Family fortunes
Robin Oakley
Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather, but you get a much better idea whether a horse will stay on winter ground working it on grass.’ Paul’s wife Fiona watched on old Flying Instructor, once the stable star and winner of races like the Red Rum Martell Chase at Aintree, now the nearly white hack leading the string. Astride one Thelwell-style pony on a leading rein was five-year-old Hugo. Seven-year-old Sophie, self-announced as a future trainer, turned hers amid the wet tussocks of marsh grass. Work done, the horses circled the trainer for assessments before heading back over his sister’s farm to Cropredy Lawn, the training yard clustered around a 1780s farmhouse amid the rolling Oxfordshire countryside.
Beneath warm-red tiled roofs, hanging baskets were still blooming. Amid the bustle of stable life — brooms swishing, buckets filling, boxes being mucked out — the horses took a relaxing dip one by one through the swimming-pool before having their gleaming wet coats scraped down like West End shop windows. Why, I wondered, did anybody ever do any other job.
‘It is lovely,’ Paul agreed. ‘You get up in the morning and the horses are thrilled to see you — partly because they know they will be fed. Your hopes and dreams slowly come alive. There’s always something to look forward to, even when you’re at your most depressed.’ But there is, of course, a down side, too, particularly when horses are injured. ‘Handing out the bad news that a horse has “got a leg” is what drives us all to drink.’ That day there were pursed lips from the vet over Duke of Buckingham, whose six owners Paul was about to meet for lunch.
Plenty of trainers can get a horse fit. But it’s all about getting them relaxed as well and perhaps being a happy trainer helps. Paul relishes being out on his own rather than in a crowded training centre. Not just because, as he jokes, ‘We can make our mistakes in private,’ but because on the 200-acre farm the horses can go out in the paddocks, they can be hacked round the fields or taken up through the woods. ‘The more you relax horses, the more they will eat, and the more they eat, the harder you can train them.’ He likes to bring his jumpers on gradually, starting them in ‘bumpers’ (Flat races for National Hunt horses). ‘Bumpers are a great introduction. Otherwise the banging and crashing of a hurdle race can startle them.’ In the Webber loo hangs a less than flattering report from his own schooldays. Nevertheless, he likens his job to that of a headmaster. ‘The owners are the parents, the horses are the pupils. Some of them you have to sit at the front and keep an eye on. The cleverest ones can sit in the rear. My job is to keep moving them all back a row.’ It takes patience, but Paul Webber has demonstrated that. He is known for bringing back long-term invalids to win races, often first time out. In that, he believes, his equine swimming-pool has been a factor, enabling him to give horses non-weight-bearing exercise. ‘If they are stuck in their box for three days, you can be three weeks behind.’ Watch next for the return of the talented Patricksnineteenth after pioneering stemcell surgery.
There have been significant successes, like the two Martell Chases with Flying Instructor and Jungli, like the middle-distance Flat race exploits of the hurdler Ulundi, with whom he won at Royal Ascot, and the top handicaps won on the Flat this year by Kew Green, who was given only a 30 per cent chance of being a racehorse after an operation for kissing spines. But when I asked about the stable’s Cheltenham Festival victories, the answer was a rueful hand-signalled zero. There have been seconds, like De Soto in the Festival Bumper last year. But there’s still something of a Cheltenham hoodoo.
Paul’s father John, a farmer, who died in 1995, trained at Cropredy Lawn before him. Paul was his assistant and the champion amateur rider in 1980–1 with 32 winners. He was then assistant trainer to Jeremy Hindley in Newmarket and spent ten years based there working for the Curragh Bloodstock Agency. He travelled the world buying horses and working for the likes of Kenny Brown in New Zealand and Jonathan Sheppard in the US. ‘But I always knew I would come back here.’ Jeremy Hindley, who advised him to take up the CBA job, told Paul, ‘It’s no use being the best trainer in the world unless you get access to the best horses.’ He still loves sales and he believes he gets the best value by buying unraced horses, sometimes tipped off by the Newmarket stable lads he made it his business to know. ‘It doesn’t take a lot to find a horse which has won a hurdle at Auteuil and pay £150,000. The trickier bit is to find somebody willing to pay the £150,000 for you.’ He is well chuffed, therefore, to have secured the talented De Soto, a Hernando horse who might well provide him with that first Cheltenham Festival winner, for just £20,000.
Especially if that elusive Cheltenham Festival winner emerges, this could be the breakthrough season which takes Paul Webber from the respected to the household-name category, something which would have happened sooner if Ulundi hadn’t been beaten a head and two short heads in America in the Arlington Million. Currently only one trainer in the top 50 has a better rate of winners to runners than Paul’s 25 per cent. He has a fruitful association with a talented young stable jockey in Tom Doyle and he has plenty of good equine talent coming on in a yard of 60-plus. Watch out for Spin Around, Press Gang and One of the Boys. And for a trainer with a smile.
Previous page
