The turf
Individual approach
Robin Oakley
Athe Epsom veteran Cyril Mitchell used to say, with just a touch of overstate- ment: `Any fool can get a horse fit to run, it's getting them right in their minds which counts.' Up on the glorious Berkshire gal- lops of East Ilsley, as his nephew Tom Jenks (Tom Paddington) and stable secre- tary Gee Armytage (Frenchman's Creek) schooled their mounts for second-season trainer Hughie Morrison over a few hur- dles, you could see the old adage in action. `He's a natural, a pretty good mover for a flat horse,' Tom Jenks told the trainer, with the jump jockey's healthy prejudice after the first three. `He's a thinker, but a trier,' responded the trainer. Back they went for a second go, this time in the presence of Tom Paddington's owner, Mary Drysdale.
The day before his triumphal return on Earth Summit at Aintree, Tom Jenks, hands bare of gloves despite the frost on the ground (`I only wear gloves when I'm on a real puller, when the reins get sweaty'), had been instructed to teach Tom Paddington how to fiddle his obstacles. Right on cue, following the big-jumping Frenchman's Creek, a handsome home- bred 'store' who has already been exciting interest from jumping yards, little Tom Paddington, a three-year-old, produced a perfect leap. 'What you call an owner's jump,' commented the trainer. `He's straight as a die,' said Tom. `Yes,' said Hughie. 'He wants to do it.'
With a only a dozen or so horses in the yard, Hughie Morrison relishes being able to treat his charges as individuals. He liter- ally runs between the schooling hurdles with his gardening fork to replace the div- ots. Bouncing along in his Range Rover he enthuses over the glorious downland turf `so much better than Newmarket' and the eight-furlong woodchip and uphill five-fur- long fibresand strips which he lets out to other trainers. (The Ridgeway kindles other enthusiasms, too. One foggy morning he found in the middle of the woodchip gallop a couple asleep in their pitched tent.) Rattling round the purpose-built yard he took over from Simon Sherwood with char- acter sketches of its incumbents, Hughie Morrison radiates energy. The schoolmas- ter's glasses are appropriate: he is the sort who would always find the time to coach the juniors' five-a-sides.
Coming from a family with both politics and horses in the pedigree, grandson of a leader of the backbench Tories, nephew to two former leading Tory MPs, he has been dandled on prime ministerial knees. At 17 he was unabashedly telling house-guest Margaret Thatcher what to do about regional government and the House of Lords. One of the few trainers with a degree, he had the odd flirtation with poli- tics and a spell running an electrical busi- ness in Manchester, before returning to his 'A grim reaper . . . how fascinating.' first love as an assistant for two years to Paul Cole.
He rode a number of point-to-point win- ners, though his record under rules was a fourth at Wincanton and a fall at Chel- tenham. And his start as a trainer has been auspicious. In his first season he had four winners. In his second he has managed nine wins and 11 seconds from 70 starts, an impressive percentage and one matched significantly by neighbour David Arbuthnot using the same terrain.
But he is a realist. The facilities at Sum- merdown may be state-of-the-art, but the most expensive horse in the yard is Mane Frame, who cost £40,000 at the December sales. 'At the lower end of the market you are buying horses with less good conforma- tion and you have to be more particular about what you do with them. Top trainers have got good machines which can go on anything.' He has the patience for the awkward ones. The four-year-old gelding Fletcher will take your arm off given the chance. The sign over his box reads: `Beware, I bite.' He suffers from thin soles to his feet. (Thin-skinned politicians tend to bite as well.) But they won an Ascot race with Fletcher being trained from a field, leaving him out every night for the moisture in the grass to help his feet until they took pity on him in the October rains.
Fletcher and Tayovullin, who ran third at Southwell the day I was in East Ilsley, keep going pretty consistently. But when Sabigo bruised a foot the yard told Hugh he couldn't get her fit in time for the race they wanted for her. He worked her hard and proved them wrong, picking up his biggest prize yet, a £15,000 contest at York. But he is honest enough to admit the downside: 'I'd left nothing on her. She came back and she got colds and her legs swelled up.' He is no great weight-watcher with his horses, having not yet invested in the expensive weighing machinery. Nor does he believe that blood tests are everything. Grinkov has won three races on the back of only moderate blood tests. `What would he be like if we could get his blood right?' muses the trainer, whose only known eccentricity is to give ailing horses a cactus extract, about which he enthuses.
Owners should note, Hughie Morrison likes running his horses. He admits, 'I'm in the entertainment business.' His first objec- tive is to win a race with a horse, his second is to increase its value for those who need to sell on abroad their less encouraging prospects or to pass them on for jumping. And he is happy with syndicates. His 15 horses have around 40 owners between them. It's the only way to get going.' But owners with Hughie should not look for an overdose of optimism about his charges. always think it's arrogant to say you're going to win when other trainers have got horses ready to win the race as well.' His horses always tend to drift in the market, he says, because he doesn't bet, not above a tenner each way, and he has no big pun- ters in the yard. 'The bookies ought to be sending me horses: I've beaten quite a lot of favourites with my outsiders.'
One who might sense when to punt on a Morrison horse now, perhaps, is John Fran- come, a regular tennis partner before Hughie swapped his Lambourn house with Simon Sherwood. One day at Newmarket, Francome asked him loudly and publicly how he fancied his two runners that day. The trainer informed him that Tayovullin, ridden by an inexperienced stable appren- tice, was little fancied there on the course at Newmarket but he was expecting good things of his runner at Bath. The trainer then watched aghast as his Bath entry man- aged only fifth and Tayovullin stormed home at 33-1. But then John should have known what they say about trainers' tips . . .
Robin Oakley is political editor of the BBC.
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