Foinavon Read online

  To Molly

  ‘Foinavon has no chance. Not the boldest of jumpers,

  he can be safely ignored even in a race noted for shocks.’

  Daily Express, 8 April 1967

  Contents

  8 April 1967…

  1 Vulgan

  2 Ecilace

  3 The Road to Baldoyle

  4 Kempton Park

  5 A Horse to Run in the National

  6 Ma Topham and the Battle for Aintree

  7 The Road to Doncaster

  8 Hello Susie

  9 Wasted

  10 1966 and all that

  11 500/1

  12 A Jockey to Ride in the National

  13 An Iron Bunk-bed and Two Armchairs Pushed Together

  14 The Ecstasy of Aintree

  15 A Typical Day for Something Terrible to Happen

  16 ‘Johnny, What’s This You’re Riding?’

  17 Over the Melling Road and Far Away

  18 A Blanking of the Mind

  19 A Small Blue-and-White Drinking Mug

  20 An Understandable Slayer

  21 A Chain Reaction of Ruin

  22 Only One Gone On

  23 ‘They Might Call This the Foinavon Fence’

  24 Foinavon and the Women

  25 Well Done, Foinavon

  26 The World of William Hickey

  27 10 Million to One

  28 Last Hurrah

  29 A Certain Mileage

  30 Ghosts and the Great Pools Swindle

  Notes on the Text

  Appendix A – 1967 Grand National Racecard

  Appendix B – Timeform Ratings of the 44 Runners

  Appendix C – 1967 Grand National Result

  Appendix D – Poem by Carol Mills and Sally Williams

  Appendix E – Foinavon Race Record

  Acknowledgements

  Image Section

  A Note on the Author

  8 April 1967 …

  I remember not the smallest detail of my seventh birthday on 7 April 1967, but one moment from the following afternoon has remained with me.

  It was 3.32pm as I now realise. I don’t think I was watching the Grand National exactly, but it was on in our bay-windowed Taunton house. I could hear the commentary chattering away in the background, ‘Rutherfords, Castle Falls, Castle Falls, Rutherfords … ’ like an incantation. Surely one horse or the other would win. Then, abruptly, everything changed. Where previously all had seemed settled, at least to a distracted seven-year-old, now chaos reigned. Michael O’Hehir’s irrepressible voice acquired an incredulous tone as he rattled out his now famous roll call of fallen horses. That is when I looked up at the television picture and saw a thrilling mêlée. It looked like every single horse had been stopped in its tracks. A few jockeys, thrown onto the landing side, were flapping around like beached fish. There was, as O’Hehir said, a ‘right pile-up’. But then, after an improbably long interlude, just as it seemed that the whole race had ground irretrievably to a halt, one horse and rider approached the fence, slow as you like, on the wide outside, plopped over and trundled away to a sort of immortality. ‘Foinavon has gone off on his own,’ announced O’Hehir. My eyes never left the screen until he passed the winning-post three minutes later.

  The Grand National got me at an impressionable age. From that afternoon, for years to come, I used to stage versions of the race in my bedroom, laying out an assortment of pencil boxes, biscuit tins and the odd cuddly toy for the fences. The horses were those small collectable picture cards that Brooke Bond used to give away with PG Tips tea, in sets numbered, handily enough, from one to fifty. Cards landing picture side up when tossed over a ‘fence’ were deemed to have fallen. Even today, I can remember the specific cards that represented a few of the horses. Bassnet was a redstart from a British birds series; Anglo was kallima inachus, the orange dead leaf butterfly, from tropical Asia; Vulcano was a De Dion Bouton from a vintage car series given away with packets of sweet cigarettes.

  What can I say? It was a long time ago. Xboxes were few and far between. In some ways, I liked to think, my imaginary Nationals were an improvement on the real thing. The biggest field in a real Grand National, for example, was 66 in 1929. As the years went by, though, I added the new runners to my original field of 44. By the time football claimed me, I regularly had ‘Nationals’ with 80 or 90 horses charging pell-mell up and over the cunningly angled shortbread tin standing in for Becher’s Brook. Let me tell you, it was quite a spectacle.

  I wasn’t the only impressionable youngster on whom Foinavon’s Grand National left its mark. Two girls called Carol Mills and Sally Williams composed a poem in red ink, in eleven four-line verses. They posted it to Foinavon, ‘Oh! What a lucky horse!’ John Kempton, who trained him, still has the poem (see here).

  I suppose it was the train-wreck quality of the 1967 race, pure and simple, that grabbed me that first afternoon. It was a black and white television set, so it wasn’t the bright race-day colours appealing to me. I was wary of donkeys, never mind clunking great thoroughbred horses, and blissfully ignorant that there was any chance of anyone or anything getting hurt charging over those big, dark fences.

  With the passage of time, though, I came to realise that Foinavon’s incredible victory struck other personal chords. For one thing, like many people, I love an underdog – and upsets don’t come much bigger than Foinavon’s Grand National triumph. But whereas nearly every sports-lover cheered when Ronnie Radford’s Hereford United dumped Newcastle out of the FA Cup, or Jim Montgomery’s Sunderland beat the dastardly but once awesomely powerful Leeds at Wembley, that’s not really how it works in racing. So many of those watching the National have bet on the outcome that, in contrast to football, when a rank outsider comes in, people tend not to be too thrilled. This offends my sense of fairness. I must admit it is lucky I was too young to bet on Foinavon’s race or I might have taken as dim a view as any other losing punter. As it was, I was able to enjoy his win as wholeheartedly as any FA Cup giant-killing.

  Foinavon’s National is also one of those sports stories that comes with its own life-lesson. I suppose you could interpret it as a horsey reworking of the fable of the hare, or in this case hares, and the tortoise, though I prefer to see it as the parable of why you should never give up. In sport, as in life, you just don’t know what lies around the corner.

  Of course, now I realise that the National is a dangerous business – for riders and their mounts. I am soft-hearted to a fault about animals. So I watch the race with intakes of breath and gritted teeth. But still I watch. Engaging in something as deliberate as writing this book has obliged me to ask myself why.

  I don’t think you can justify exposing a racehorse to danger in a scientific or mathematical way. If you take the view that it is unacceptable to put an animal avoidably at risk and you shun animal products yourself then it strikes me as both logical and perfectly respectable to contend that the race should be stopped. What I think the rest of us can do is assess what is to be gained and what lost from that particular course of action.

  If you stopped the Grand National, it would prevent perhaps one handsome animal a year from suffering a life-ending fracture in the course of competing in the most physically demanding event in the British horse-racing calendar. You might also spare an indeterminate number of people the undeniably distressing sight of the stricken animal endeavouring in vain to right itself or to carry on galloping. It is hard, in all honesty, though to think what else you might put in the ‘gains’ column. I certainly don’t believe that the animals spared the rigours of competing in the National would instead live out long lives in sundappled pastures. If the National disappears, along with its copious prize money, it will be much less worthwhile devoting time and attention to training horses, like Foinavon, wi
th a proclivity for endurance events. In the long term, ‘National-type’ horses would no longer be produced. In the short term, a great many would drop out of racing. These are, on the whole, high-maintenance animals with a very specialised skill-set. Even when they can be retrained for, say, eventing or leisure-riding, this takes time, money and an owner or benefactor willing to take a chance. The supply of all three of these vital ingredients is limited and eminently exhaustible. If you stop the National, in short, I think that far fewer of the current crop of long-distance specialists would live out long, purposeful, reasonably well-cared-for lives than if the race keeps going.

  Nor do I believe that halting the National would put a stop to the public relations war between horse-racing interests and the animal rights movement that nowadays erupts every year around the time of the Aintree meeting. It would just move to new battlegrounds. Two weeks before the 2012 Grand National, which led mortifyingly to the deaths of two of the forty runners, a high-profile Flat race in the Middle East eventually claimed the lives of three of just 13 horses entered for it. Horses will occasionally suffer life-ending injuries in any form of horse racing, no matter how well regulated the sport is, no matter what steps are taken to protect them. For those who find it immoral to place any animal purposely and unnecessarily at risk, no form of horse racing can truly be acceptable. The Grand National is just the juiciest target.

  I would not proffer it as an inescapable conclusion in any way, but horse racing is still a pursuit I feel comfortable supporting on certain conditions. One of these is that all reasonable measures to protect racing horses, consistent with the character of a race, are put in place. Another is that animals in training are well looked after, with, for example, strict and effective policing of medicines administered in the days before a race. I was quite struck by the measured reply I got back from Australian philosopher and animal rights campaigner Peter Singer a few years ago when I approached him for a comment about the ethics of horse racing. ‘I think that animals are often subject to unnecessary stress and abuse in the racing industry,’ Singer stated. ‘And jumps racing is definitely worse because of the high rate of injuries … But I also think that, given the relatively small number of animals involved, and the more individualised attention racehorses get, the suffering of racehorses is insignificant compared to, say, the suffering of factory-farmed chickens and pigs. That’s why I’ve never made much of an issue about it.’

  I must admit, though, that I don’t look at this purely in terms of horse welfare. The Grand National is thrilling. It is spectacular. There is an aesthetic beauty about a big field pouring over the spruce-dressed Liverpool fences, just as there is about a Dennis Bergkamp goal or a Roger Federer passing-shot. The courage and skill required to excel make those who succeed, equine and human, among the most revered figures in all of sport. But the National is about so much more than the clinical business of winning. For most, the adrenalin rush of tackling those fences is more than enough. After the race, one former jockey told me, the eyes of everyone who had completed the course would be ‘ablaze with the experience’. This is what makes the race an inexhaustible fount of stories. The National, in short, has its own very considerable intrinsic value – and this is partly because of the demands it poses and the heavy price it can exact.

  For all of the controversy that dogs it, for all that football has become an ever more dominant sporting superpower, for all that our attitude to horses has changed since they ceased to be indispensable for farming and waging war, the National still embodies Britain in ways that have something in common with the way the Tour de France embodies France. The bicycle race goes to the country, turning its best-known landmarks, natural and man-made, into the amphitheatre in which the action unfolds. With the Grand National, it is the other way around: the country goes to the race. But this happens in a number of ways.

  Firstly, and most obviously, horses from all over the country (and beyond) head to Liverpool to compete. In 1967, Honey End and What a Myth came from Sussex, Red Alligator from County Durham, Kilburn from Kent, Foinavon from Berkshire and so on. A horse called Freddie flew the flag for Scotland – even though, like Foinavon and so many of the 44 runners, he was foaled in Ireland, in County Offaly. Secondly, a high proportion of the population – something like one in six – makes a point of watching the National and often making a small bet. The race’s appeal, moreover, embraces town- as well as country-dwellers and stretches from top to bottom of society. Freddie’s biographer Vian Smith, indeed, went as far as to explain his subject’s huge 1960s popularity in terms of class struggle. The secret of Freddie’s command over the hearts of men, he wrote, ‘lies in his furious refusal to give in. Men and women see in him the proletariat tackling the aristocrats and somehow winning when it seems he cannot.’

  Lastly, it is part of the charm of racing that features of the national landscape (and many other things) can be brought to life and assembled in one place through the medium of the horses’ names. This was never plainer than in the 1967 Grand National, whose narrative, by one interpretation, could be summarised thus: a valley in Hampshire (Meon Valley), brings down a hill in Wiltshire (Popham Down), which later causes the pile-up that hands victory to a towering Scottish mountain (Foinavon).

  Few racehorses in history have been named after a more striking geographic feature than the 1967 Grand National winner. Foinaven, as the Gaelic is usually anglicised today, is a great lummox of a mountain in Sutherland on the Grosvenor estate of Reay Forest. With its long multi-summited ridge, it is not a classical mountain shape like Ben Stack, its near neighbour. But at a whisker under 3,000 feet, it glowers over the ruggedly scenic local landscape with its white-faced sheep, properly sulphurous gorse and ten weather changes an hour. From her summer base at Lochmore Lodge, Anne, Duchess of Westminster, Foinavon’s one-time owner, would have struggled to see his mountain namesake behind the contours of the smaller, but nearer Arkle. But it would often have brooded in the background as she fished the Laxford river or stalked red deer. And on the road back from Oldshoremore beach, on a clear day, the three mountains – massive Foinaven, squat Arkle and shapely Ben Stack – stand out in majestic line, just as they once did in Tom Dreaper’s famous stable north of Dublin.

  Conquering a mountain is an obvious metaphor for realising an ambition. The Grand National has metaphorical power too. With its obstacles and colour, its feats of raw courage, its elation, its despair and, above all, its outrageous twists of good and bad fortune, it is the perfect sporting metaphor for our passage through life. That, more than anything, is why I keep coming back to it. And it is why I will never forget Foinavon. This is his story.

  See Notes on 8 April 1967 …

  Chapter 1

  Vulgan

  In spring 1942, France was under German occupation as far south as the Loire. The United States had entered the war and its troops were about to start using the wide-open spaces of Aintree racecourse as a transport depot. But the tide of history had not yet turned decisively against Hitler in North Africa and the Soviet Union, and the Normandy landings were more than two years away. It was against this unpromising backdrop that a ten-year-old mare called Vulgate made the 120-mile journey from her stable near Evreux, west of Paris, to the La Potardière stud farm near the town of La Flèche, between Le Mans and Angers.

  With petrol scarce and the atmosphere in the countryside at best tense, this was not a trip to be undertaken lightly – not least because a union with the same stallion, Sirlan, the year before had failed to produce any offspring. This time, however, the mating proved fruitful. The following spring Vulgate gave birth to a male foal who would go on to leave as big an imprint on National Hunt racing as any horse in history.

  The yard where the foal, Vulgan, was raised was presided over in wartime by Madame Jacques Lambert, daughter of Count André d’Ideville, a past president of the French Sport Society, and a woman with more on her mind, clearly, than dreaming up over-elaborate names for her livestock. Madame Lamb
ert’s husband was away in North Africa at the time with the French army. Having landed back in his homeland at Toulon at the head of his squadron in August 1944, Commander Lambert was wounded fighting German troops in Lorraine, eastern France on 11 October. He died about a month later.

  This turbulent start to his life did not prevent Vulgan, whose relatively short frame was belied by an imperious eye and fiery temperament, from compiling an impressive race record. Starting with a third-place finish in an 800-metre (four-furlong) dash at Maisons-Laffitte, he clocked up five wins over three seasons (1945–7) on the Flat in France. These included the Group 4 Prix Major Fridolin and Prix de la Goutte d’Or, both run at Longchamp’s famous racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris. He also finished second in his final French season in the Group 2 Prix de Strasbourg at Saint-Cloud.

  Horse racing continued in Britain as well as France through the war years, but with more disruption. This may help to explain the success enjoyed by French-bred horses on English courses in the immediate postwar period. Vulgan himself was acquired by a Mr H. Coriat, a Wiltshire farmer who, according to Sporting Life, ‘hitherto has always preferred to go hunting, rather than to watch racing’. Trained at Childrey, near Wantage, by Captain John de Moraville – who was awarded the Military Cross in 1941 but was a prisoner of war by the time his future charge was foaled – the five-year-old bay colt in March 1948 gave Coriat his first winner – in Cheltenham’s prestigious Gloucestershire Hurdle. Sent off at 9/2 second-favourite, he came through with a sweetly timed challenge after the final flight to win by three-quarters of a length. It was to be his only race over obstacles, the branch of the sport at which so many of his progeny would excel.

  For most of his last two years as a racehorse, Vulgan competed in long-distance Flat races requiring the stamina that his pedigree suggested he should possess. At Royal Ascot in June 1948, he made the frame twice in a week, coming second in the Gold Vase over two miles before winning the marathon Queen Alexandra Stakes, a feat he came close to repeating the following year when finishing second as odds-on favourite. He ran his last race on 12 November 1949. Fittingly, it was at Liverpool.