump-jockey. The risk of broken bones and extended hospital visits was no longer a preoccupation, but a jockeys’ valet faced a similar grind of early mornings and countless miles on the clock. Plus now the good days meant not glory and a stupendously potent adrenalin rush, but a smaller-than-expected pile of boots to polish or mud-spattered breeches to wash. Buckingham continued to view his domain, nevertheless, as ‘almost a sacred place … the holy of holies … the best place to be’. And, as a gregarious character as well as an ex-rider, he could relate to the maddeningly capricious ups and downs that his clients had to cope with like few others. This must have been a big advantage – and a great help to them. He still inhabits the house he was living in that cloudy morning not far off half a century ago when he took John Kempton’s surprise phone call asking if he would ride Foinavon at Aintree. The Rose and Crown is still his local.

  Two days before Buckingham’s last Grand National, on 1 April 1971, Iris Watkins collapsed towards the end of a typically busy day engaged in chores around the property at Nine Mile Ride and died of a stroke. She was just 54. Cyril stayed on at the bungalow for some months after her death, but then moved with the brood-mares to a former pig farm in the New Forest. Coincidentally, the new house – Yew Tree Farm at Stoney Cross near Lyndhurst – was almost next door to a hotel called the Compton Arms. Events had evidently taken their toll. Tiggy Partridge, a local teenager who looked after the horses for him, describes him as ‘quite a recluse. A very nice man, very quiet.’

  On 24 October 1974 Partridge had tonsillitis and was too unwell to tend to the horses. Her indisposition coincided with the day when Cyril’s diseased heart finally gave out on him. He was found on the property at the wheel of his car. He was a month short of his 66th birthday. Partridge (now Tiggy Aubin) recalls that the property, originally two separate farm workers’ cottages, was subsequently auctioned in Lynd-hurst for £25,000. It was bought by the director of a carpet company.

  Of the people most closely associated with Foinavon, the only one who made news again in any significant way was, ironically, the co-owner who gave up his interest in the horse in the months before he hit the Aintree jackpot. Football pools concessionaire Mac Bennellick had made the front page of the Havering Recorder in the wake of that victory. Six years later – just a week before Red Rum’s sensational first Grand National win – he found himself on the front page of the News of the World.

  ‘The Great Pools Swindle’ proclaimed the headline in capital letters more than an inch high. ‘Four men and a woman have confessed to the News of the World that they have pulled off the gambling swindle of the century,’ the story, by reporter Michael Litchfield, began. ‘They filled in football pools coupons after learning match results from phone calls across the world and collected top dividends for weeks on end.’

  McIntyre ‘Benny’ Bennellick was said to be ‘Mr Big’ of a syndicate whose alleged exploits provided an object lesson in how technology, in this case the international telephone network, was starting to shrink the world.

  For some years, the football pools organisations in Britain had made use of the Australian football results to enable them to keep going in summer when the European leagues were not functioning. I still have hazy recollections of these scores being read out on the afternoon sports programmes, monotonous as the speaking clock, interminable as the shipping forecast. Under the scheme outlined by the newspaper, Bennellick and his associates had realised they could ‘beat the clock’ by exploiting the time difference between Australia and England to phone over the results and fill in and deliver a coupon before the pools companies’ deadline for receiving weekly entries. The plan entailed heavy upfront cost: two members of the team were said to have been dispatched to Melbourne with £3,000 in their pocket. But the newspaper said their aim was to make ‘at least £100,000 every season’ from a system they regarded as ‘a champagne pension for life’.

  By today’s standards, the infrastructure at their disposal seems impossibly primitive. A call from Bennellick to his Melbourne associates needed to be booked for 8.35am South Rainham time, 25 minutes before the deadline for coupons to be delivered to the pools company’s offices. Two further members of the team, one an accredited pools agent, would then be waiting with a blank coupon for Bennellick to call them at ‘a phone in a public kiosk outside Blackfriars station’. The newspaper helpfully included a small photograph of the London phone box in question. In a touch of cloak-and-dagger, the calls to Australia were said to deploy a special code. ‘No team was ever mentioned.’

  Almost four decades on, Litchfield remembered Bennellick as being ‘quite shabbily dressed’ with a fairly thin face and hair ‘all over the place’. The extensive News of the World spread quoted a Mr Leslie Payne, managing director of Copes Pools, as saying, ‘If it is at all possible, we shall certainly want to prosecute them all.’ One can only presume that it was not possible. ‘I expected there to be prosecutions, but it was never mentioned again,’ Litchfield told me.

  Quite how much Bennellick and his associates actually made from what the newspaper described as ‘Britain’s most audacious gambling coup’ is unclear. But it was not enough to provide Foinavon’s former owner with a pension for life, ‘champagne’ or any other variety. He and his wife Peggy moved to Ashford in Kent, where they bought a 60-acre farm in an auction. They built a four-bedroom house, kept chickens and sold their eggs. His son and daughter-in-law used to grade the eggs for him. By 1975, though, he and Peggy were divorced. Another relationship broke down when the woman moved to South Africa where her husband was working. He bought three greyhounds, which he raced at Romford. He used to place bets at £200 a time, but rarely if ever won. As he struggled to make ends meet, he sold the gold Grand National trophy Foinavon had won for just £200. In 1984, now renting an apartment in Gravesend, he fell ill with prostate cancer and was taken into hospital. While there on 29 May, as the miners’ strike raged, he had a heart attack and died. He was 67 and had hit rock bottom financially. His son Colin survived him by only a year, dying in July 1985 at just 36 years of age.

  Foinavon’s miracle day at Liverpool didn’t change the lives of those closest to him – except in the very short term; but it has touched those of plenty of strangers, myself included. From the very start, the Grand National has been a race of incredible stories – and stories such as Foinavon’s and the pile-up he eluded helped stimulate the interest that kept the race alive when its future was under severe threat. Now the advance of technology that seems to have helped Mac Bennellick to place bets on the football pools while already knowing some of the results, has created conditions in which the value of broadcasting and sponsorship rights for world-renowned sports events like the National have been able to spiral.

  As this book goes to press, it looks like the 2014 renewal may be the first Grand National worth £1 million in prize money. And if the race’s future is still not entirely secure, it is because of the highly emotive issue of horse welfare, and not financial pressure. So much has been invested at Aintree that Mirabel Topham would scarcely recognise the place (and would no doubt be less than thrilled to find her old house turned into a restaurant). Time, in short, has moved on. There is now a limit on the size of the Grand National field and a chaser with Foinavon’s record would have no chance of making the cut. Yet no one – and nothing – has benefited more from his one great exploit than the National itself and of course, the fence after Becher’s now bears his name. I hope those now running Aintree can feel the presence of those ghosts.

  See Notes on Chapter 30

  Notes on the Text

  8 April 1967 …

  Copious prize money – the total prize fund for the 2012 Grand National stood at £975,000, with £418,860 earmarked for the winning owner.

  High-profile Flat race in the Middle East – the race was th
e Dubai Gold Cup and the horses were Fox Hunt, Bronze Cannon and Grand Vent. The race was restaged after being declared void when Fox Hunt sustained his fatal injury.

  Freddie foaled in County Offaly – A Horse Called Freddie, Vian Smith, Stanley Paul, 1967, page 9.

  One in six Britons watch the Grand National – BBC coverage of the 2012 race was watched by an audience that peaked at 10.89 million viewers.

  Freddie’s ‘furious refusal to give in…’ – A Horse Called Freddie, Vian Smith, Stanley Paul, 1967, page 56.

  One racehorse that shared its name with an even more striking Scottish mountain was Ben Nevis, the 1980 Grand National winner.

  Chapter 1

  US troops at Aintree – Gallant Sport – the Authentic History of Liverpool Races and the Grand National, John Pinfold, Portway Press, 1999, pages 202–5.

  Vulgate’s journey – email correspondence with Guy Thibault, French bloodstock expert.

  Failed mating – French Stud Book, volume 26.

  Madame Lambert, death of Commander Lambert – Auteuil, hier et aujourd’hui, volume 2 (1916–2003), Guy Thibault, Editions du Castelet, 2003.

  First race – ibid.

  Group 4, Group 2 – the group system is a way of benchmarking the quality of the best races. The lower the group number, the better the race.

  Wartime racing – the only English Flat-racing Classic to be missed was the 1939 St Leger, although the two Epsom Classic races moved to Newmarket. In 1942, King George VI remarkably won four of the five Classics, with only the Derby eluding him. Jumps-racing was harder hit: there was no Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1943 and 1944; no Grand National from 1941–45; and Kempton Park was closed for racing.