Lester: The Official Biography

by Dick Francis

  Brandy proved to be the least suitable children's pony in riding history. "It was wild.

  It was fast, but it was wild. It put the old man on his back two or three times. It really used to have a go. It used to run away with me all over the place. Disappear." Brandy took off regularly with Lester and pulled up miles away across the Downs when at last it got tired. Its speed was so great that it was an attraction at informal war-time amusements. "They used to get Freddie Fox, Gordon Richards and the old man-all those sort of jockeys--for past-andpresent races. Brandy and the old man used to win all the time. Go like hell."

  It says a good deal for the son's balance and the father's courage that the young Lester was let loose on this unpredictable bolter long before he had the strength to control it, but there is little doubt that Brandy adjusted Lester to racing speeds while most children of his age were on the leading-rein.

  One day when Keith and Lester were on one of their regular long rides over the Downs, two single-engined aeroplanes collided overhead. Although they were fighter aircraft, it was an accident, as both were American from a nearby training base. Keith and Lester reined-in and saw pieces of aeroplane falling not far away, and Lester set off instantly to take a closer look. When Keith caught him up, Lester had stopped and was peering concentratedly down at something on the ground. To his horror, Keith saw that it was the body of one of the pilots.

  Before Keith could take any action, his son spoke. "He's dead," he said.

  No hysterics, no tears, no visible emotion. Just a calm statement of something he understood, although he had not seen a dead person before. He was seven at the time.

  Keith and Lester rode home matter-of-factly and Keith and Iris waited for their son to have nightmares when the shock of what he'd seen hit his imagination. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Lester never referred to the pilot again and nor did his parents, for fear of stirring up horrors, and after a while they were not sure that he even remembered. From a very early age, and certainly by this time, Lester's mind accepted reality prosaically, and his reaction to everything, good or bad, was filtered through an inner damping process. The cool head he took to racing was already in full command on the day he saw a man fall out of the sky and looked at his dead face with dispassionate interest instead of fright.

  Although by the age of eight or nine Lester could ride like an angel, he still couldn't get up on a pony without help, owing mostly to his small size but partly to a surprising inability to jump up. This made him doubly keen never to fall off away from help, but also posed problems when it came to gymkhanas.

  Owing to war-time restrictions on crowds and a general shortage of petrol, the only available shows were the sort of local gymkhanas run by the Pony Club and the Red Cross, and young Lester, already eager to race, wasn't going to miss them. He used to ride to nearby gymkhanas alone on his pony, compete in every event he could, and ride home again. His chief complaint was that he couldn't go in for anything such as obstacle races, which involved dismounting and getting up again without help.

  "I didn't win at gymkhanas to begin with, but as time went on, I did. One of the last few gymkhanas I rode in was at Faringdon, and I rode the pony from Lambourn to Faringdon and won a few things and rode home again."

  Lambourn to Faringdon is ten miles, and Lester was eleven.

  Before he was ten, he was beginning to ride the racehorses in Keith's stable. None of his relations was surprised and no one made a fuss of it or told him how extraordinarily advanced he was in ability. Even Keith and Iris, though expecting him to be good, didn't quite realise what they had on their hands. However brilliant any child may be, he still has a long way to go, and it was probably what Lester couldn't yet do which filled their thoughts, not what he could. In any case, both of them also, like most horse-racing families, were down-toearth in approach and despised airs and graces. Achievements from Lester were more often greeted by a parental "yes, but next time . . .", rather than "Well done."

  Keith, for all his kindness, was firm and exacting. "He was pretty strict. He didn't stand any nonsense, you know." He insisted on Lester riding every possible day, knowing that no one, whatever their natural talent, ever achieved greatness without constant and dedicated practice.

  The end of the war brought little let up in the general picture of countrywide austerity, but it did at least allow the resumption of racing. Keith turned exclusively to training and bought a larger stable at Lambourn, and the family moved there when Lester was eleven.

  The house with its twin gables stood high off the road on a bank in the centre of the Berkshire village, with the stable yard immediately behind it. Life re-established itself fairly smoothly but, owing to the transport problem, Lester (no longer able to cycle to school because it was now too far) became a weekly boarder at King Alfred's. This unpopular arrangement lasted until Christmas 1947 when Lester left King Alfred's and went instead to a tiny private school in Upper Lambourn. There, the one lady teacher, Miss Amy Westdrake, took ten or twelve pupils and gave individual attention. Lester travelled to and fro again on his bicycle, two miles each way.

  In the spring of 1948, aged twelve, he followed a course entirely normal for the sons of racehorse trainers, and became legally apprenticed to his father.

  -

  3 Apprenticeship

  THE difference from that day to the next was almost unnoticeable. Lester had been riding out with the string of racehorses at morning exercise for some two years, and merely continued to do so. The new school allowed more flexible hours than King Alfred's, but he was already accustomed to them. He worked as usual in the stables every minute available, standing on a bucket to groom the parts of a horse he couldn't reach from the ground. Nothing external changed, but internally Lester took a giant mental stride towards maturity. He had been looking forward to being apprenticed, and felt that the real part of his life was just beginning. It excited him. He waited with a sense of dawn breaking for his first professional race.

  It came on 7 April 1948, in the Easter school holidays, when Keith without any apparent trepidation put his shrimp-sized son onto a racing saddle for the first time, in an apprentice race at Salisbury. The horse, The Chase, was a three-yearold filly which Lester had regularly ridden in gallops at home. The new jockey knew his mount, he knew how to pace himself over the distance, he was unexcitable by temperament and unlikely to lose his head. Other boys had started even younger -his own great-grandfather Tom Cannon at nine, Stanley Wootton and many others at ten and eleven. To Lester himself, twelve seemed pretty old. As usual in the Piggott family, no one made any fuss.

  The Chase went well enough on that first occasion though without troubling the judge, and Keith gave Lester sporadic practice through the summer. There were five more races at places like Bath, Kempton Park and Worcester, three of them on The Chase again, and two on another horse, Secret Code. At Chepstow on 31 July, in the last of those races, Secret Code finished second.

  Came the summer school holidays, and The Chase was due to run at Haydock on Wednesday, 18 August. Lester was to be in the saddle for a tough appearance against seasoned jockeys, as it was not an event for apprentices only. The race was a seller (the winner to be sold for auction afterwards), and one of the other entries was Prompt Corner, a horse formerly trained by Keith, which had been sold three months previously. Its new trainer was Ginger Dennistoun who was never averse to winning his races by off-course strategy if he could get the chance.

  He said to Keith Piggott, "It's no good us taking both of the horses up to Haydock.

  We might as well work them both at home and take the best one." So the horses were galloped together. Dennistoun brought Prompt Corner to Keith's gallops and Sam Wragg rode it, finishing perhaps half a length in front of Lester on The Chase.

  "You won't go now, will you?" Dennistoun said to Keith, but before Keith could answer the twelve-year-old Lester said quickly, "You didn't take the 7-lb allowance into consideration."

  The horses were both carryin
g the weight they would have in the race, but as Lester was an apprentice he could have claimed 7 lb less, and if he had carried 71b less, he would have won. So Keith said he would send The Chase to Haydock, and that didn't please Ginger Dennistoun very much.

  Bill Rickaby, Lester's cousin, was engaged to ride Prompt Corner at Haydock, but on the day of the race he couldn't get to the course because of bad weather. An on-the-spot replacement jockey would have to be found.

  Ginger Dennistoun, also having trouble in reaching the course, found out where the Piggotts were staying, and telephoned Keith to say he didn't think he could get there, and he wouldn't be having a "go" with Prompt Corner. Eventually, however, he arrived and engaged Davy Jones to ride. At that point, he instructed the jockey to win if he could, but at the last minute he changed his mind again and told him not to as there had been no time to arrange suitable bets.

  Lester says, laughing, "Prompt Corner finished second to me and it could have won.

  Davy was just behind me, hauling on his reins and yelling, `Go on, go on.' And I rode my first winner. But if Davy had been trying, he'd have beaten me. What a carry on, eh?"

  The face which the winning jockey took into the unsaddling enclosure betrayed none of those thoughts. He stood 4 ft. 6 ins. in his racing boots and weighed less than five stone, and although he was a child he already knew what not to say in public, a lesson some adults never learn in all their lives.

  The pressmen, routinely interviewing the winning trainer-Keith-found that Lester was only twelve; and suffering as so often happens from a dearth of rivetting subject matter, they fell on this fact with enthusiasm. Lester, from his very first win, was news.

  As for Lester himself, he and Keith drove home contentedly in the horsebox to Lambourn, and Lester went to bed. It was after all, as he pointed out, past his normal bedtime. What else would you expect him to do?

  Quite.

  The fact that Lester went quietly off to bed sums up perfectly the professionalism of his family. Wild celebrations with screams and kisses would be unthinkable. A job of work had been successfully completed and life would go on as before. That the local paper had sent a photographer to record his triumphal return was just one of those things. The photographer took a picture of Lester going upstairs to bed, carrying (naturally) his own bag.

  Life, of course, never went on quite as before. More photographers arrived, some of them from the Press Association and Reuters, whose pictures travel far. Lester was photographed on and off horses, with and without parents, bicycling, boxing, reading, playing draughts, sitting in armchairs, perching on fences, chewing bits of straw. Lester-fever got into full swing right at the beginning, and never stopped.

  Iris went on record as saying, "He's just an ordinary boy."

  It is difficult for any mother of a sensible child to realise that her son is not ordinary, but her action was at once illuminating, the shape of things to come, and the buttress of the level-headedness which has saved Lester always from complacency. Iris probably feared more than was necessary that too much publicity would turn his head; but she knew all about the destructive effects of adulation, and she didn't intend Lester to be spoiled by success.

  The Press, in consequence, came to regard her as a dragon, an obstacle always in their way, a suffocating influence. "Always there, mothering him at the races," they complained: and Iris said, "How did they expect Lester to get to the races? He'd been leading apprentice for three years before he was old enough to drive. Keith couldn't leave the yard six days a week, chauffering our son.

  Someone had to, though, so I did it. The Press never seemed to realise that that was why I was always there waiting to take Lester home."

  To take him safely home, out of the reach of temptations, corruptions, and hangers-on. Lester himself took his fame phlegmatically, felt no need to skip out of his mother's care, and had no intention at all of losing his way. After the excitements of the first win, he rode in nineteen more races during the summer holidays and the autumn, but The Chase had left his father's yard, sold in the auction after the Haydock selling-race win, and there were no more signals of the future to come.

  Many of the horses he rode in this early time were owned by Betty Lavington, who had some of her many horses with Keith. Her father, Wilfred Harvey, had horses (including Ascot Gold Cup winner Supertello) with Jack Waugh at Chilton, and in due course her daughter, in the way that racing families intertwine, married Newmarket trainer John Winter, brother of champion National Hunt jockey/trainer Fred.

  Betty Lavington saw Lester's potential from the start, and it was she, owner of The Chase, who gave him his first ride and his first winner.

  The following year, 1949, was for a long while unproductive. Lester, always a realist, tailored his expectations to match the actual present, and says he wasn't in that year particularly keen or ambitious. Neither did he feel frustrated nor disappointed, but accepted life as it came. This pragmatic attitude, already well developed by thirteen, is at the very root of his character and has been the bedrock of a stability impervious to storms. Lester sees things as they are: a gift not given to most.

  On 7 April, at Bath he set out to ride a mare called Betsy for his father. It was a wet and windy day and the filly wasn't keen to go down to the start. Practical Keith flapped his macintosh behind her to get her going, whereupon she kicked up her heels and bolted, young Lester hanging on for dear life, but unable to stop.

  At the end of the chute at Bath, where the 6-furlong races start from, there is a high brick wall. Betsy headed straight for it at a full gallop. Lester's solution to imminent annihilation was to yank her head round towards the rails, a manoeuvre so successful that she somersaulted over the top and landed in a heap on the other side. Neither horse nor rider were more than shaken, but they took no part in the actual race: the saddle's girths were broken.

  It was over a year from his first win to his second, although he had, in between, ridden in a large number of races. Press interest was not exactly sleeping but no longer at fever pitch, and Lester acquired a good deal of experience without anyone commenting or expecting too much. This invaluable groundwork flowered again on Saturday, 20 August when he won the apprentices' handicap race at Newbury on Forest Glade, trained by his father. There were no stop-go shennanigans on this occasion and also less public acclaim, but on his next winner, Secret Code, at Bath on 1 September, he started favourite. Both of these horses were owned by Betty Lavington: she gave Lester not only his first winner, but his second and third also.

  Two further successes followed, one in September, one in October, and then on 28 October, he rode Flurry for Frank Hartigan in a selling handicap at Thirsk. There was no photo-finish in those days. "I didn't win the race," Lester says in amusement. "The judge gave it to me. It was a short race, five furlongs, and we were spread all across the course. Fred Hunter was on the rails and I was in the centre, and he was half a length in front at the post. The judge didn't see him, I suppose."

  They all count. That was official win number five, and with one more in November Lester finished the 1949 season with 6 wins from his 120 rides.

  At about this point, the Berkshire school inspectors began to try to put a stop to the budding career. During the Second World War the school leaving age had been raised from fourteen to fifteen, although the first year the ordinance came into actual effect was 1947. This was a shade too soon for Lester as Berkshire County Council, once the law had been changed, set out in his case especially to enforce the new regulations strictly. Under the old rules, Lester, fourteen on 5 November 1949, would have been free after that to do as he pleased. Under the new, his days were supposed to be spent sitting behind a desk.

  As well try to stop bamboo shoots growing. Lester needed racing as racing needed Lester. If Lester had to be in school by law, in school he would be-but not during the times when he was wanted on a racecourse. Accordingly, for the summer and autumn terms of 1950 Lester's timetable was as follows:

  Six thirty a.
m., rise and ride out at exercise on one of his father's string. Have breakfast, bicycle to school at approximately eight and have lessons for half of the morning. Go home, be driven to the races, ride in races, be driven home. Eat. Cycle back to school for more lessons. Cycle home, go to bed. Same most days, Monday to Friday.

  His devoted teachers, Miss Amy Westdrake, and her sister Mrs Lunn, saw to it that his total daily hours of schooling were what the law required, unstintingly working for him early and late while in addition teaching their more normal pupils during normal school hours. Their belief in Lester was unbounded and most effectively expressed.

  Berkshire County Council didn't exactly give up. They tried to obtain a ruling that no person under fifteen should be allowed to go anywhere where gambling was taking place. Although they didn't say so, the move was a direct attempt not only to stop Lester from riding in so many races at fourteen, but to stop him from going to the racetrack altogether. Perhaps they truly thought he might be better off in a schoolroom, but one wonders. In any case, the ruling was not passed, and Lester pursued his long legal and arduous days dutifully to the discontent of almost everyone.