New Year disappointment
Robin Oakley
New Year's Day was to have been such a splendid start to the year. Mrs Oakley had been fully organised for one of her thrice-yearly visits to the racecourse, a process much on a par with equipping an RAF squadron for a month-long exercise in the Antarctic. Boots, coat, thermals, mittens and lip-salve were laid out. So were two Biros, plus the crossword and the novel which she had promised me were for the journey down and not for what she finds an interminably long interval between races (and which I find an incident-crammed 25 minutes bustling between unsaddling enclosure, saddling boxes, parade ring and bookies' lines). I nearly had the search parties out for her once at Sandown, only to discover that she had slipped back to the car for an extra half-hour with the latest Salmon Rushdie. It was a Group race too.
I had marked her card for the placepot with what I was convinced was fiendish cunning. The frost had gone. And I had promised her there would be no 'beef-in-a bun' this time — we were lunching with the hospitable Adrian Pratt in the directors' box. But then I double-checked on Ceefax before we left to discover the dread news: Plumpton: ABANDONED due to waterlogging.'
The pub we then chose for lunch instead proved to be closed. And as we walked round Battersea Park for our fresh air she wouldn't even take my bets on which rich kid was going to fall off its gleaming silver scooter first. Even though I had let her make my first three New Year resolutions. All right, since you ask, I am never again to leave on a foreign assignment Saying, 'Oh, and, by the way, you'd better keep an eye on the back tyre, passenger's side.' (Yes, it did go when I was in Hong Kong and she was in a thunderstorm in Wandsworth.) I am strictly forbidden to explain at any length how and why the third leg of the treble failed me. And finally when working at home I am to stop answering the phone to her friends saying, 'Oh, you again.'
What made the cancelled day's racing all the more galling was that as I settled down that afternoon to read Stewart Nash's Plumpton, an illustrated history of the course (published by Plumpton Racecourse at £9.99), the first thing I noticed was Stewart's remark that, since Peter Savill and Adrian Pratt took control and David McHarg became clerk of the course, they had gone through two full seasons, 32 meetings in all, without an abandonment. Aficionados will enjoy Stewart's book, complete with splendid grainy black and white photographs of past stars like Lord Mildmay, Bill Rees and Bill Gore, the Findon trainer who sent out at least a hundred winners at Fontwell.
If we think we are tough on horses with today's training regimes, what about the way they used to race them? The first race at Plumpton's first meeting in February 1884 was a two-mile hurdle, won by the four-year-old Cowslip, owned by the then clerk of the course Mr S. Savage and ridden by Harry Escort. Escort rode a treble that day, the third leg of which was again on Cowslip, who turned out once more to win the hunter chase by 30 lengths. In those days if horses ran a dead heat they went out again over the same distance to run a decider.
Friendly Plumpton, with its tight turns and tricky fences, has not been exactly in the forefront of National Hunt courses, and it seems it had some pretty ropey officials too from time to time. Stewart records that the regular Plumpton winner Clapper was first past the post in the Falmer Handicap Chase on Easter Saturday 1957, at least a neck in front of Prince Eyot, ridden by Gay Kindersley for his father Philip. But the judge, a jovial fellow who had probably lunched rather well, confessed that he did not know who had won and added, 'Gay Kindersley is a nice fellow so I gave it to him.' It proves, I suppose, that nice guys can win, or be judged to have done so anyway. But the judge proved a loser. A fortnight later the Racing Calendar recorded that he had relinquished his licence.
Inevitably, from Plumpton, there is a story too about 'Iron Man' Ray Goldstein. Only Josh Gifford rode more winners at Plumpton than the man from Tottenham who broke most of the bones in his body racing but always bounced back. Stewart Nash tells of the time that Goldstein was concussed on the gallops riding work for Auriol Sinclair one morning and taken to hospital. Somehow he managed to persuade a doctor to give him a letter saying he was fit to ride. He was driven on to Plumpton and rode two winners, even though he had to lie down between races to recover. The man you had to feel sorry for was Martin O'Halloran who had dashed to the course hoping to pick up the two spare rides. Goldstein's determination robbed him of the rides and he was done for speeding on the way to Plumpton?
I bet Ray Goldstein never let his wife make his New Year resolutions.
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