Horses have four legs
John Oaksey
VALLEY OF THE RACEHORSE by Robin Oakley Headine, £18.99, pp. 256 Ionly hope Robin Oakley wasn't expect- ing too much when he decided to transfer his attention from politics to racing. Lambourn, the Berkshire village whose millennium year he has so readably described in Valley of the Racehorse, is a delightful place when things are going well. But, besides its 3,000-plus human inhabitants, Lambourn contains more than 30 stable yards and well over 1,000 race- horses. Which means that, seven days a week, there are, literally, thousands of things which can, and all too often do, go wrong, Horses have four legs, don't forget, and `things going wrong' can range from real tragedies like death, broken bones and strained or ruptured tendons to foolhardy bets, discontented owners, bruised feet and unfair comments in the Racing Post or, come to that, The Spectator.
As it happened, the 12 months Robin chose to cover were 'abnormal' in some unexpected ways. Early one morning, sev- eral jockeys and a licensed trainer were suddenly, and, as it turned out, quite unnecessarily, arrested — in connection with an alleged case of 'doping and race- fixing'. The case is still dragging on and it was not till June 2000 that all the licensed trainers and jockeys were finally released without charge. The whole tragicomic saga, apparently involving professional punters, reflected little credit on the police, even less on the Jockey Club's own security ser- vice — and was precisely the sort of public- ity racing can do without.
But, as Robin Oakley soon discovered, Lambourn trainers are a mixed but gener- ally friendly bunch. They range from 70- year-old Doug Marks, who rode two Classic winners in 1940 because he was the only man (or rather six-stone boy) who could get on with a wayward filly called Godiva, to Nicky Henderson, the village's most successful jumping trainer. Nicky was meant to be a City gent but became an assistant to Fred Winter and got hooked on riding as an amateur. Still under 50, he has saddled the Champion Hurdle winner three times and 21 other Cheltenham win- ners, four of them this year. Racing has been going on longer than most competitive sports and a Derby win- ner was trained at, or near, Lambourn in 1855. But it was not until the 1930s that a rich landowner called Sir Hugh Nugent recognised the full possibilities of Mandown as a training ground, the often windswept hill above the village with its springy, unploughed turf. Oakley tells the story of Sir Hugh standing his gypsy groundsman Bill Howe in the middle of Mandown Bottom with a ball of twine. He himself then rode round and round on his Douglas motorbike, paying out 12 more yards of twine on each circuit. In the 1950s, being run away with round Mandown with frozen fingers and aching arms, I often wished he had chosen somewhere rather less open and encouraging to headstrong horses!
It was Fulke Walwyn, the greatest ever trainer of steeplechasers, for whom I used to ride out. He was kind enough to describe my style as 'a fair example of the Old English lavatory seat' but did let me ride Taxidermist, the best chaser I ever sat on.
Fulke Walwyn and Fred Winter — the two great FWs. As Oakley soon found, those are the names which still dominate Lambourn's memories today. Fulke has a road named in his honour and Fred, who won him the Grand Steeplechase de Paris with the bit broken in Mandarin's mouth, was four times champion jockey and eight times champion trainer. Now, tragically, having survived so many crunching falls, the best jockey I ever saw has been crip- pled and partly deprived of speech by a stroke.
The Walwyn tradition is carried on by Fulke's younger cousin Peter, recently retired but trainer of the 1974 Derby win- ner Grundy, founder father of the hugely successful Lambourn Open Day and, a much loved leader of Lambourn society. For reasons which those who know Peter's walk and booming voice will readily recog- nise, he is known among his countless friends as Basil — after Fawlty of the eponymous Towers. 'If John Francome is Lambourn's crown prince,' Oakley writes, `Peter Walwyn is its much loved benevolent monarch.' One of my proudest boasts is that I rode his very first winner.
As in most books about racing these days, the name Martin Pipe keeps cropping up, not always in a context as flattering as you might expect for a man who so regular- ly trains twice as many winners as the best of his contemporaries. The 'Interval Train- ing' on which (among many other things, notably swimming, regular weighing, temperature taking, blood sampling et al) Pipe has built his amazing record, is adopt- ed by many, but not all Lambourn trainers. For instance Mark Pitman, who took over from his famous mother Jenny soon after the Cheltenham meeting, has mixed feelings about the Pipe method. He seems to have decided on a compromise between Jenny's traditional routine, Martin Pipe's repeated short-up-and-back-down- again gallops, and various other arts and crafts gleaned from his tours of successful stables all over the world.
It would be impossible in one book to cover half the characters around whom Lambourn — and a good part of British racing — has built its history, but Robin Oakley does many of them justice.
Jack Dowdeswell, now probably the hap- piest octogenarian you will ever meet, was paid two shillings a week by Ted Gwilt in 1931. When he asked for a transfer to another stable the answer was 'Definitely not', so when, after five years, Jack, no longer an apprentice, was told to stay on at £2 5s a week, his answer was 'Definitely not.' He was given his first chance by Bay Powell, became champion jockey in 1947- 48, reckons to have broken every bone at his disposal and was still riding out at 78. He and his wife Betty are the star turn on the dance floor at hunt balls.
The modern incarnation of Hugh Nugent's old gypsy groundsman Bill Howe is a tireless machine of a man called Eddie Fisher, to whom every blade of grass on Mandown is precious and familiar. He has, in fact, had an all-weather gallop named after him, but although officially retired after 45 years no one has seen him standing still yet.
I have loved Lambourn since 1958 when we celebrated Taxidermist's Whit- bread Gold Cup at the Malt Shovel. Robin Oakley makes it very clear in his splendid account of Lambourn that the Malt is still going very strong indeed under Rhona and Clive Alexander. I plan to take this paper along on the off chance of a free drink.
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