by Dick Francis
Their Majesties enjoy every part of racing. Sometimes they go across to the far side of the course in a Land Rover, so that they can see the start or be close to one of the jumps; often they stay after all the races are over to see any horses which may be being schooled over the course; and always they walk informally among the other racegoers when they go round to the saddling boxes to see the horses there, or down to the winner’s enclosure after a race. Their real and undaunted interest in steeplechasing is a spur and a blessing to all of us engaged in it.
The course of the Royal horses has not always run smooth. It is as difficult for Queens as for anyone else to buy a really good horse, and after Monaveen and Manicou disappeared from the scene, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had some difficulty in finding anything worthy of bearing her colours.
M’as-Tu-Vu held the fort with smaller races until Double Star came along to win for her over and over again.
Devon Loch, however, is the greatest steeplechaser Her Majesty has ever owned. He was a big, fine, well-made gelding, with the intelligence and courage which distinguish a great horse from a merely strong one. But in my first year with the stable he was not in training, although he had run in the two previous seasons.
One day in February, when we had finished the morning’s schooling programme in his park in Kent, Mr Cazalet said, ‘Dick, have you heard about the International Steeplechase?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I have entered Campari and Rose Park,’ he said. ‘We will have to wait and see whether or not they will be accepted. If they are, will you go to ride one of them?’
I said I would be very pleased to. The International Steeplechase, as I very well knew, was a new invitation race that had been arranged by an American racecourse: any number of horses could be entered, but the Americans would choose the ones they thought most suitable; invite several each from England, Ireland, France, and other countries, and pay a good deal of their expenses.
Rose Park and Campari were both accepted two or three weeks later, and the half incredulous hope of a voyage to the United States suddenly became a real possibility. There were still seven or eight weeks to pass before the race, and any of the thousand and one infuriating things which lame or upset a horse had plenty of time to happen, so that I was trying not to be too optimistic about the journey.
I expected to be going to ride Campari, because at that time I had never ridden Rose Park. Of all Mr Cazalet’s charges, he was the one who had most often encountered Lord Bicester’s horses, and from the beginning it had been decided that Bryan Marshall should continue to ride him in all his races. Bryan had been Mr Cazalet’s retained jockey before me, but he had recently married and bought a house with some stables, ready to start training on his own account. Campari slipped and injured a hock in his next race, and my hopes faded a good deal. Bryan, however, decided he did not want to go to America, and when Mr Cazalet said he would find a second jockey at the course when he arrived, I was in the happy position of being certain to go even if only one of the horses was fit. As a trial outing I rode Rose Park in a race at Sandown, and he won it comfortably.
Mary and I were sure we should never again have such a wonderful opportunity of visiting the United States, so we decided that she should come with me, and that we should go by sea, stay over there for three weeks, and make it our summer holiday. We had no great dollar problems. My expenses for travel and a week’s stay were to be paid for me, and I would be earning a fee in the International race; Mary’s fare could be paid in England in sterling, and we were to stay for a while with friends.
Oddly enough, while I worried over every little bump suffered by Campari and Rose Park, it did not occur to me that I was the one who might be put out of action. I had been lucky for so long, except for the short lapse on Lochroe on Gold Cup day, that I had almost forgotten how suddenly the most cherished plans can break with a bone, and turn into disappointment and Plaster of Paris.
By the beginning of April, I had ridden a great many more winners during the season than anyone else, and one half of my life’s ambition was in sight. I did, in fact, finish that season as Champion Jockey; a most satisfying goal to reach and to remember.
April the tenth was such a glorious spring day that Mary and I took the whole family to Beaufort Hunt races. We lazed in the sun while the picnic lunch was demolished, talking about our coming voyage on the Queen Elizabeth less than three weeks ahead. Presently I changed into racing colours, waved to the children, and set off on Pondapatarri.
As I came to the last but one fence, easily in front, I was happily concentrating on getting home another winner to add to my score. And ten seconds later I lay on the ground unable to move.
Pondapatarri had fallen, but as so often happens, it was not he who had done the damage. I fell easily on my shoulder, but another horse jumping behind me tripped over Pondapatarri as he was struggling up, and as it fell over it kicked me in the back. It was the most sickening, frightening blow I have ever felt. I was instantly numb all over, and my muscles seemed to have all turned to jelly. I looked up at the high white puff-ball clouds in the blue sky, and thought that the Atlantic would have to roll on without me.
Two first-aid men came up and looked at me, and after a while a doctor drove up.
‘Can you wiggle your toes?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, moving them half an inch.
‘Have you got pins and needles in your hands or feet?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Can you feel this?’ He ran his hand along my thin racing boots, and down my arms.
‘Yes,’ I said. It was a great relief to both of us.
‘Keep him flat on his back,’ said the doctor to the first-aid men. ‘He’ll have to be X-rayed before he can get up.’
Bryan and Mary Marshall took our children home for us, and Mary came with me to a hospital in Bristol. By the time we got there the numbness was going from my limbs, and although from shoulders to stern I could still feel nothing, we began to wonder whether we might not see New York after all.
We had the usual long wait in the casualty department, this time complicated by its being seven o’clock on Saturday evening, long after the X-ray staff had gone away for a well-earned weekend. When at length the X-rays were taken the results were very hopeful.
‘I can’t see any break,’ said the young casualty doctor, ‘but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t one. We would have to take more pictures to be certain. Anyway, you can go home, and I’ll get an ambulance to take you.’
He was a little taken aback to discover that ‘home’ was seventy miles away.
I usually recover very fast from my injuries, and this was no exception. A few days later I went up to London to see Bill Tucker, armed with the X-ray photographs the doctor had given me for the purpose. Another series of X-rays was taken, and this time the damage showed. One of my vertebrae was crushed and chipped, but not in a serious place, and it only needed rest, I was told, for it soon to be as good as new.
‘Can I go to America a fortnight today?’ I said, ‘and race in three weeks’ time?’
Bill Tucker hesitated. ‘You can,’ he said at last, ‘if you ride in a steel brace. We’ll try to get one made. You’ll have to wear a plaster jacket all the time now as well.’
I got him to relent about the plaster to the extent of agreeing that I could have a large brace made as well as the small one, and I was soon encased in an extra set of ribs and backbone made of metal and leather. I detest wearing plaster, partly because it weakens every muscle inside it, but mostly because it itches so badly; and as Mary does not knit we can never find anything long and pliable enough to scratch in the unget-at-able depths. The longest I have ever worn plaster was the four days it took to make my wide steel cummerbund.
Firmly buckled into my rib-cage, therefore, and very thankful to be going at all, I waddled with Mary up the gangplank of the Queen Elizabeth two weeks later.
11
&nb
sp; America
THE Queen Elizabeth’s mooring ropes were flung out on to Pier 90 in New York at one o’clock exactly, and still swaying from our five days afloat, we watched the 2.15 race at Belmont Park racecourse on Long Island.
That first drive, in the car which met us after we had been whisked at high speed through the Customs, was in some ways the most interesting we took, for the quickest way to Long Island led through Harlem. The road was broad and lined with little stores blazing with neon lights in the sunshine, the people were coloured, and their clothes were brilliant. On every unbuilt-on space there was a negro selling water melons, and huge piles of these enormous green fruit were adorned with large and frank notices.
‘Have a good belly-wash,’ said one. ‘Flush out your kidneys,’ advised another. But we had no time to accept these entrancing invitations.
We were driven over the vast new Triborough Bridge and on to Long Island. We passed Idlewild airport, and travelled for a short way beside Long Island Sound, the stretch of water between Long Island and the mainland shore of Connecticut. The tremendous space everywhere was an immediate and lasting impression from our first hour in the country.
Long Island really is long. It stretches for a hundred and ten miles, but at no point is it more than thirty miles wide. At the Western end there are the crowded New York city districts of Brooklyn and Queens, and at the east, the deserted windswept stretches of sand at Montauk Point. In between lie little townships and communities, and comfortable country homes of wealthy people.
Mary and I spent more than half of our holiday on Long Island, exploring it from Oyster Bay on the north shore to Jones Beach on the south. Jones Beach stretches for so many miles that it is divided up into numbered areas, each with its own acres of car park behind it. There are no houses to be seen, and on the windy May morning we went there, very few people either. All along the deserted coast the Atlantic waves rolled up on to the quiet sand, and it was hard to imagine it as it must be in the summer, dotted black with hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers trying to escape the swamp-heat of their city.
On Long Island there are three racecourses to cater for New York’s racegoers, Belmont, Jamaica, and Aqueduct, but Belmont Park was the only one we visited, for racing was centralised there during the whole of our stay.
The arrangement of racing fixtures is nothing at all like ours. Two and three day meetings on the big tracks are unknown: instead, the meetings go on continuously for six to ten weeks at the same track, before transferring to another one. A trainer may spend his summer months in racing near New York, and his winter in the south, in Florida, California, or Mexico City, for everyone moves from course to course with the racing fixtures. Horses, stable lads, jockeys and trainers move en masse from one to the other, and hardly ever go home in between. It is almost possible for a trainer not to have permanent stables of his own, for the horses are all trained on the racecourses, and the downland gallops that we rely on here are a rarity.
At Belmont Park there are rows of stable buildings where each trainer is allotted as many boxes as he needs. They, like all the newer stables we saw during our visit, were built on the ‘barn’ plan. They consisted of two rows of boxes back to back standing inside a large barn, so that in wet or snowy weather the horses could be exercised indoors in their own stable by walking and trotting them round and round the long central block of boxes. Hay and other fodder for each trainer’s horses can be stored on top of the boxes, easily accessible and sheltered by the all-covering roof of the barn.
In the racecourse stables a trainer’s horses stay for the whole ten weeks of the meeting whether they are racing or not, looked after and fed by his own stable lads, who live in blocks of living quarters near the stables and in rooms and lodging houses nearby.
The system has its advantages, for it cuts down travelling to a minimum, and the horses have no tiring journeys by horse-box just before they race. They live on the course, and gallop on it every morning, so it is all familiar to them when they are taken out to race, and it is unusual to see one sweating from nervousness. On the other hand, there is no privacy in that sort of training. At seven-thirty in the morning the car park near the stables is full, for owners, trainers, pressmen and punters have driven in to see the horses work on the practice track. Everyone has a stop-watch.
The trainers arrange the gallops with the lads who are to ride them. The horses start, the watches click; the horses pass the half-mile post, the watches click; the horses complete their gallop and pull up, the watches are consulted. Where everyone trains in the same conditions, and the state of the going on the sand tracks and cinder tracks is not affected by the weather, time is a sure indication of a horse’s possibilities.
A trainer does not say to his lad, ‘Go a good six furlongs half speed, well on the bit,’ but instead, ‘Go the first half-mile in sixty-five seconds, and the next quarter in twenty-eight seconds, and then pull up.’ And so acute is their judgement of speed that many of the ‘work’ jockeys can follow these orders to within half-a-second.
Close outside the racecourse entrance there are large snack bars and breakfast-rooms filled with the people who have been watching or riding the gallops. The air is full of the delicious smell of fresh coffee and only one topic is discussed: which horse worked how far in how many seconds.
Making a light and irreverent remark about the Press one day I was surprised by the aghast faces turned towards me.
‘Hush,’ said a trainer, ‘they may hear you.’
Remembering the banter the racing journalists exchange with jockeys in Britain, I said they were welcome to.
I was then given a serious warning that it was unwise to make disparaging comments about pressmen in the U.S.A. They could use their power, I was told, to make me personally, and the British contingent in general, thoroughly unpopular with the New York racing public. The Americans themselves said they had always to smooth the Press down and keep them sweet with deference and flattery, and only then would they write a fair report of a race.
Shocked, I launched into a glowing and accurate account of the friendliness of the race-reporters at home. They never deliver too harsh or cruel a criticism, but are, on the contrary, quick to praise. One can be sure, also, that if one asks them not to print some particularly private fact that they may have learned by accident, they will not do so. They are the friends and advertising agency of the racing world, not the public informers and destroyers of reputation that their American counterparts were said to be. The existence of a benevolent and honest racing Press, I began to see, was something which I had always ungenerously taken for granted.
Belmont Park is an attractive racecourse with little ornamental lakes and brilliant azaleas and other flowering shrubs in the centre. Inside the sand track where most of the flat races are run is a grass track, on which only two or three flat races are run each week. Hurdles are set up on this track for the occasional hurdle races, and next to it on the inside is the steeplechase course. From a distance the fences looked much the same as the ones we were used to at home, but when we got close to them we found that they were very softly built, so that horses could brush them without being checked in their stride. Steeplechases, in fact, are commonly known by the shorter and more descriptive ‘term, brush races.
The enormous grandstands lie along one side of the track, and there are no spectators in the centre of the course. Opposite the stands the most elaborate and informative Tote machine I have ever seen flashes second-to-second news across the course. Not only does this monster record the changing odds on each horse, but also the price forecast in the morning papers so that one can compare the two; and when the race starts, it lights up with the time in seconds taken by the leader to reach each quarter-mile post, the total time of the race, and the order of the horses as they pass the winning post. There were so many columns and squares of flickering figures that I never did track down the meaning of them all.
Every day except Saturday, when the races are usua
lly all flat, there is one steeplechase in the day’s programme of eight races, but the race the British, Irish and French horses were concerned in was something of an occasion, and it was given the week’s most honoured position of being the sixth race on Saturday afternoon.
From their arrival on Tuesday or Wednesday the jockeys from Europe had a few days to get used to the unfamiliar conditions and a new set of rules.
We were absolutely astounded to learn that all jockeys have to be in the weighing-room before noon, when they are remanded in custody until they go out to ride, and that they may not see or speak to their trainers or owners during their imprisonment.
‘Why can’t we see the other races?’ we asked.
‘You can,’ we were told, ‘on television.’
We were shown the jockey’s changing-room, which was furnished with easy chairs, writing-tables, and two large screen television sets. On one the normal programmes blare away, and on the other, all afternoon, the jockeys see what is going on outside. This transmission is on a closed circuit for receivers on the racecourse only; there is one in the President’s room, where Mary and I ate sandwiches one day and watched the racing from our armchairs.
‘What on earth can we do between noon and the time for our race?’ we asked. ‘It’s nearly four hours.’
‘Have a Turkish bath,’ said the American jockeys.
There were, we found, steam rooms near the changing-room, and rooms with beds in where one could lie down and relax and get cool again. Dave Dick, who is six feet tall and fought a non-stop battle against his weight, spent most mornings in there.
