Monday Musings: The Brigadier and The Major geegeez.co.uk

What is or was your favourite flat racehorse? Once that is revealed the inevitable question, certainly to my own favourite, is why, or more likely, who was he?

I have been unequivocal about mine for more than 60 years. I had already played my first game at Lord’s for London Federation of Boys Clubs when Hethersett, owned by Major Lionel B Holliday, prepared by his private trainer, Major Dick Hern, was one of seven horses to fall in the 1962 Derby won by Vincent O’Brien’s Larkspur.

Hethersett, winner of the three-runner Brighton Derby Trial – oh for that race to be brought back! – beating the smart pair River Chanter and Heron (he of the Sandown race of renown) in a canter so that on just his fourth career start he was 9/2 favourite in the 28-horse line-up.

After the fall at Epsom he came back with a poor run on firm ground in the Gordon Stakes but then three months on from achieving one ambition, I was to taste my first example of a “touch”, three winners in a “Trixie” all in a day on holiday in Bournemouth with my parents and an aunt and uncle. They had grown-up things to do. I played pitch and putt alone at Tuckton Bridge at nearby Christchurch then got to a betting shop in Bournemouth that didn’t mind under-age customers, in time for racing.

I forget how much I collected after the wins of Hethersett (Great Voltigeur); Sostenuto, owned by Phil Bull, in the Ebor; and, Persian Wonder (later a multiple champion stallion in South Africa) in the Falmouth Handicap, but it brought a “put it away!” from my mum when I surreptitiously showed the wad to her from the table behind as we sat down for supper in a café that night. After York I thought Hethersett was my sure thing then for the St Leger and he duly obliged at a nice price, too.

The Major Holliday thing was reinforced when a schoolfriend, Sim Galpert, proved to have an even deeper obsession with the Huddersfield industrialist, whose family firm eventually became ICI and lately Zeneca. One of the business’s biggest claims to fame was that they manufactured 11 million tons of TNT and never had a single loss of life in their factories.

Sim would bang on about the Holliday breeding – all the foals had the same initial as the stallions, Hethersett from Hugh Lupus and a later champion, Vaguely Noble, was by Vienna. Although we lost touch when we both left Central Foundation Grammar School in 1965, I’m sure the white, maroon hoop, armlets and cap stayed with him as they did with me.

Casualties were far more common in the irascible Major’s racing operation. Trainers came and went and at the end of 1962 Dick Hern abandoned ship and moved to West Ilsley, previously the base for Jack Colling who was retiring. I remember with all the venom of youth, regarding Dick Hern as a traitor, an opinion reinforced when Darling Boy, one of the horses he’d taken over, beat Hethersett on the St Leger winner’s four-year-old debut in the Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket.

He never won in three starts under the name of S J Meaney, the head lad in Hern’s time, Holliday himself effectively the trainer then, and retired to stud for a brief but successful career. He sired Arthur Budgett’s Derby winner, Blakeney, before dying soon after from a brain haemorrhage, caused in Hern’s opinion by the effects of that fall in the Classic.

While Sim and I have never spoken in almost 60 years, two other long-standing friends and fellow racing obsessives have stayed in contact. One of them, Peter Ashmore, called to see if I was going to be at Tattersalls sales last Wednesday, and when I said I would he brought me a book of which he was gushing in his praise.

It is called Brigadier Gerard and Me by Laurie Williamson, published by Brigustbooks and is sub-titled, A Personal Journey Through Horse Racing. Chunky, large and with print comfortably sized for senior readers, it has a cover price of £14.99 and extends to 524 pages. Peter said once he started reading the book he couldn’t put it down. I opened it on Friday morning and finished it at Sunday lunchtime.

Laurie was Brigadier Gerard’s groom throughout his entire time in the Hern stable, getting him at the start of his two-year-old year by a fluke – effectively none of the senior lads there cared for his owners, John and Jean Hislop.

This is where my other pal, of even longer duration than Peter, comes in. He is George Learoyd Hill, like me from the London Borough of Hackney, but with a far more interesting life than mine to tell. That said, he says the same about mine.

George’s racing interest was even more immediate than mine and he still had three of his teenage years in hand when he started work at Turf Newspapers in Curzon Street, W1. There, various members of the Jockey Club would pop in and out, taking George under their wing. Old Etonians almost to a man, their number regularly included John Hislop, whom George often spoke to.

Later we were colleagues for seven years at the Daily Telegraph, before George moved on but we’ve stayed firmly in touch. A man with thousands of racing books in his possession, I’m sure this one will be winging its way to him before Peter gets it back.

Like George, Peter and me, Laurie Williamson had a father who initiated and then shared the interest in racing. When the young man had the good fortune to land on Brigadier Gerard it was the incentive for him to stay with the horse for the whole of his career which coincided with the conclusion of his five-year apprenticeship.

Unlike the three of us, Laurie had the wherewithal to keep a detailed diary, so that many of the incidents that would have been confined to the dustbin of a fading memory have been retained in full focus.

John, and especially Jean Hislop, the breeders and owners of Brigadier Gerard, come out as off-hand or even rude and when confronted by the young man who cared day and night for their champion, they never had the slightest interest in giving his opinion house room.

Laurie, after the entirety of the horse’s career, reflected that he had only attempted to speak to John Hislop three times, twice being completely ignored. The one time he did get a reply was before the 2,000 Guineas where although third favourite, the Brigadier beat Mill Reef and My Swallow, the two other champions of that incredible 1971 Classic crop. Laurie asked Hislop what chance he thought Brigadier Gerard had of beating Mill Reef and was told, “if he doesn’t beat him today, he never will!”

On the other hand, Lord Rotherwick, owner of Duration, the other horse Laurie cared for throughout the same period, was very popular with the lads, always talking to them enthusiastically when his horses ran. He was the exception rather than the rule in those days of Military-type discipline and deference in racing stables.

Through the book it became clear that the relationship between Major Hern and the Hislops was not harmonious. Over time their insistence on planning his races themselves rather than taking full notice of Hern’s undoubted skill and knowledge, possibly, in Williamson’s opinion at any rate, was a contributory factor in his sole career defeat in the 1972 Benson and Hedges (now Juddmonte) Cup, his 16^th race of 18.

A winner from five furlongs to a mile and a half, Brigadier Gerard has only recently, 50 years on, been given the full credit in ratings terms by Timeform, one of several well-thought-out themes in a book which tries with some success to argue his charge as superior to contemporary Mill Reef, predecessors Ribot and Sea Bird II, Nijinsky, his senior by one year and the sole Triple Crown winner since Bahram in 1935 and more recent superstars Dancing Brave, Sea The Stars and Frankel.

He has an analytical and form-based method, one formulated with those many hours’ studying with his father the implications of the Brigadier’s training and racing. The one regret for me is that he didn’t ask someone like me, a racing person with journalistic, editing experience to run an eye over the finished copy.

Having grown up for all those Fleet Street days, including editing stories from Peter Scott and John Oaksey, two of the most oft-quoted writers in Laurie’s formidable offering, with the Daily Telegraph style book, I can be very pedantic – when I remember, even that was a while ago! Laurie’s book suffers from a comical treatment of possessives to the extent it can halt the flow of consciousness. Happily, though, it never stops the marvelling at this work of a lifetime. Also, the detailed index has all the names, but as Eric Morecambe might have said: “Not necessarily in the right order”! Or matching the pages where they are alleged to be found either in some cases! That index needs another look, too.

I won’t go any further to spoil what I promise is a great read. I knew what was coming for almost of all of it, names, race distances and the like from half a century ago. But then it was still early in my time in racing journalism, and long-term memory beats short-term by a distance, almost in Brigadier Gerard fashion! Younger readers will also find it enthralling.

In conclusion, Laurie confesses he was ready for some time to leave what was basically a five-year term of virtual slavery. It was only the good fortune of having a great horse – in his and probably my opinion, the greatest of them all - to live with, and a boss he respected, to a degree, that kept him there. The dream of getting rides soon evaporated for most of the 18 apprentices promised as such that tended to be there at any time. Despite that, he says it was a period in his life he would never have changed as it brought him in contact with Jill, his wife and mother and grandmother to their children.

When Brigadier Gerard retired back where it all started at Egerton Stud in Newmarket for his career as a stallion, Laurie travelled with the horse in the box from West Ilsley and said his farewells. Later, John Hislop, having heard that Williamson was quitting the yard and going out of racing, issued a decree banning Laurie from ever visiting the horse in his new home. He never again saw the horse that had been the entire raison d’etre of his life for three whole seasons. Nice man, that John Hislop!

Dick Hern was a man of the old school, and his two principal friends among the racing press, Peter Scott, Hotspur of the Telegraph, and Michael Seely of the Times, were allowed where all others were not.

I recall rather fortunately getting to him first after Henbit won the Derby in 1980. I asked him what he thought about Henbit and the race. Deadpan, with no hint of excitement, just a little supressed pride, he said: “He’s a nice horse. I always liked him. That was a good race.” Get the book and see what life was like for boys in stables half a century ago. Laurie survived it and should be proud of the volume he produced. If you’re reading this, Laurie, and you have a re-print in the pipeline, let me correct those irritating literals and that baffling index!

- TS

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