I got a parcel in the post the other day, preceded by an explanation as to why my friend Peter Ashmore would want to send me “The Boss”, written in the year 2000 by John Budden and subtitled the Life and Times of Horseracing Legend Gordon W Richards, writes Tony Stafford.
Peter knows I speak regularly with Nicky Richards, Gordon’s son and successor at Greystoke stables in Cumbria. He also thought I might find it interesting that Gordon basically was sent away from home in Bath, where he had learnt to handle all manner of horses associated with his father’s business, at the age of 11.
It intrigued Peter that young Richards’ first stop was at Sandbanks in Dorset, now the most valuable stretch of real estate, excepting certain parts of London, for instance Hampstead and Mayfair, in the UK. In 1941. When he arrived during the early stages of the Second World War, the beach was split into no-go areas by the military’s prolific use of barbed wire.
That didn’t faze Louie Dingwall, in effect and indeed practice, one of the first horserace trainers in the UK, even though it took the Jockey Club thirty years to accept that she and any other female should hold a licence, originally officially in her husband’s name.
What Peter didn’t know is that there is a small connection with me here. In the early 1970’s soon after I joined the Daily Telegraph and a few years after Mrs D, as everyone who worked for her called her, had been officially sanctioned as a trainer, I headed up a syndicate in the first horse in which I ever had an interest.
Looking in the Sporting Life, which I devoured just as I had the Greyhound Express in my first Fleet Street job a few years earlier, the racehorse sales were always an interest. I noticed that a three-year-old called Princehood had been acquired from Doncaster the day before by Mrs D for £300, or maybe even £260. I called her and asked whether she had a buyer. “Yes, my dear, me!”
As an article commissioned by the Poole Museum about this remarkable woman revealed much later, her horses usually cost £500 or under. I reckoned this impressive winner by five lengths of his debut for the classy Newmarket trainer Atty Corbett, but a disappointing fourth next time, had to be a snip. (In those days I had no idea that horses could go wrong!)
I thought putting together a syndicate (at £30 a shot!) from the paper and the reprobates, including long-term friend Trevor Halling (father of boxing commentator Nick) and band leader Chris Allen, habitués of the Corals shop across the road from the paper, would be an easy task. It wasn’t, and fifty odd years later, it still isn’t!
But in the end, we did it, and Princehood ran a few times in the name of Mrs S Carroll, a Roedean teacher who was married to my racing desk colleague, John. We were all excited and I had a couple of trips down to Sandbanks, to the stables which had its own petrol pump, a remnant of the garage she ran when she also had, among others, a successful bus business, that serviced the area.
Those days more than half a century ago, the multi-million pound properties to be were a distant illusion, but any coastal place which has water on either side of valuable land is to be treasured and that’s where we had a family lunch at Rick Stein’s restaurant a couple of years ago.
By the time I met the trainer she was already in her 80s and was poorly sighted, so that she could a couple of years earlier have driven her horsebox to Nice in the South of France and won a £6,000 prize (big money in those days) with the unconsidered veteran Treason Trail at Cagnes-sur-Mer says much for her endurance and tenacity. Then she drove it all the way back, drawing on all those days driving buses before the War.
Mrs D’s main jumps jockey in those days was the talented Gary Old, but instead of slogging through the hot Dorset summers on horseback, he used to trade that for hiring out deckchairs and his extreme good looks on the beach at Bournemouth, barely five miles along the coast.
His true potential was only really revealed when he left the Dingwall yard to join Donald Underwood near Guildford, and he had a great association with True Song, a smart hurdler who won the big novice race at Chepstow on the eve of the Cheltenham Festival. Sadly, Gary Old died very young.
Another Sandbanks inmate was Pat Butler, whose time there didn’t exceed Princehood’s by long as he has been training in his own right in Sussex since 1976. When we bump into each other on the racecourse, Pat always reminds me of those distant days.
Princehood left to join Ken Payne when he moved from the New Forest to Middleham and broke the 5f track record at Lanark at 14/1 as we looked on in concerted disbelief in the Kings and Keys pub. Two days earlier we were all on when he got stuffed in a seller at Doncaster.
When I began today’s jaunt I had intended to give rather more prominence to the journey Gordon Richards made to the top of the jumping tree. As when in his early days as an apprentice jockey with the Tom Waugh stable at Chilton, the clerk of the scales asked his name. “Gordon Richards”, he replied. “I don’t think we can have two Gordon Richards”, was the clerk’s response, referring to the perennial champion who set even greater records than Tony McCoy’s over jumps as the leading flat jockey either side of and during WW2.
Young Gordon was asked who he worked for and when he replied, “Mr Waugh”, Gordon W Richards was born, never to be altered for the rest of his highly-successful life and career.
Reading John Budden’s studiously researched missive, understandable as his original occupation was as a schoolteacher in Cumbria, for me it was a series of human and equine names that also exactly mirrored the most active of my betting days.
Names like Playlord, the horse that got him going in Yorkshire and enabled him to take the Greystoke stables across in Cumbria previously the home of Tommy Robson, through to Noddy’s Ryde and after that many more, lastly in Gordon’s life, One Man, the enigma that could win any race – apart from the Cheltenham Gold Cup – provided vivid reminders of those days.
The brushes with authority were detailed, often with some humour, as he always stood his ground and supported his jockeys. But then came the gradual and eventually rapid decline in his health, which meant Nicky had to take control. He has done so with great skill and dedication for 25 years already – and he’s now approaching, unbelievably, the age his father was when he died from cancer in 1998.
John Budden, known as Lord John Budden in the press rooms in the north of England for his plummy tones, used that term to describe the great radio commentator Peter Bromley. John also commentated in points and under Rules and was a very popular man with colleagues and professionals in the sport. He was a good tipster to boot and wrote for the Cumberland News from 1966 until his death last year. Dedication indeed.
There were parallels with my other much treasured book that ended in a similar period. Horsetrader, subtitled Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings, was written by Patrick Robinson with (no relation) Nick Robinson as early as 1993, yet it has become such a must-read that it has been re-printed and also voiced as an audio book.
I have my old copy and find that the events chronicled therein ended as far back as 1993! As with The Boss’s joint-author, Nick Robinson died only recently, in his case this summer aged 87. He was a major influence in the development of syndicate ownership, through Kennet Valley Thoroughbreds which continues to thrive under Nick’s protégé, Sam Hoskins.
It was Robinson, in a coffee shop in Liverpool attended regularly by sons of wealthy businessmen in the Liverpool area, that first whetted the young Robert Sangster’s appetite for horse racing.
The book details how winning (and losing) gambles gradually persuaded the son of the founder and chairman of Vernons Pools, in the days when football pools were the only way for the public to land onto massive riches. That was before even Premium Bonds (launched in 1957) and the lottery in the UK, although Ireland’s lottery was the driving force behind upgrading the Irish Sweeps Derby in the early 1960’s.
Sangster, off his own bat, studied his new-found obsession and decided Vincent O’Brien was the best trainer and acted on his opinion. Decades later, Robert, Vincent, and Vincent’s son-in-law John Magnier, ruled the world of horse racing.
Without Robinson there wouldn’t have been a Sadler’s Wells, thus Galileo and Frankel. It all came down to that coffee shop!
Just as Nicky Richards has assimilated the skills of his father, The Boss, so Robert Sangster’s sons and grandsons have made their mark either as breeders, owners, bloodstock agents or, in the case of grandson Ollie, an emerging trainer. A rich legacy indeed!
Horsetrader’s conclusion is that the arrival of the free-spending Arab owners altered the equilibrium, we thought once and for all. But look at racing in 2023, thirty years after Horsetrader’s publication, Coolmore stills thrives in its modified form, and while Arab owners are still very much in evidence, the growing threat and indeed the money to sustain it now comes from Japan.
That is epitomised by the brilliant Equinox, highest-rated horse in the world and about to service his first book of mares, including the wonderful Japanese champion Almond Eye.
They certainly adhere to the old racing adage, breed the best to the best and hope for the best. Then again, Coolmore, 30 years on from Horsetrader’s publication, might say that in daringly sending Rhododendron to mate with Deep Impact in Japan and getting Auguste Rodin they weren’t far off!
- TS
