Foinavon Read online

  It was during his spell at Childrey that the stallion’s explosive temper nearly cost him his future fame. A trademark bite inflicted a nasty cut on de Moraville’s thumb, prompting him to threaten to have the aggressor gelded. As the trainer observed in later years, had he carried out his threat, he would have changed the course of jumps-racing history.

  Happily for scores of future owners and trainers, including Foinavon’s connections, millions of racegoers (and, many might add, Vulgan himself), the emasculator was never deployed and by 1951 the stallion was installed at the yard where he would spend the rest of his life.

  His path to the white-walled driveway of Frank Latham’s Blackrath Farm in County Kildare, just a few miles south-east of The Curragh, Ireland’s premier Flat racecourse, was not straightforward, however. In October 1950, he was sold for 510 guineas at Newmarket to the British Bloodstock Agency, which specialised in buying horses for export. As Dermot Whelan, a former stud groom who started working at Black-rath in 1958, recollects, the horse was earmarked for a buyer in a ‘foreign country’ (he cannot remember which one), but the deal, he says, fell through because of a dock strike. This enabled Latham to snap him up for £520 and move him to Kildare’s rich pastureland.

  Latham had not even intended running Blackrath as a stud. When he bought the property in 1944, he was planning to rear young horses there. He already had a training establishment in North County Dublin, where he still lived. He therefore advertised for a head lad to take charge of his new acquisition. One of those who replied to the ad was a stud groom from Mallow whose stud farm was closing down. He told Latham that, as a result, a stallion called Flamenco was available for nothing. Latham said, ‘OK, bring him up with you.’

  Vulgan took up residence in the first box inside Blackrath farm’s sturdy black steel gates. So aggressive was he that a false ceiling eventually had to be built into his stable to discourage him from rearing. The walls were padded with coconut matting to try and stop him hurting himself in his fits of temper. Whelan, a former jockey, had to use a piece of wire to reach over the stable-door and catch hold of his head-collar to minimise the risk of getting kicked or bitten. The stallion’s short stature caused him difficulties with the bigger mares and a platform was built in the soft-surfaced inner yard to help him accomplish his assigned duties. There was no doubting his vitality, though, and he would still buck around like a playful young colt during exercise sessions right up until the day he died.

  His initial fee for servicing a mare was just 25 guineas, but as his reputation grew, so did this charge. By 1956, it was up to 47 guineas (£49 7s, or £49.35); in 1960 it was 59 guineas; in 1964 it was 121 guineas; and in 1966 it hit 149 guineas. In his last few years at Blackrath, Vulgan’s offspring were winning so many races that Latham was able to insist that his star resident was available only to mares whose owners would also pay for a second horse to see a less garlanded stallion. By the time he died, his fee had risen all the way to £250 – a fraction of the £50,000-plus fees commanded by the top Flat stallions today, but enough to recoup Latham’s initial investment every couple of visits.

  Between 1966 and 1974, the stud that wasn’t intended to be a stud was responsible for the leading National Hunt sire – Vulgan – each and every year. It often had another stallion in the top five leading sires of jumpers too. This was Escart III who is best remembered as the sire of L’Escargot, a winner in the 1970s of both the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Grand National. L’Escargot it was who, in 1975, prevented Red Rum from notching a hat-trick of three consecutive Grand National victories.

  Vulgan was leading National Hunt sire on at least 11 occasions in all, fathering a string of high-class hurdlers and steeplechasers whose names are instantly recognisable to horse-racing enthusiasts even today: Larbawn, Kinvulgan, Kinloch Brae, Castleruddery, all were Vulgan foals. He produced winners of both of Cheltenham’s most prestigious races: the Champion Hurdle (Salmon Spray) and the Gold Cup (the giant The Dikler). And he sired the winners of the 1964, 1967 and 1970 Grand Nationals. In 1970, indeed, the first two past the winning-post (Gay Trip and Vulture) were Vulgan offspring, while the 1967 race saw Foinavon line up against two more of Vulgan’s sons (Vulcano and Penvulgo). More prosaically, Latham’s champion stallion was single-handedly responsible for the disproportionate number of racehorses whose names began with the letters ‘Vul’ that were active in this period. The 1967/68 jumps racing season featured well over twenty.

  This, then, was Vulgan’s destiny. In 1957, though, he was still just another waspish stallion doing his thing in the racehorse country west of the Wicklow Mountains. This was the year that a 19-year-old mare called Ecilace was brought up from County Limerick to be impregnated by him – in return for the 47-guinea fee.

  See Notes on Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Ecilace

  The village of Pallasgreen straddles the main N24 road between Limerick and Tipperary in rural Munster. It boasts a pub called The Chaser, a branch of St Ailbe’s Credit Union and it played host to the team from Kyrgyzstan ahead of the 2003 Special Olympics, which were staged in Ireland. An out-of-the-way spot, it appears little marked by the vainglory of the Celtic Tiger years.

  It can be scarcely more than 30 miles from the famed Coolmore stud, but this is also cattle country – and Ryan country. The local celeb, a hammer-thrower who won gold for the United States at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, was called Ryan. The local honey farm is called Ryan’s. And the man who owned Ecilace at the time of her assignation with Vulgan in 1957 was called Ryan.

  Timothy H. Ryan ran a dairy farm of 80 acres about a mile back towards Tipperary from the centre of the village. An easy-going man whose family had lived in the area for more than 200 years, he was not much involved with racehorses. Indeed, Ecilace was the only broodmare he ever owned. He had inherited her from his father-in-law Michael Fitzgerald, a more serious horse-breeder based at Straffan, County Kildare, a village best known nowadays as home of golf’s so-called ‘K Club’. Fitzgerald’s Kildare connection could explain why Ecilace was sent to Vulgan, a Kildare-based stallion.

  Though never raced, Ecilace had form as a brood-mare before her trip to Blackrath. A decade earlier she had foaled the oddly named Umm, winner in 1955 of both the Irish Grand National and the coveted Galway Plate. Ecilace was also half-sister to a number of winners, among them a horse called Millennium, which won more than twenty times, three of these victories coming in the same week. A photograph exists of Fitzgerald with his mare and the foal Umm in a Kildare meadow in 1947. Fitzgerald stands straight-backed, decked out in hat, suit and tie, as the leggy foal sticks close to his mother. Ecilace eyes the camera warily.

  Eleven years later, and around eleven months after visiting Vulgan, the mare had another son to tend to. The foal, which would eventually be named Foinavon, spent roughly the first year and a half of his life on Timothy Ryan’s Limerick farm. His first stable, just up the road from a level-crossing, was a solid, stone affair with a narrow door, timber roof-beams and whitewashed inner walls. There were six stables in the block, though these were not all used for horses. A small back window, at about shoulder-height for a man and fitted then as now with dark metal bars, overlooked the lane and a good-sized field on the other side of the road.

  This field, with its view of local landmark the Hill of Nicker, mythological home of the ancient Irish goddess of love, is now given over to cattle. In the summer of 1958, though, the foal, like thousands of others in Ireland’s lush, green meadows, would have spent long days here with the fitful Irish sun beating on his back. Another photograph taken not long before his sale the following year shows a flat-capped handler with the yearling in classic side-on pose. The man holds the lead-rein at arm’s length in his left hand while in his right he holds up a short stick, like a conductor’s baton, to fix the horse’s attention. The horse looks handsome and nicely relaxed, as evidenced by the slack in the lead-rein. In the background, Timothy Ryan, dressed much like his father-in-law 1
2 years before and gesturing with his right arm, is neatly framed by the yearling’s powerful neck and forelegs. So carefully composed is the photograph you cannot help but conclude that the young thoroughbred was a patient sitter.

  In September 1959, the colt made the more than 100-mile trip to Dublin, most likely by train, and, on the 21st of the month, he was sold at Goffs in Ballsbridge to a Mr H. J. Rooney. The price paid was 400 guineas, so farmer Ryan made a tidy margin over Vulgan’s 47-guinea fee for impregnating his mare.

  Harry Rooney worked for Captain Charles Radclyffe, a well-known schooler of young jumpers whose father-in-law, Major Gilbert Cotton, was Aintree’s long-time course inspector. It was Radclyffe’s custom to bring a small number of yearlings over from Ireland each season and to raise them on his property at Lew in Oxfordshire. Successful Grand National horses bought by Radclyffe as yearlings include Corbiere, Zongalero and State of Play. A former High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, he schooled the Queen Mother’s young horses for many years.

  It is hard to be certain because Radclyffe’s young purchases were generally not named until after he sold them on, but it is probable that Foinavon spent his second birthday in this delightful corner of the Oxfordshire countryside. This may even have been where he was gelded. Orchard Paddock – where the youngsters were kept – with its gnarled fruit-trees, was the only field on the farm that had never been ploughed. Fertilisers, moreover, were used only sparingly, so as to safeguard the health of its original old grasses.

  If the colt was housed here, though, his stay was brief; in May 1960 he again changed hands, being bought by the owner for whom he would later make his racing debut, Anne, Duchess of Westminster. A County Cork-born general’s daughter, the duchess would go on to become, along with the Queen Mum, the best-known owner of steeplechasers of her era, although this owed little to Foinavon’s efforts.

  Three months after sealing the Foinavon deal, Radclyffe found himself bidding in the Ballsbridge sales ring for a gangly bay gelding against the duchess and her trainer Tom Dreaper. County Meath-based Dreaper won the auction with a bid of 1,150 guineas. The duchess had just bought Arkle.

  Foinavon was taken to Bryanstown, the duchess’s 700-acre farm near Maynooth, a few miles west of Dublin, where her racehorses were accustomed to spend their summers grazing and resting valuable limbs. It was not for another 16 months, in September 1961, at an age when many Flat horses have the bulk of their racing careers already behind them, that he was sent to Dreaper’s Greenogue yard to be broken.

  See Notes on Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  The Road to Baldoyle

  In a pocket of rural charm not yet shunted away by the boom-bust materialism of the north Dublin suburbs, lies one of racing’s holy places. It looks modest enough: a compact collection of whitewashed, red-doored stable-blocks behind a bright red gate, with the first stable so close to the road that its occupant could practically take up hitchhiking. Yet any racing fan with a passing interest in football might testify to the aptness of the colour-scheme; if there was a Manchester United of 1960s steeplechasing, this was it.

  It was here at Greenogue that a pipe-smoking cattle farmer who was getting on in years nurtured, more or less simultaneously, the two most highly rated steeplechasers that ever drew breath. Arkle, as sweet-tempered as he was intelligent, with his three Gold Cups and his widely publicised penchant for Guinness, became the sport’s poster-boy. But the vicious Flyingbolt, who suffered from brucellosis, a contagious disease that can cause joint and muscle pain, is reckoned to have been only 2lb Arkle’s inferior and much better than champions of more recent vintage, such as Desert Orchid and Best Mate.

  When Foinavon arrived in September 1961 and took up residence in box number 4, Tom Dreaper’s school of steeplechasing excellence had still not quite attained its absolute peak of pre-eminence. This came in 1964, the year in which the trainer celebrated his 66th birthday. All told, he collected stakes worth £41,849 in England and Ireland for patrons such as the Duchess of Westminster, with Arkle responsible for nearly half the haul. (This at a time when Dreaper could have bought an ounce of Ogden’s tobacco for his pipe for 5/5½d – 27p.) Nevertheless, Fortria, the yard’s star turn, had already reeled off consecutive victories in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, Cheltenham’s premier two-mile steeplechase, and the trainer’s astonishing run of seven successive Irish Grand Nationals – a feat achieved with seven different horses – between 1960 and 1966 was under way. He had already won that race five times in all, starting in 1942 at around the time Vulgan was conceived in war-torn France. So the stallion’s three-year-old son was certainly entering the jumps game at the very top of the pile.

  Dreaper’s training regimen could be characterised by the aphorism ‘less is more’ – unlike his racehorses’ diets, which consisted of four oats-laden feeds a day. According to Ivor Herbert, former trainer and Arkle biographer, ‘In contrast to almost every other important stable in Western Europe, Tom Dreaper’s horses are hardly ever out of their boxes for more than thirty minutes. Forty-five minutes would be the absolute longest.’

  ‘We used to go out at nine and were back in at half-nine,’ says Peter McLoughlin, a long-time member of the tight, devoted Greenogue team, who rode Fort Leney, another Dreaper star, in the 1967 Cheltenham Gold Cup. ‘Twice a week we would school. We had four little jumps on the way to the gallops, which were across the road and about three fields away. Then we had six fences on the gallops. Two of these fences had ditches on the landing side. Fairyhouse fences. They taught the horses to stretch out as they jumped.’ According to Pat Taaffe, Arkle’s regular jockey, schooling over the four ‘baby’ fences was ‘Mr Dreaper’s big thing’. They were about three feet thick and three feet high, composed of loosely packed furze held in by a tree trunk on either side. They were very close together and frequently used, so the ground around them was what the soft-spoken Taaffe once described as ‘you know … mucky’. It was Dreaper’s contention that, if it was to be a steeplechaser, a horse needed to know how to jump even before it knew how to gallop.

  With his arrival at the stable coming in the month after Arkle’s, you might imagine that Foinavon’s presence would have been somewhat overshadowed. The future champion’s calibre, though, was not immediately apparent. ‘At the start Arkle was like a car with four flat tyres,’ Peter McLoughlin says, while acknowledging that he was already a ‘brilliant’ jumper. Pat Taaffe was more explicit still, remarking, ‘He moved so terribly behind, you could drive a wheelbarrow right through between his hind legs.’

  A year younger than his stable companion, Foinavon was a fine-looking horse. A photograph from these early days depicts him as a big, raw four-year-old with a trace clip in the front yard with an appreciative McLoughlin. It appears, though, that he was at Greenogue for some time before acquiring his name. In the Sporting Chronicle’s ‘Horses in Training’ list for 1962, he is there, but recognisable only by his parentage. With Arkle and another future Cheltenham winner, Ben Stack, who came to the stable at the same time, named after mountains on the Duchess of Westminster’s Sutherland estate, you can appreciate how she might have conceived the idea of naming her third young horse under Dreaper’s tutelage after another mountain, one of the highest in Scotland not to be a Munro. And so Foinavon he became, in time for him to start the first of his more than 60 races, on 18 May 1962.

  The term ‘bumper race’ might conjure up images of the fairground. In fact, it is a term for flat races held at jump-racing meetings. They are so called because the amateur jockeys who used to ride in them were thought so ungainly they would let their backsides ‘bump’ on their mount’s saddle as it galloped, in contrast to the more polished, or perhaps merely fitter, professionals. In Ireland in the 1960s, these races were mainly for maidens, in other words horses that are yet to win a race. Part of the theory behind them was that they allowed young animals to gain racecourse experience without the added hazard of jumping. They are also a good test of stamina: according to Ivor Herbert
, ‘a horse which stays two miles on the flat, almost invariably stays three miles over fences’.

  So there is nothing unusual in Foinavon’s first race – the 1962 Tally-Ho Plate at Dundalk, 40 miles north of Greenogue on the road to Belfast – being on the flat. Nor, given his subsequent record, was there anything especially unusual about him finishing unplaced out of 13 runners. His first jockey, Mr Tony Cameron, reckons he came in around fourth and was ‘a bit one-paced’. Though nobody realised at the time, there was the faintest precursor of what fate held in store, in that Cameron, who would go on to represent Ireland in the three-day event at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, had come fourth in the Grand National at Aintree seven weeks before on Gay Navaree, a 100/1 rank outsider. Given his accomplishments as a horseman, there is not the slightest chance Mr Cameron let his backside bump on the young gelding’s saddle.

  The novice did progress over that first summer. A second ‘bumper’ at Galway in August brought a first visit to the winners’ enclosure following a third-placed finish. In September he went one better, coming second behind a horse called Commutering in a two-mile Flat race, the Williamstown Maiden Stakes, at Phoenix Park in Dublin. To go from there to making his debut over obstacles at the citadel of English jumps racing that is Cheltenham, as Foinavon did on 16 November, would be a tall order for any horse, however. It is hard to imagine that a trainer-owner combination as knowledgeable – and patient – as Dreaper and the Duchess of Westminster would have expected too much from his tilt at the three-mile Cowley Novices Hurdle. ‘Little is known of Foinavon,’ proclaimed The Times on the morning of the race, although it added that Dreaper ‘did say lately that he was hopeful that some of his young horses this season were useful’. In the event, the hurdling debutant managed a creditable third place, from 19 starters, in his first race under Taaffe. It was left to a stable companion running in his first steeplechase the following day to deliver incontrovertible evidence that the trainer’s hunch was justified.