I was birdwatching the other day with a jolly Methodist minister who had only ever once been to a racecourse. Knowing nothing of the sport, in the first race he had backed an outsider called something like Holy Orders, purely on the name, and collected. He put most of his winnings on The Lord in the next. Alas, it came nowhere. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘the only time in my life I have been let down by The Lord.’
The Lord clearly hadn’t noticed either that last Saturday’s card at Newbury promised the best jumping fare this season, the Cheltenham Festival apart, and it was frosted off. It left me free to conclude the final chapter of a book about the Flat trainer Clive Brittain, which has been a joyful experience. As everybody keeps telling me, Clive and his wife Maureen are simply the nicest people in racing. They live for their horses and never say a bad word about anyone.
Their achievements are extraordinary. Clive was one of 13 children who supplemented the family income by helping local horse-dealers to break and sell ponies. He was then a stable lad to Sir Noel Murless for 23 years, during which time he never earned more than £17 a week. As Murless approached retirement, Clive set up on his own. Within a few years he was the first trainer in Newmarket to have more than a hundred horses. He has trained six British Classic winners and those of almost 50 Group and Grade One races and in doing so he broke the glass ceiling. Before then trainers were almost exclusively ex-Army men from good private schools, set up with a legacy.
A restless innovator, Clive was the first to build an equine swimming pool, the first, says former jockey Steve Cauthen, to use horse walkers. Especially he was the first to travel his horses worldwide. He was the first British trainer to win a Breeders Cup race in the US and it was six years before anyone repeated the feat. He was the first to win a Japan Cup and the second place he achieved with Bold Arrangement in the Kentucky Derby of 1986 is still the best place any British handler has achieved there. He was hoovering up Group races in Germany and Italy before others had even found the racecourses on a map.
As the US legend Steve Cauthen told me, ‘When I first got to Britain in the late Seventies and early Eighties guys like Henry Cecil and even Michael Stoute were taking the attitude: “We would rather stay at home, why bother with abroad?” But Clive saw the opportunity. He started winning these things and it forced other people to follow him because their owners were saying, “How about it, if he can do it why can’t we?”’
Clive is famous for getting his horses out on the Heath in the dark while others are still fumbling for their bedside alarms. He is famous for his celebration dances in the winner’s enclosure, a reaction as eagerly sought by the TV cameramen as Frankie Dettori’s flying dismounts. And he is famous, too, in some eyes for aiming his horses at what others see as overambitious targets. Let the purists scoff. Clive’s record may be studded with successes like Rajeem’s 66–1 victory in the Falmouth Stakes, Braughing’s 50–1 success in the Cambridgeshire or Terimon’s second place in the Derby at 500–1 but, as he puts it, ‘I’ve been criticised for tilting at Group One windmills with horses some people reckoned shouldn’t be running at that level, but I’ve managed to knock down quite a few of those windmills.’
Having begun training in 1972, he is still very much in business. But in writing the book it has been fascinating to learn more of the Newmarket of the 1970s and before. Clive’s fellow trainer Sir Mark Prescott painted for me a picture of the brutality and bullying that went on in the yards before the stable lads’ strike of 1975. Little apprentices would arrive with a suitcase containing the suit their parents had saved to buy. By breakfast the next day, the new arrival would be in rags and one of the old hands would be swaggering around in the new suit, no word said by anyone else. Lads would be kicked up the backside for failing to say ‘Good morning’ — or for saying ‘Good morning’ when it wasn’t one. Even with Murless, who helped to drive out brutality to horses and lads, Clive was never throughout his 23 years addressed by his first or last names. He was always called simply ‘Calne’, because Calne in Wiltshire was where he came from.
He made it to the top above all else because he was and is a superb horseman. As fellow trainer John Gosden puts it, ‘He was as a young man and probably still is now the bravest rider there has been. There was nothing he wouldn’t get on.’ Clive has infinite patience with difficult horses, indeed I think he enjoys them the most, and the joy of it all is that his career proves that nice guys can win.
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