Seeking to persuade Mrs Oakley to wager a bottle of Ledaig single malt on which of three wet sheep will be first up a windy escarpment tends to be as close as you get to racing when holidaying on the Isle of Mull. But one of the great blessings of the sport is its depth of anecdotage, and the three latest volumes kept me going for the week.
The preface to Leigh and Woodhouse’s Racing Lexicon (Faber, £9.99) mentions the racing enthusiasm of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, which reminded me of the bishop who declined an invitation to say grace at the Gimcrack dinner ‘because I don’t really want to remind the Almighty that I am here’.
The Lexicon provides a guide to racing jargon and journalism. Under ‘Leg’, for example, the authors note that a horse may have ‘a touch of a leg’ (an injury to the limb). He may be said to ‘have the legs of’ a rival (i.e., to be capable of outrunning him). Or a horse may be said to have ‘found a leg’ (i.e., he has somehow managed to regain his balance after a jumping error). The only obvious omission I can see is the word ‘Get’ as in ‘that animal wouldn’t get [i.e., last] seven furlongs in a horsebox’. There are useful explanations of such terms as ‘pinhooking’ (buying foals and selling them on as yearlings).
Racing has its euphemisms, even in breeding, and I liked Leigh and Woodhouse’s explanation of life’s most vital activity: ‘Chorus will be “Visiting” King’s Best. Such a visit will not be for the purpose of inspecting his stamp collection.’
In Dawn Till Dusk (Highdown, £15.99), Colin Cameron, who has generously donated the royalties to Racing Welfare, celebrates the work of the racing characters whose names we do not often hear — the grooms, work-riders and travelling head lads who do so much to iron out the quirks and make our champions. The relationships they strike up with their equine charges come to life in their own words. Listen to Joyce Wallsgove on Moonax, Barry Hills’s St Leger winner who had a reputation as a mean-tempered sort. Not for her: ‘Sometimes he would be really low, just flat. He’d stick his head under your arm and just wanted a cuddle. Then he’d be fine and shake himself down, as if to say, “I’m not a softie or anything like that, you know, you can leave me alone again.”’ Never mind that Moonax once put her in casualty for four hours; she used to rub his gums because it relaxed the horse.
Listen to the pride of Jimmy Scott from Sir Michael Stoute’s yard on the grey Kribensis, one of the first Flat types to win the Champion Hurdle. ‘When he first went hurdling, people said, “Who is that rabbit you’ve got?” When he won the Triumph we paraded him round six times and I said, “Here’s your rabbit.”’ Kribensis acted up one day at Newmarket and kicked a fancy car. Nervously, as a big fellow got out of the car, Scott rode up on his hack to calm things, explaining that the culprit was bound for the Champion Hurdle. ‘Don’t worry about the car,’ said the man. ‘Is the horse all right?’ He’d backed Kribensis for Cheltenham.
It comes as no surprise to hear from Rodney Boult, work-rider of Desert Orchid and Persian Punch, of trainer David Elsworth’s concern for his horses. ‘At the races he makes sure jockeys take care of them. That’s even if he has had £1,000 to win. I have seen him have a good bet on a horse and then tell the jockey, “Don’t you knock him about now.” He thinks about the horse, never the bet.’
But the best collector of racing anecdotes these days is Marcus Armytage, who writes for the Daily Telegraph and Horse and Hound. Few of the disciplinary scrapes, social disasters or Acts of God affecting the racing community fail to finish up in an Armytage column. Hot Cherry (Highdown, £15.99) is a collection of the best of Armytage. Dip in almost anywhere and you will find a nugget, like the tale of breeder and former amateur rider Gavin Wragg. Asked once by the Folkestone stewards what the owner would think of his performance after he had dropped his hands in a hunter chase he replied, ‘He’s furious, I am the owner.’
Addicted to fast wheels, Wragg was driving back from a celebration after riding in Czechoslovakia’s Velka Pardubicka chase. After passing a stationary police car, he looked back to see if it had followed him, only to see the terrified white face of his dining companion, trainer Charlie Mann, who was clinging to his back spoiler. The pair were arrested at gunpoint.
No surprise, perhaps, to hear of the reaction to his fellow jockeys’ less than sophisticated prank when they liberally smeared the inside of Gary Bardwell’s Y-fronts with Tiger Balm while he was riding in a race. ‘Despite his colleagues humming the Jerry Lee Lewis hit “Great Balls of Fire” on the way home,’ Marcus records, ‘Bardwell didn’t so much as shift awkwardly in his seat.’ But Bardwell, I recall, was sufficiently stoical once to have ridden a race with a broken leg.
And racing being as tough as it can be, no surprise to hear of the late Jimmy Fitzgerald quizzing a lad on his previous day’s absence. When he explained his wife had been having a baby the trainer responded, ‘Why were you there if you didn’t have to effing deliver it?’
If you don’t enjoy this book, just don’t bother ever going to a racecourse.
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