The turf
One of the greats
Robin Oakley
Isuppose we should have seen it coming, but when Peter Walwyn and his wife, Bonk, told me over dinner at the Hare and Hounds last Thursday that he was about to announce his retirement from training I was virtually struck dumb over my rack of lamb. Trainers come and trainers go, but some, like Peter, become an institution. It seems as natural to read 'Winner trained P. Walwyn, Lamboum' on scanning through the race results as it does to brush one's teeth or turn the light on when it gets dark. His has been one of those careers you never quite envisage coming to an end.
Peter has been one of the great trainers of our time. In 1975 he was the first this century to send out more than a hundred winners in a season. He trained the golden- maned Grundy, a horse who would have looked as appropriate on the rodeo circuit as on the Epsom or Ascot turf, to win the English and Irish Derbys and to beat Busti- n() in one of the great races of all time in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes that year. He handled such famous fillies as the Guineas winner Humble Duty and the Oaks winner Polygamy. He won more races than any other trainer in the years 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977. And I will always rate it a special achievement that he trained Rock Roi, a horse who needed virtually 20 minutes warm-up just to leave his box, to win both the Prix du Cadran and the two Ascot Gold Cups from which he was so unluckily dis- qualified.
Peter had told me at the start of the year that he had nothing much in the stable this year and so it has proved, with a sub-stan- dard set of three-year-olds and just four winners all season. It was typical of his luck recently that the night we met up for din- ner he and Bonk had spent hours stuck in motorway jams and got beaten a head with their only runner of the day at Folkestone. It is better to quit now and be remembered for his great achievements, dominating the racing scene in the Seventies, than to endure more seasons of decline remember- ing how it used to be. And it is not as if Peter, now 66, will be short of things to do. He has always been the justification for the Motto of 'Give a job to a busy man, he'll do it better than anyone'. Not only is he the chairman of the Lambourn Trainers Feder- ation, but he is heavily involved with the apprentice school in Newmarket, with the Animal Health Trust and with campaigning for his beloved field sports. More leisure time for P. Walwyn is not likely to be to the benefit of those deputed to answer letters in Downing Street, especially after officials had sought to justify to such a hunting enthusiast the Prime Minister's attendance at the Palio on the grounds that it is part of Italy's traditional culture.
Peter Walwyn is the epitome of the old school traditionalists. But, while you may find some gentle mocking of his rolling walk, full vowels and Basil Fawltyish man- nerisms in the Lambourn pubs, it is always a mockery underlined by affection. Local folk know that he has done more than any other to put Lamboum on the map. There has been no big figure readier to offer use of his gallops, his pool or his expertise to the less-established. And he has provided real lessons in loyalty. When Daniel Wildenstein demanded that he sack his then stable jockey Pat Eddery in 1978 after a ride the owner had not liked, the trainer stuck with his jockey and said goodbye to the 25 Wildenstein horses. (No flat jockey has ever ridden more winners for a single trainer, incidentally, than the 800-plus Eddery has ridden among Peter Walwyn's 1,853.) There was loyalty, too, to his old friend Jeffrey Bernard. Peter and Bonk were not above slipping into the hospital to see the old soak with his favourite vodka mix carefully disguised in a mineral water bottle .. .
Great trainers like Peter Walwyn may seem to do much by instinct. But few are more fascinating to listen to about getting a horse ready to win. An iron law, he says, is that horses which suffer interruptions in their preparation for a big race will not win it: 'You gear a horse's preparation for a big race to the day. It has to roll like clock- work. You can get away with a setback per- haps in preparation for a lesser race but not for the big ones .. . ' He weighs his horses every four to five days. `If they don't lose any weight after a race they haven't done a tap. If they lose 20-30 kilos as a result of a race they are dehydrated and you have to get the electrolytes back in ... A three-year-old shouldn't weigh any more than a two-year-old, they are just convert- ing fat to muscle.'
As leader of the local trainers and `We really need new textbooks — even the parents don't understand guineas.' founder of the Lambourn Open Day, which this year raised £40,000 plus for local chari- ties, Peter Walwyn was my first port of call when I started work on a book about Lam- bourn. He was positively bouncing with pride and enthusiasm as he showed me the housing they had managed to build for sta- ble lads and their families by raising £900,000 in fewer than ten years, the indoor fitness centre and the Lambourn racing museum. Racing will be poorer without Peter Walwyn training horses. Lambourn without him would be unthink- able, but fortunately he will be living on at Windsor House while renting out the yard.
Robin Oakley is political editor of the BBC.
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