High life
Thrills and spills
Jeffrey Bernard
Last week's 2,000 Guineas day at New- market turned out to be one of the most memorable days I have ever experienced at the races. Certainly on that course. The usual chill wind from the North Sea must have been making the inhabitants of another country miserable and we were sun-baked. The St Georges, Charles and Christine, excelled themselves and anyone wishing to give a party should get their card marked by that couple.
There were only two hiccups as far as I was concerned. At the splendid buffet lunch at Sefton Lodge I spilled about half a pint of mayonnaise down the front of my brand new mohair suit. I had been waiting for the weather and the occasion on which to wear it. This was it. Then, in the afternoon when we were having tea in Charles's box on the course, I was chatting to Henry Cooper and nibbling on an egg and cress sandwich when I sneezed and deposited most of it on the lapels of his beautiful suit. It seems to me unfair that such things happen to me when I am stone cold sober. Well, lukewarm if not stone cold. I brushed Henry's suit down with my hand and so rubbed the egg in. What a nice man he is and I think that even today he could sort out our present crop of heavyweights. Another odd thing was that Lester Piggott was smiling. When he heard that the Inland Revenue were nicking all my money from the Apollo Theatre he actually laughed. A rare contortion for him.
Anyway, the right man trained the winner of the big race and for the third time in his career. He and the owner of Tirol, who had brought six of his brothers with him from Ireland, were celebrating in the adjoining box. Heaven knows what the Irishmen had on Tirol but Hannon backed it at 40-1 and then again at 16-1. He asked me for two tickets for the Apollo as he has yet to see Royce Mills depicting him playing Find the Lady with his triplets. What a good man and trainer he is. Unlike most trainers, who seem to come out of the pages of Harper's & Queen or the Taller, Richard was once the drummer in a pop group. On Sunday I read that he had spent f1,000 buying drinks for the locals in his village pub to celebrate Tirol's triumph. What must they have been drinking? I had a jolly encounter with him years ago in a pub in Newbury and won f60 from him playing spoof. It seemed a lot of money then and I suppose it was.
Henry Cecil, who didn't have a runner in the Guineas, was in our box and, rather surprisingly, the Frenchman Francois Boutin, trainer of the red-hot favourite, Machiavellian, watched from the box too. I stood next to him as the race was run and it can be quite interesting to stand next to a trainer on a big occasion. (I stood next to Bernard van Cutsem once when he had put £50,000 on a horse and although it got stuffed he didn't even twitch when he saw he was beat.) For most of the Guineas Boutin seemed satisfied, though God knows why since Machiavellian was lying a little too far back, but he murmured what sounded like `Va bien' a couple of times. When they came out of the dip, though, and it became obvious that he wasn't going to peg back Tirol, he muttered `Mende' a couple of times. He is an odd fellow in some ways. A shrewd, normally ice-cold man, he pretends he can't speak or under- stand English, which he can. Perfectly. I wonder why he got Freddie Head to ride the horse. He may be top-notch in France but I wouldn't give him my cleaning woman's job over here. He'd get shut in the broom cupboard.
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