Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  ‘I thought it was curtains,’ he says. ‘Instead he invited me to come shooting that afternoon. When I said ‘I don’t shoot’ he said, ‘Come and look at the Racing Calendar.’ We never had another cross word. He was the nicest and the best trainer. I was always straight with him and told him when I thought I’d ridden a bad race, come too early or whatever. He would always say, ‘Jack, you did your best.’

  Although Captain Powell was later ‘warned off’ after one of his horses was found to be doped, Jack Dowdeswell wouldn’t hear a word against him: ‘In those days trainers had to carry the can. He wouldn’t have known how to dope a horse.’ Jack reckoned he had ridden some horses that were doped and he reckoned he knew who was behind it, but he wasn’t saying.

  After six years away in the war with the Royal Horse Artillery, Jack Dowdeswell came back in 1946 to win at Wye on his first ride back. The next year he was champion. But it was a different life then. There were no sponsorships or endorsement fees or free cars.

  I think horses ran for me. I was always kind. I didn’t like using my whip and the form book told me I was getting results as good as those who did. Though of course if a horse made a mistake I would give it a couple to wake it up. I’d love to be riding today at £85 a ride [as it then was]. When I rode it was three guineas a time and if the race was worth over £85 you got a fiver. But there were no percentages for winning riders. You hoped for a ‘present’, but there were more promises than presents.

  Nor was there then an Injured Jockeys Fund. Back injuries finally forced Jack Dowdeswell to retire from the saddle in 1957, but not before he had broken 50 bones in all. The worst injury was when a following horse virtually ripped his arm from its socket after a fall at Taunton. His wife dashed down from the stands and he was in so much pain he bit through the glove she gave him. When he was eventually given morphine and supposedly out cold, the doctor told his anxiously inquiring fellow jockeys, ‘I’m afraid he’ll never ride again’, at which point Jack sat up and exclaimed, ‘Oh yes I bloody well will.’ It took him eleven months though to prove it.

  * * *

  Another sorely missed Lambourn veteran, Snowy Outen, I spent time with both when writing my Lambourn book and later when putting together a biography of Barry Hills, whose head lad he was for many years, having been with Barry from his start-up in 1968. Officially Snowy (whose hair was white from childhood) ‘retired’ from Barry’s Faringdon Place at the age of 70 in 1994. But he went straight back to the yard and continued ‘doing his four’ or any other tasks he was handed, saying that he would be bored silly just walking his dogs three times a day. The only concession he made was to stop riding out; instead, when the others were legged up, he went to collect the eggs from Barry’s chickens. To all of Lambourn’s delight, Snowy was at Newmarket leading up the horse when Haafhd, ridden by Michael Hills, was an impressive winner of the 2,000 Guineas ten years later in 2004.

  Snowy had started as an apprentice alongside Doug Marks in William Jarvis’s stable in Newmarket back in 1938, but this was the first time he had led up a Classic winner. It was Snowy who had legged up all five of Barry’s children, two to become trainers themselves and the twins jockeys, on their first childhood mounts.

  In a house filled with racing memorabilia like the signed photograph from Steve Cauthen thanking him for his friendship, Snowy showed me the fraying letter from trainer Jarvis to his mother setting out his apprentice terms: £1 0s 0d a month for the first year, rising to £11 3s 4d for the fifth year. Board and lodging were free but ‘if you can afford to fit him out with breeches and leggings those are more serviceable than trousers,’ wrote the trainer.

  As with the other veterans there were calamities along the way. Riding the King’s horse Ocean Swell in 1941 Snowy clipped heels with another horse: he had 68 stitches in his head and suffered two broken legs, a fractured skull and a broken shoulder, but he was back riding again before being called up in 1943. Having applied for the Veterinary Corps he was sent to the Mule Corps used for transporting gun parts, even though at 6st 7lb he was too light even to lift shells. There were exercises in Scotland and in Europe, then jungle training in India for an Orde Wingate operation. He volunteered in 1946 for the British occupation force in Japan after Hiroshima, where an officer keen on racing found him 40 gardeners and they laid a racecourse for monthly meetings at which Snowy rode eight winners. Two years in Hong Kong followed, during which Snowy heard the War Office was planning to put down twenty ex-service horses. He arranged for some officers to buy them and start a riding school. When he came home there were stable jobs with Ginger Dennistoun, Florence Nagle and Ian Balding before he began with Barry.

  Snowy was not one to believe that everything was better in the old days: ‘When I first went in and you did your two you scrubbed your horses to death. You worried them with it. It made them sour, drove them silly.’ In Barry’s early days in Keith Piggott’s old yard, he remembered the horses did not have mangers, just buckets for their water. Snowy never drove a car, so ‘My wife and I used to walk up at 9.30 to 10.00pm to ensure that each horse had a full bucket for the night and I would have a pint myself on the way home. If they kicked a bucket over in the night and made a noise it was Barry lying in bed who would hear it and have to go and fill it for them.’

  Snowy would be up again in the yard around 5.00am to give the horses a feed before seeing in the lads at 6.30. Not surprisingly, he rated Barry as a master of the training art, telling me, ‘He doesn’t kill his horses. If work-riders go a stride faster than he wants, he’ll go pop. He doesn’t want them leaving their races on the gallops. He likes to bring on his horses nice and steadily. It’s no good working a horse to death when it’s not ready.’

  It was from Snowy that I began to get a sense of the rhythms of the training year in a big Flat yard:

  In the spring you bring on the two-year-olds. They tell you themselves if they are going to be early types. As they run, you give them a rest and then you pick them up again. You look at them every night and you can see them maturing. You have your Guineas horses, Classic animals, then you think about Ascot, then Goodwood. After Goodwood [at the end of July] you are beginning to think about the new crop of yearlings.

  Snowy was always fascinated by the veterinary side. ‘I like to try to find a “leg” before it becomes a “leg”,’ he said, and he was heartened by the advances in horse care: ‘Now they deal with colic by calling the vet and having an injection into the horse’s neck. In the old days it was a matter of staying up all night trying to get the horse to break wind and pass a dropping. Once they laid down quiet it was OK.’

  He didn’t believe in the iron fist approach of his own young days but said that a head lad had to know how to lead. ‘They used to rule by the rod, a toe up the backside, but no more. I would never ask a lad to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I believe in manners and in saying please and thank you. Manners help with your staff. But they’ll shit all over you if you get too familiar.’ Not a mistake the master of Faringdon Place, B.W. Hills, would ever have made.

  Clive Brittain

  I have rarely had such fun from my racing as during the eighteen months I spent putting together a biography of Clive Brittain. I wanted to write about Clive for many reasons. The first of those was his sheer list of achievements. Not only has he trained the winners of 50 Group One races, including six British Classics, he was, with the magnificent filly Pebbles, the first British trainer to win a race at the Breeders’ Cup. He was the first to win the Japan Cup and the second place he achieved in the Kentucky Derby with Bold Arrangement in 1986 still remains the best placing achieved by a British-based trainer.

  I wanted to write about Clive too because of the way he broke the glass ceiling. He had been a stable lad with Sir Noel Murless before he set up on his own and in those times former stable lads just didn’t do that. To make it as a trainer you needed a background in the services, a nodding acquaintanceship with a reason
able proportion of the entries in Who’s Who, an old school tie and a decent legacy. Clive had none of those.

  The other reason for telling his story though was a simpler one: every time I saw Clive on a racecourse he was enjoying himself. As the ace American jockey Steve Cauthen told me, ‘One of Clive’s biggest qualities is that he made everybody around him have a good time. The owners around him were all getting fun.’ Says George Duffield, ‘He’s what racing’s all about. He enjoys racing, full stop. Day in, day out. He’s so buoyant and full of the joys of spring. He just gets on with the job, no whingeing and moaning. Just goes and does it; what will be will be.’

  As everybody kept telling me, Clive and his wife Maureen are simply the nicest people in racing. They live for their horses (and their Labradors Hoover and Sweep) and never say a bad word about anyone. But their achievements are extraordinary. Brought up as one of thirteen children in Calne, Wiltshire, where his father stuffed sausages in the local bacon factory, Clive taught himself to ride by jumping bareback on to Welsh mountain ponies in the field opposite. Soon he was supplementing the family income by helping local horse dealers to break and sell their ponies in Chippenham Market.

  For 23 years then Clive was a stable lad to Sir Noel Murless; Maureen was stable secretary. He was never paid more than £17 a week although his canny backing of the Murless horses produced an added annual income of £5,000. He was never even head lad but he was of especial value to the yard where horses like Petite Etoile, St Paddy and Crepello were trained: Clive was the man who could and would ride anything, the natural horseman who sorted out the problem animals. As fellow trainer John Gosden puts it, ‘He was as a young man, and probably still is now, the bravest rider there has been. There was nothing he wouldn’t get on.’ And yet in all his time with Murless Clive was never addressed by his first name, or even by his surname, only by where he came from. It was ‘Calne, do this, Calne do that’. No insult was meant, it was just how things were in a more forelock-tugging age.

  As Murless approached retirement Clive set up on his own. Within a few years he was the first trainer in Newmarket to have more than 100 horses. A restless innovator, Clive was the first to build an equine swimming pool, the first, says Steve Cauthen, to use horse walkers to warm up his charges before exercise. Especially, he was the first to travel his horses worldwide. It was six years before any other British trainer replicated his Breeders’ Cup victory. Clive was hoovering up Group races in Germany and Italy before others had even found the racecourses on a map. As Cauthen told me:

  When I first got to Britain in the late seventies and early eighties, guys like Henry Cecil and even Michael Stoute were taking the attitude ‘We would rather stay at home, why bother with abroad?’ But Clive saw the opportunity. He started winning these things and it forced other people to follow him because their owners were saying, ‘How about it? If he can do it, why can’t we?’

  Clive is famous for getting his horses out on the heath in the dark while others are still fumbling for their bedside alarms. It is not an affectation. He had to be up before dawn to move the ponies he looked after in his teens, sneaking them back from an owner’s grazing before anybody was up to see them. He found too, when handling the awkward cusses in Noel Murless’s string, that he achieved the best results by taking them out early alone.

  As for becoming Newmarket’s dawn-breaker, Clive’s long-time pal Willie Carson told me:

  It came about in the days when there were so many trainers in Newmarket and Newmarket Heath was only allowing so many gallops to be opened in order to save the ground. Clive planned to get the best ground by getting there first. Henry Cecil and Michael Stoute might have 50 horses in one lot. If you followed them it was like going up a ploughed field – you had to keep in-between the bushes – so Clive’s early start was a clever plan to get the best ground and stop the chance of getting his horses injured. He was looking after his horses.

  Clive is famous for his celebration dances in the winner’s enclosure, a reaction as eagerly sought by the TV cameramen as Frankie Dettori’s flying dismounts. And he is famous too in some eyes for aiming his horses at what others see as over-ambitious targets. Let the purists scoff. Clive’s record is studded with successes like Rajeem’s 66-1 victory in the Falmouth Stakes, Braughing’s 50-1 success in the Cambridgeshire or Terimon’s second place in the Derby at 500-1. As he puts it with a quiet smile, ‘I’ve been criticised for tilting at Group One windmills with horses some people reckoned shouldn’t be running at that level, but I’ve managed to knock down quite a few of those windmills.’ His is not, of course a policy that is always favoured by jockeys. They would rather have one more on their winner total than the second or third place in a ‘black type’ race which pleases owner-breeders.

  If there is a story which sums up Clive Brittain’s attitudes and abilities it is that of the two Royal Ascot victories scored by Radetzky, in the St James’s Palace Stakes and the Queen Anne at prices of 16-1 and 25-1.

  Clive can’t bear unfulfilled potential and Philip Robinson, his long-time stable jockey, told me how much joy Clive obtains from trying to find the key to the awkward horses: ‘A lot of horses show ability but don’t come up with it on the racecourse. That’s one of his real pleasures in life, trying to work them out and, if you like, get one over on the horse, getting them to enjoy their racing.’

  In 1976 Clive ran two horses in the St James’s Palace Stakes. One was Patris, owned by his first major stable patron Captain Marcos Lemos and being ridden by stable jockey Willie Carson; the other was Radetzky, a cranky horse very much with a mind of his own, owned by banker Curtis Elliott and being ridden by Pat Eddery. Carson had angered Captain Lemos by accepting a retainer to ride the next season for Dick Hern and both owners had wanted Eddery to be on their horse. Both owners too liked their due amount of attention and Clive and Maureen had to mount a diplomatic offensive in the parade ring moving between two mutually suspicious clusters.

  Turning for home in the race, Radetzky was in front and Willie Carson set out after him, colliding with the French favourite Earth Spirit on the way. Patris and Radetzky flashed past the post together. There was a long pause for the photo and then a dead heat was declared between the two Brittain-trained horses. Both groups were up in the air cheering and went off for a champagne celebration together. But meanwhile a stewards’ inquiry was called.

  Captain Lemos had seen Willie bump the French horse and feared Patris was going to be disqualified. He was right. In the end the stewards demoted Patris to third place and Radetzky was left as the sole winner, but Lemos took the decision with good grace and ironically he and Curtis Elliott from then on became good friends.

  A dead heat between a trainer’s two runners in a Group One at Royal Ascot was remarkable enough. But the sequel was even more so. Two years later Radetzky had been retired to stud but was not attracting too many mares. A few weeks before Royal Ascot in 1978 Curtis Elliott asked Clive to take him back into training. Clive agreed to give it a try and found himself with the big, almost black Radetzky corned up to the eyeballs and behaving like a king.

  Fearful that the horse might injure a stable lad, Clive rode him himself, and found he was in a battle of wills with a stallion used to being the boss. He reared, he spooked, he planted. He refused to go in any direction he was asked so in the end Clive backed him all the way to the training grounds, about a mile and a quarter. The horse never got a slap. Clive sensed that every time he attempted to take control the horse tensed up. Eventually they got to the closed Round Gallop. Clive backed him into a hedge and they were off and galloping: the breakthrough had been made. So it went on for session after session, including a gallop at Yarmouth racecourse with the then 9st 10lb Clive in a 10lb saddle riding Radetzky in most of his work.

  Says Clive, ‘He absolutely cruised past his lead horse and I knew he was as good as before, if not better. L’amour had obviously done him the world of good.’ Word soon spre
ad at Carlburg House and the staff were on him to a man at all sorts of fancy prices when Radetzky went down to the start for the Queen Anne Stakes at 25-1.

  The horse had given trouble going to the start in the past but that day he went down like a lamb for Edward Hide and came back like a lion, making every yard of the running and leaving the rest strung out like the washing as he coasted home four lengths clear. It was a famous victory – and whatever Radetzky had won, Clive had lost 10lbs in the process.

  Barry Hills

  Of the many racing figures in Lambourn, one who fascinated me from the start was Barry Hills, so much so that ten years after writing my portrait of the village, I persuaded him to let me write his biography. It was not just that Barry had the biggest, most successful team in Lambourn but the sheer dogged character of the man who created a £3 million state-of-the-art training establishment and a racing dynasty, with sons John and Charlie following him as trainers, Richard and Michael among the country’s top jockeys and George successful in bloodstock and horse insurance in America.

  Few in racing can resist the story of a betting coup that comes off and Barry’s breakthrough was founded on one of the classic coups. When he was travelling head lad to John Oxley in the 1960s, Barry used to get together with the head lads to Harry Wragg, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort and Jack Watts and settle on a few ‘good things’ on which they would invest a few hundred – at a time when he was earning just £25 a week.

  Barry’s personal pot was augmented among other good ‘touches’ by successful bets on Sky Diver in the Stewards’ Cup at 50-1, on Jack Watts’s Ovaltine winning the Ebor at 100-8 and on Harry Wragg’s Lacquer taking the Cambridgeshire at 20-1. ‘We didn’t bet big but we had some yankees and cross doubles. We more or less cleaned up in our own small way,’ is how he puts it. But the horse who was to transform his fortunes, literally, was Frankincense, trained by John Oxley and owned by Lady Halifax.