Trump card of a joker
Robin Oakley Royalty and racing have long been intertwined. We would not have been racing at Ascot this week were it not for the prodigiously fat Queen Anne, who, when she could no longer be hoisted into a saddle, used to follow the royal buckhounds for hours in a specially designed two-wheeled carriage and who founded the racecourse, conveniently close to Windsor Castle.
The royal family have vitally influenced some racing careers, too, as I was reminded by the death of former Lambourn trainer Doug Marks, the only man ever to have ridden two Classic winners as an apprentice, which he did in 1940. Three years before he had been taken on by royal trainer William Jarvis after his father, a first world war veteran, wrote to the Prince of Wales asking for help in getting his son stable employment.
'I was four stone, and that was mostly head,' Doug Marks told me. 'My father took me to the stables and said, "He loves horses." Actually, I had never seen one. I was so useless I was on the stable pony for 18 months. But then the Prince of Wales came to the stables and asked how I was getting on. For something to say, Jarvis told him he was thinking of letting me ride in a race.'
Doug's father badgered the trainer to make good his promise. The young Marks was given a ride and won, receiving not a word of praise because the stable money wasn't down. Then the filly Godiva came into the yard. He begged to be allowed to 'do' her. She dumped every other rider who got on her back and he was allowed to ride her in her two-year-old career, winning a Classic trial.
The young apprentice wondered what would happen when Godiva was three. 'When jockeys came to the yard I felt like a man watching others eye up his woman.' In the end he was allowed to keep the ride in the 1,000 Guineas, his trainer imploring him, 'For God's sake don't do anything stupid because if you do it won't reflect on you — you're only a little boy.'
They won the race, with the diminutive Marks cheekily shouting at the great Sir Gordon Richards, 'Come on, Gordon,' as he sailed by. They won the Oaks at Epsom, too. The other jockeys conspired, trying to push him into making the pace, but he coolly dropped in behind them. Hearing Godiva was well behind, trainer Jarvis tried to hide himself from humiliation in the crowd, only to hear the crowd cheering his horse home as young Marks threaded through to win.
Sadly, the riding career was curtailed, both by the war and by Doug Marks, then in the RAF, contracting TB and spending three years in hospital, most of the time in an iron and leather frame with his legs in plaster boots. Ever positive, he told me, 'You either died or you got better. It probably saved my life. I would have been an air gunner and the odds are you would have been talking to my ghost.'
I only ever spent a day of my life with Doug Marks, interviewing him for a book on Lambourn. But it was one of the best fun days I have had in racing. Famously, joker Marks once told his string to meet him under a big oak tree. He went out an hour earlier and climbed up into the thick foliage. The string spent 15 minutes circling the tree, the lads swapping their opinions about the guv'nor, before he jumped down and told them, 'I heard all of that.'
Then there was the idle paper boy who kept turning up late with Doug's copy of Sporting Life. Doug chided him, 'My old lead horse gets in a right state if his paper isn't here on time.' The delivery boy indicated his scorn whereupon the trainer spread out that day's paper and the horse trotted over and appeared to read the headlines. The goggle-eyed stable boy departed and was never late again. Though he was never early enough to see the feed bowl placed every day on an old Sporting Life.
Doug Marks didn't win any Classics as a trainer. But fellow trainer and neighbour Michael Blanshard says he was a shrewd punter 'though never letting on'. With a team at times including Reg Akehurst and David Elsworth there were some notable coups, especially with Golden Fire, bought for just 400 guineas in 1960 and the winner in 1962 of the Chester Cup, the Goodwood Stakes and the Cesarewitch, for which connections had backed him significantly at 28-1.
That one was lucky, thanks to jockey David 'Flapper' Yates. Yates actually finished second to Orchardist but, against the advice of his trainer, he borrowed the money to lodge an objection and the stewards gave him the race because of interference by Bill Williamson. What was unusual about that was that Yates had borrowed the cash from one Lester Piggott, not known to part easily with the folding stuff. 'He soon asked for it back, mind you,' says Yates.
Doug Marks never had a big yard but he did train for some well-known show-business owners such as singer Frankie Vaughan and comedian Jimmy Tarbuck. Tarbuck used to say he kept horses with Marks to stop the trainer becoming a comedian. He was certainly full of good cheer, one of those characters in racing who, once met, are never forgotten.
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