Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings. Nick Robinson
be for the Stewards Cup, and he, Eric, believed he would win it. This possessed enormous appeal to the Robin Hood of Vernons. He, Robert, now had the means to win them back all of their lost money. For weeks before the race, they plunged the cash onto Highroy, as if defeat was out of the question.
However, when the overnight declarations came up, there was bad news. The venerable Newmarket trainer Jack Jarvis had unexpectedly decided to run Lord Rosebery’s sprinter Creole, and naturally summoned his stylish stable jockey Peter Robinson to ride – the same Peter Robinson Eric had booked for Highroy. This was a serious blow. Eric hustled around and booked Paul Tulk for Highroy, a capable jockey but not his first choice. The race was, as usual, run at a ferocious pace and on the line Creole beat Highroy a short head. Robert and Nick could not believe their luck. Eric was very fed up too. But he had a plan. Three days later on the Friday there was another Goodwood sprint, the Chichester Stakes, and in his view Highroy would have recovered sufficiently to run and win. ‘The competition is not so hot,’ he said. ‘And Jarvis does not have a runner. Peter Robinson will ride for us.’
Once more Robert and Nick plunged into the bookmakers, and once more they stood, gripped by nerves, high in the County Stand, their fingers white-knuckled on their binoculars. This was getting expensive. And once more Highroy got beat in a photo-finish, by a short head.
‘Christ!’ said Robert. ‘Can you believe that could happen? Can you believe that?’
‘Not easily,’ said Nick. ‘By the way, did you see who rode the winner?’
‘If you say Paul Tulk I’ll probably commit suicide.’
‘Don’t do it, Robert,’ said Nick, shaking his head gravely. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’
This was not the only time in 1963 when Robert felt the need for a drink. It was an awful season for him. Not one of his horses won anywhere. But this seemed only to spur him on to greater ambitions, to own more horses, to go racing more often, and to study formlines and breeding lines even more assiduously.
Curiously it had been a powerful owner-breeder and member of the Jockey Club who had inspired him to lose so much money on those Goodwood sprints. And now it would be the same senior establishment figure who would get it all back for him and more. Sir Foster Robinson had a two-year-old filly who had not yet won a race. She was bright chestnut in colour and rather lean and athletic in conformation. Her name was Homeward Bound. It was her ancestry which intrigued Robert: she was a half-sister to Chalk Stream, his very first horse, both of them being out of Sir Foster’s mare Sabie River. When Nick imparted the news that his grandfather’s trainer, John Oxley, thought she would win the Oaks, England’s premier mile-and-a-half classic for fillies, run at Epsom three days after the Derby in June, Robert could scarcely locate a bookmaker fast enough.
On the day of the race the bookmakers were still offering 100–7 against Homeward Bound winning the Oaks. They who handled the accounts of N. J. F. Robinson and R. Sangster lived, however, to rue their careless and uncharacteristic generosity. On a wet afternoon on Epsom Downs, Homeward Bound came with a tremendous run down the middle to win the 1964 Oaks by two lengths from Windmill Girl (the future dam of Arthur Budgett’s two Derby winners). It was the finest moment in all of his years of racing for Sir Foster Robinson, now aged eighty-four. It was not half bad for his grandson and his sidekick either.
The victory of Homeward Bound did not spur Robert Sangster on towards the upper reaches of thoroughbred racing – with thoughts of perhaps one day owning an Oaks winner of his own, or perhaps even a Derby winner, or any other classic winner. But rather it seemed to concentrate his mind on the intricacies of breeding racehorses, as indeed the subject has captured men of similar thoughtful and ambitious disposition down the years. He had loved the electric atmosphere of the big summer occasion on Epsom Downs, but what really fascinated him was the fact that Homeward Bound was from the same mare as Chalk Stream. He worked out that the basic shape and conformation of the two horses was from the dam. He also considered that their similar will-to-win must spring from the same genes. But Homeward Bound’s superior class, and her ability to run over a longer distance, and to keep running on strongly, uphill to the finish, must surely have come from her sire, the great staying horse and champion stallion, Alycidon. Robert immersed himself in books about the subject, poring over long-forgotten pedigrees, tracing bloodlines to famous stallions, trying to formulate patterns of breeding, which stallion lines worked best with which female lines.
But these were his evening preoccupations. His day-to-day dramas on the racecourse were still conducted around the northern tracks, and the one he loved most of all was the modest Scottish course which sits on the south Ayrshire coast on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. The two big meetings at Ayr Racecourse, in June and the Western Meeting in September, represented for Robert something approximately between Christmas and Mardi Gras. Or at least he was apt to turn the occasions into those qualities of celebration. He would arrive on the evening before the racing began, by now sweeping up the drive to the Turnberry Hotel in a new Rolls Royce, and within the hour he would report to one of the greatest golf links in the world. Turnberry, a 7000-yard championship test, spreads along the shoreline, guarded by a magnificent lighthouse. In terms of difficulty it compares very favourably with Robert’s home links of Hoylake, and like Royal Liverpool has been the scene of a titanic and historic battle for the British Open – in 1977 Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus burst ten strokes clear of the field before Watson’s 65 beat Jack’s last-round 66. Its views out towards the Irish Sea are as romantic as those from the Wirral. In the near distance you can see the granite dome of the island of Ailsa Craig, and beyond that the Mull of Kintyre. On very clear days, you can see the distant shores of County Antrim in the north-east of Ireland. With the possible exception of the winner’s enclosure at the nearby racecourse, Robert’s favourite place on all of this earth may very well be the ninth hole at Turnberry, the tee of which sits on a rocky pinnacle out to sea.
Nick Robinson recalls one glorious summer evening here, just as the sun was turning the far reaches of the ocean to the colour of spent fire as it sunk behind the waves. Robert was about to hit when someone carelessly asked him, in the middle of his backswing, ‘Does that lighthouse work?’
‘Only when it’s dark,’ replied Robert breezily as he struck a long drive out over the in-running tide and over the cliffs towards the fairway, and the green, set hard by the great nautical light.
Only truly diabolical weather ever prevented him playing nine holes after a day at the races. And nothing ever prevented him playing eighteen before he went to the races.
Win, lose or draw, he and his friends – plus of course Eric Cousins – dined sumptuously at the Turnberry Hotel every night, not, incidentally, at his expense, although he would usually insist on standing the party two or three bottles of decent champagne by way of an overture. Sometimes the party was overshadowed by a particularly grim loss to the bookmakers, but not for long. And certainly not on the occasions when his chestnut colt Shy Boy (by Alycidon) – bought for 2300 guineas at the autumn sales – won twice at the Ayr June meeting over a mile and a half. Definitely not when his bay gelding Endorsement – bought for only 1000 guineas from Jack Jarvis – won the Ayrshire Handicap by a neck from Night Star. Words can barely describe the fun and games which broke out after Robert’s lovely chestnut filly Brief Star got up on the line to win the major race of the Western Meeting, the Ayr Gold Cup.
However, no race in Eric Cousins’s relatively short but meteoric career as a trainer ever matched that Gold Cup for such personal tensions and feelings of rivalry inside his own stable. It had all begun back in the days of the old Kardomah lunch club. Robert had introduced two of his friends to Eric. They were David Freeman who ran an upmarket meat canning business (Gold Dish Ox-Tongues), and Leo McParland, whose family owned a major cattle importing business, bringing the beasts in from Ireland presumably in order to help fill the Freeman cans. These two old friends also went in together and bought a couple of racehorses, but one of them was a very useful filly named Ludham, and when she finished third in the Oaks, having finished second in the Cheshire Oaks, Robert felt slightly aggrieved at the sheer quality of their filly – better than any horse he had ever owned. Then Ludham came out and won the Doonside Cup at Ayr and they all thought Robert’s nose was really out of joint, though