Читать книгу Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings - Nick Robinson - Страница 8

The once-great English seaport of Liverpool ought, in fairness, to hold a truly commanding view across the wide Mersey to the far-off mystic mountains of north Wales. Indeed it would do so, but for a mighty headland which juts like a giant fist straight out of the picturesque Roman city of Chester. The Wirral peninsula measures some fifteen miles by six, and it divides the two broad estuaries of the Mersey and the River Dee. On its north-eastern side are the heavy industrial ports of Birkenhead, Wallasey, Bebington and Ellesmere, which more or less wreck the mystic aspect of Liverpool’s view.

On the far, western coast, however, is a true romance of water and flatlands, of a great river swirling out into the Irish Sea, of west winds from Ireland, perfumed by the heather of County Wicklow. Breathtaking vistas of the sea – the same waters over which Admiral Nelson once sailed his fleet – not to re-store in Liverpool, but for a secret tryst with the most famous and elegant of the local beauties, Lady Emma Hamilton of Parkgate. J. M. W. Turner memorably painted the Welsh mountains from here.

Just to the north of Lady Hamilton’s childhood home stands the eastern seaward point of the headland. Here lies the historic golf links of Hoylake, home of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, the scene of ten Open Championships and the course which beat Jack Nicklaus. And here, with glorious gardens lapping down almost to the fairways, are some of the most expensive residences in this most exclusive stretch of north-western England. They form a millionaire’s row, known since the age of Queen Victoria as The Golden Mile. What the Hamptons are to New York’s Long Island, so West Kirby is to the Wirral peninsula.

This is Sangster Country. It has been Sangster Country for most of this century. The grand family house, where Robert was raised, is called West Lodge. It stands behind solid, red sandstone pillars, among beautifully clipped lawns. Providentially it always possessed a fine stable block and groom’s cottage within its grounds. The family has been wealthy since Edwardian times. Robert’s grandfather Edmund Sangster founded the fortune with a large warehousing and wholesale business in nearby Manchester shortly after Lord Rosebery’s godfather ascended the throne of England in 1901. Fourteen years later his teenaged son Vernon – Robert’s father – set off with the Manchester Regiment to fight on the Western Front in the Great War. He survived that most awful of conflicts, and returned to a depressed and demoralized England with a view to taking over the family business.

But by nature, Sangsters tend not to take over things. They are more inclined to start things. They are entrepreneurs by instinct, blessed with a touch of daring, but equally blessed by a certain sure-footedness. Young Vernon Sangster and his father proceeded to launch a business, essentially a lottery. They called it Vernons Pools and their plan was to give every working man, for just a few pence, a chance to win a fortune. Every week.

It was built around the results of the Football League matches played in England all through the autumn, winter and spring of the year. Success depended on the devotion of millions of ordinary people who sent in their coupons and their small amount of money, in the hope of scooping up thousands of pounds for correctly forecasting the drawn matches. One unlikely ‘save’ from an unseen goalkeeper playing hundreds of miles away in the pouring rain and mud, could smash millions of dreams. It happened every week. But it did not cost much, and the hopes of millions stayed high. The coupons and the little cheques and money orders kept coming.

Profits grew steadily each year and in the mid 1920s Vernon Sangster and his father moved the operation thirty miles to Liverpool. In the 1930s, with the business of football pools making the family rich, there were two major relocations: Vernon, now married to Peggy, bought West Lodge; and Vernons Pools set up their new headquarters in the north-eastern suburb of Liverpool, Aintree, home of the world’s most famous steeplechase, the Grand National.

Robert was born on 23 May 1936. He was to be an only child and sole heir to a sprawling business which would, before he was out of school, employ six thousand people. Under the umbrella of Vernon Industries there were factories making products to help Britain’s war effort, factories making kitchen and domestic products, factories making plastics, factories making children’s toys. And all the time the great ‘cash cow’ of the football pools increased the vast and diverse fortune of Vernon Sangster.

He was a nice man, rather quiet, but immensely well-liked by both his peers and employees. He was extremely generous to charities, a trait inherited by his son. Vernon was not given to ostentation in any form, and usually had lunch with his wife in a private businessmen’s club in Liverpool. He was, however, obsessed by sports, choosing for Robert’s godfather Dr Joe Graham, a British Boxing Board of Control official fight doctor. He also ensured that Robert was taught the game of golf at a very young age under the tutelage of one of England’s finest players, his friend Henry Cotton, three times winner of the Open Championship and, belatedly, a Knight of the Realm.

Vernon, who played off a handicap of twelve and would one day be elected to membership of the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews, was of course a member of Royal Liverpool Golf Club. He and his wife played the daunting 7000 yards of Hoylake a couple of times a week. This was no ordinary golf club. Royal Liverpool is redolent with legend. Here it was that one of the finest amateurs of all time, Mr Harold Hilton, a local member and the only man who had ever held both the US and British Amateur Championships in the same year, won the 1897 Open beating the five-times professional winner James Braid. Here too the immortal Edwardian golfer James Taylor won the first of his five Open Championships by eight shots in 1913. Also it was at Hoylake that the great American Walter Hagen won the second of his four Open Championships, in 1924, playing the last nine holes in 36, despite visiting three bunkers. Bobby Jones sailed into Liverpool in 1930 and nearly blew his Grand Slam – with a seven at the par-five eighth hole, right at the bottom of the Sangster garden – in the last round of the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool. Ultimately he won by two strokes, but to the end of his life he always said: ‘I’ll never forget Hoylake.’

In the 1967 Open Championship here, in mild conditions, only 19 of the 370 rounds played were under 70. The winner was the Argentinian Roberto de Vicenzo who finished on 278. The holder, Jack Nicklaus, failed by two shots to shoot the 67 which would have given him a tie. Afterwards he stood alone, memorably, outside the Victorian clubhouse, and he gazed out towards the far-distant eighth hole at the end of the formidable links, and he shook his head in disbelief. It is one thing for a local businessman to play off twelve on a well-watered park golf course, but quite another to be able to score like that over Hoylake. Both Vernon and Peggy Sangster became Captains of the Club in 1975, the year their only son set off on his mission to revolutionize The Sport of Kings.

As the Second World War drew to its close and Robert Sangster attained the age of eight, he was sent as a weekly border to the nearby Leas School which was also situated with panoramic views across the golf course. Unsurprisingly he swiftly came to love sports and, by the time he left for public school, Repton (founded 1577), he was a very reasonable cricketer, an enthusiastic rugby player and, at thirteen, a pretty long hitter of a golf ball. But what he could really do was box. Dr Joe Graham had seen to that, having personally shown his godson at a very young age the basics of the straight left, the jab, the hook and the uppercut. Robert even knew how to throw combinations, knew how to shift his weight, to move to the left away from a ‘southpaw’. Above all, he knew how to punch correctly, how to take the impact.

He had accompanied Joe on trips to London. At the age of eleven he had seen the British heavyweight champion Bruce Woodcock suffer a broken jaw at the hands of the American Joe Baksi. Engraved on his memory is the post-fight scene in the dressing room, where the badly hurt Woodcock sat with a white towel over his head, muttering over and over to his manager: ‘I’m sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down.’

In 1951 he watched the brilliant British Middleweight Champion Randolph Turpin beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the world title at London’s Earls Court Stadium. A few years later he was ringside with his godfather at Liverpool Stadium when the British Middleweight Champion Johnny Sullivan entered the ring first for his title fight with Pat McAteer of Birkenhead, and insisted on occupying Pat’s traditional corner. He can still recall the sound and the fury of the packed ranks of the dockers at this affront to their hero; the uproar in the stadium as the referee spun a coin and then led the arrogant ex-booth fighter Sullivan to the opposite corner. ‘No one,’ says Robert, ‘I promise you, no one who was there could ever forget the eruption of joy from that crowd when Pat knocked Sullivan out. I flew out of my seat with my arms in the air.’

He also remembers to this day nearly every punch thrown in the ‘toughest fight I ever saw’, when Dennis Powell fought George Walker for the vacant British cruiserweight crown at Liverpool Stadium on 26 March 1953. He sat behind Dr Joe while the two grim, determined contestants fought it out.

Walker, felled in the first round by a right hook, took an eight count. In the fourth Powell was down for nine from a momentous right from Walker. Then they both went down together, Powell for ‘six’, Walker rising immediately. In the seventh Walker lost his gum shield, Powell’s eye was cut, Walker’s left eye was closing and still they went at it, with thunderous punches.

By the eighth round Walker could see only through his right eye. In the ninth they were considering stopping the fight in favour of Walker, so badly was Powell’s eye bleeding. But the referee let it go on, through a murderous tenth and through the eleventh, with George Walker, fighting for his life, now being hit too often for anyone’s taste. His eye was so badly injured, his chief second Dave Edgar refused to let him come up for the twelfth round. He called the referee over and asked him to stop it. George Walker was heartbroken, begging for a chance, for just one more round. But Edgar was having none of it, and neither was the ref. They named Powell the winner and Robert remembers watching George Walker, sitting on his stool, devastated, alone, as we all must be at such times. ‘I thought then, as I think now,’ says Robert, ‘what a man’. (George Walker was to make and lose a gigantic fortune as Chairman of Brent Walker, owners of bookmakers William Hill, in the late 1980s.)

Whenever he was home from school Robert attended the big fights at Liverpool Stadium. He saw all of the top British fighters of the 1950s: Freddie Mills, Dave Charnley, Terry Downes, Jack Gardner. Dr Joe even took him down to London, to the promoter Jack Solomons’s gymnasium in Windmill Street, off Piccadilly. There the trainers taught him to spar. He used to hold the padded gloves for Freddie Mills to swing at, and he learned to move them quickly, listening to Freddie tell him, ‘Watch my eyes, Bobby, watch carefully, that’s how you read a fighter, that’s how you know when the punches are coming.’

Robert loved to watch Freddie Mills, and he was not yet fourteen years old when Dr Joe took him down to London to watch his hero defend the world cruiserweight championship against the American Joey Maxim. ‘It was’, recalls Robert, ‘the worse night of my life thus far.’ Maxim knocked Freddie out in round ten. He also knocked out three of his front teeth and Mills never fought again. But he still turned up to spar with Robert at Windmill Street.

This involvement with the sport of professional boxing was not absolutely what one might have expected from a young gentleman of Robert’s social standing. But Vernon Sangster was not some old lord crusting around the battlements wondering why the devil his son could not show a decent interest in something less violent, like hunting or shooting. Vernon Sangster was a man of the real world and he understood the excitement of professional sport at that level, and he believed his son would benefit later in life from the raw hardness of such a world. He believed it was excellent training for a boy to understand sacrifice, courage, determination, the joy of winning, and the pain and disappointment of defeat. He saw no harm in Robert’s early devotion to the brutality of the prize ring, and the men who worked in it. He even allowed his son to take eight friends, on his tenth birthday, to the fights at Liverpool Stadium.

Robert was not in fact a great scholar at school, but he was good at maths and long on common sense. He was a very formidable front-row forward on the rugby field and he pleased the Repton cricket coach, the former Derbyshire spin-bowler Eric Marsh, so much that he allowed his wealthiest pupil to keep his car in a garage at his home. Considering that Repton had now been waiting nigh-on half a century for someone to replace their immortal England and Oxford University batsman C. B. Fry (and it clearly was not going to be Robert) this must rank as a gesture of the highest nobility. At boxing, Robert was never defeated in twelve fights in the ring at Repton.

Like all young men leaving school in the 1950s, Robert was required for two years of National Service and he selected one of England’s historic fighting regiments, the 22nd Regiment of Foot, The Cheshires, the headquarters of which were in Chester Castle down at the end of the Wirral peninsula. The regiment had been founded in 1689 by the Duke of Norfolk, the direct ancestor of the one so upset at the Jockey Club blackballing, who sailed his men from Liverpool to fight at the Battle of the Boyne. For nearly three centuries the Cheshires had fought for King, Queen and Country. They had defeated the Americans during the Revolution at the Battles of Rhode Island and New York; they had fought, on and off, in India for a hundred years; they fought in the great battles for Afghanistan in the 1840s under General Sir Charles Napier, once defeating 30,000 Baluchis when outnumbered by ten to one. They fought in the Boer War, and they fought and died by the hundreds at the Somme, at Ypres, all over Passchendaele, and at Gallipoli. In the Second World War the regiment fought with enormous heroism at El Alamein, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio.

Dearly wanting to be an officer in the Cheshires, Robert applied for training but the officer selection board wanted to assess him twice and after his first interviews they requested him to serve a little more time in the regiment and come back in a few weeks in order that they might talk to him again. In the meantime, however, fate intervened and he leapt at a posting with the Commanding Officer in exciting postwar Berlin and, casting his ambitions of leadership to the west winds of the Wirral, he flew to Germany. Private Sangster, foot soldier, reported for duty.

During the first couple of days men were assessed for sports activities. It was viewed as something of a joke among the ranks when this wealthy young chap from Repton College – famed mainly for producing four Archbishops of Canterbury including Dr Ramsay – stuck his hand up to volunteer for, of all sports, boxing. Also he was apt to make the occasional remark which branded him among instructors as something of a ‘smartass’ – and on the first day of training the PTI was expounding the rules of ‘non-hitting’ areas (back of the head, kidneys, and so on), when Robert uttered one wisecrack too many. The instructor chose to teach him a short, sharp lesson in Army etiquette. Summoning to the fore the big, beefy Brigade shot-putt champion, Private ‘Tiny’ Davies, he said, ‘Right men, I am looking for someone to box a demonstration with Tiny here in the ring. Ah yes, Private Sangster, I think you’ll do very nicely.’

Robert gazed at the massive, six-foot-four-inch Tiny, nodded curtly, checked his gloves and climbed into the ring. At eighteen, he was five feet ten inches, weighed one hundred and seventy-two pounds, and he was giving away about forty-two pounds and several inches. But as Tiny advanced in round one, the words of Freddie Mills rang clearly in his mind: ‘Bobby, if ever you’re fighting a man who might be a bit short on experience, and he comes at you, bang him on the nose early – it’ll make his eyes water, unsettle him.’

Tiny came forward, swung twice. Robert, on his toes, backed away waiting for the next advance. Tiny, almost inviting Robert to hit him, again swung wildly. Robert ducked to his right, slipped inside and banged his opponent on the nose with a short left hook. Hard. The soldiers yelled with excitement. Tiny reacted with instant, unutterable rage. He wiped his smarting eyes, leaned back on the ropes for extra leverage and catapulted himself across the ring at Robert. His face was puce with fury, and his fists were drawn back behind his ears.

Robert backed up to the ropes, stood his ground and stared hard into Tiny’s angry eyes. His stance was slightly crouched, with his left jab ready. At the final split second, he shifted his weight to his left foot, and let fly with a text-book straight right hand that would have knocked down a stud bull. The force was doubled by the on-rushing momentum of Tiny, and Robert caught him flush on the jaw, just to the left of centre. Everything was correct, his wrist was locked, his elbow was locked, and his shoulder took the impact, just as Freddie Mills had instructed. Tiny, by the way, was unconscious before he hit the floor, where he remained, with the lights out, for a little over thirty seconds.

The soldiers went wild. Robert was unable to stop laughing, and the Army doctors were busy trying to revive Tiny. It was, upon reflection, Robert’s finest hour in the ring. He went on to win the Berlin Brigade Heavyweight Championship and was never defeated in more than a dozen fights, though most of them, against better boxers, were decided on points. ‘I never once had a chance to hit anyone that hard ever again,’ he recalls. ‘Actually, Freddie would have been proud of me that evening.’

For a young man so naturally captivated by heroism, both in the boxing ring and indeed in the history of his regiment, it was curious that he entirely abandoned his plans to become a second lieutenant and the vague ambition to become Captain Robert Sangster, which does after all possess a rather authoritative ring. But deep down he knew that his time in the Army was limited to just a few months and that back home the challenging, rewarding and glamorous world of big business awaited him. He had already acquired a taste for fast, expensive cars, beautiful girls, vintage champagne and the kind of well-tailored country clothes that young gentlemen of his wealth and education were apt to wear. Having bought himself a car in Berlin, Robert made the most of the great city. He was always zipping in and out of the Russian sector in search of the occasional pot of caviar and his memories of notorious forays into the more expensive night spots with a small group of adventurous, but largely impoverished fellow ‘squaddies’ still bring a beaming smile to his cheerful face even today.

Robert returned to the Wirral in 1957. By now the Vernon Organization was building parts for aircraft and owned a factory that produced a little three-wheel car which did eighty miles to the gallon, in sharp contrast to Robert’s new Mercedes Sports which was pushed to get eighteen to the gallon going downhill. He was glad to be home and was quickly absorbed with the many improvements and expansions his father had implemented during his time in the Army. One of the least successful was in horse-race betting: a credit bookmaking business run in conjunction with the football pools, an innovation which Robert noted swiftly was not making much money. He was also at a loss as to how to help improve it, since his knowledge of horse racing was extremely limited.

He knew one fact about the sport. It was a schoolboy belief that the best trainer of a racehorse lived somewhere in southern Ireland, and was named Vincent O’Brien. This man had trained the winner of the Grand National Steeplechase in each of the last three years Robert had spent at Repton, 1953–55, and achieved this with three different horses too. Robert reasoned that, since no one else had ever achieved this, O’Brien must be the best there is. At school the experts among his friends had asserted that the Grand National was for big, slow plodding ‘chasers’ and that the real kings of National Hunt racing were those who won the two main races at Cheltenham – the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle. One fifteen-year-old Irish tipster had then confided that a trainer called O’Brien had won each of those races as well, three times in a row. And that settled it in Robert’s mind. O’Brien must be the best.

Flat racing was essentially a mystery to him but, with Vernons now involved in credit betting, it was his bound duty to understand the basics of all gambling, the odds and the risks. As such he usually noticed the winners of big races like the Derby, where there might be a major pay-out. The 1957 Derby was run just a few days after he returned to the family fold and he saw that it had been won by Crepello. He also noted that the second horse, beaten only a length and half, was named Ballymoss. His price had been 33–1 and, happily for Vernons Credit, not many people had risked more than a few shillings each way. ‘I might have had a few quid on it if I’d known he was running,’ thought Robert. The horse was trained in County Tipperary by Vincent O’Brien.

Three weeks later Robert missed Ballymoss again when he won the Irish Derby by miles. But he did not miss much, since the horse started at an impossible price of 9–4 on. An entire year then slid by without Robert taking a shred of interest in flat racing, until the Royal Ascot meeting of 1958 took place. Because of pressure of work, he was not able to join a group of friends who had travelled south for the Gold Cup, all dressed up, complete with badges for the Royal Enclosure. He glanced rather enviously at the papers the following day to see if any of them had had their photographs taken, but none had. Every inch of the papers were devoted to the great Irish mare Gladness who had beaten all the colts to win the Gold Cup. She had been trained by O’Brien. That really settled it. Robert, at the age of twenty-two, reckoned he knew one shining, copper-bottomed, indisputable fact about flat racing. ‘Vincent O’Brien is the best trainer there has ever been,’ was how he phrased it to his friends, none of whom knew a whole lot more about it than he did.

Like many men of a steady temperament, but with a very busy mind, Robert Sangster was apt to come out with these slightly high-powered remarks from time to time. The fact that they were sudden, and usually sounded arrogant in the extreme, occasionally unnerved people. But they were always followed by a deep, good-natured chuckle at himself. Pompous he was not, but a mind like his needed an outlet, even though he had never actually heard of such legendary trainers as Dick Dawson, Frank Butters, Alec Taylor, John Porter, Fred Darling or Joe Lawson.

The usual setting for these pearls of modern wisdom from young Sangster was Liverpool’s Kardomah Coffee House, the lunchtime gathering place of 1950s’ upwardly mobile Liverpudlians. It was divided essentially into three sections: those set to inherit a considerable fortune; those who had a plan to amass a considerable fortune; and those who were merely working on a plan to earn a considerable fortune. Robert was a founder member of all three groups and, as the only one to already possess a fortune, he naturally became the unchallenged social leader.

The membership at table at which they gathered became an object of immense envy, admittance being unobtainable to those who did not fit these elite criteria. With Rugby Union only played at public schools in the 1950s, Robert and two or three of his colleagues from the highly reputable Birkenhead Park Rugby Football Club saw the playing of this esteemed sport as a qualification to their group. Several of their number were the sons of friends of Robert’s father. Every provincial city in England at that time had such a table in one of the new, expensive coffee houses and country towns had their groups of wealthy young farmers, but big places like Liverpool had trainee businessmen who would one day run financial empires.

Amidst the huge amount of laughter generated by these chosen few, many a great business plan was hatched in the Kardomah. Robert was more inclined than the others to think very carefully before he spoke, because he was the one person at that table who had the financial clout actually to launch a new idea. He knew that a well-thought-out business proposition to his father would be backed, because Vernon Sangster had a firm belief in the inherent entrepreneurial talents of his only son and heir. Now that he had given up his youthful ambition to change his name by deed poll to Rocky Sangster and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, Robert was eager to make his mark and knew that he deserved to be taken seriously and, if necessary, supported. This was just as it had been between Vernon and his own father Edmund Sangster in the years immediately following the Great War.

Robert fitted into the business world of Liverpool surprisingly well. To meet him it was impossible to avoid the impression of a well-tailored young bon vivant, with several girl friends and eight powerful cylinders to maintain. But he worked hard and was watchful of the firm’s money, ever mindful of how to make more. He also cherished an unspoken, even to himself, ambition to start something of his own within the Vernons Organization just as his father had done so many times.

By the spring of 1960 Robert, now coming up to twenty-four, was planning to get married. He had met and spent almost a year with the very beautiful, tall, dark-haired, Manchester model Christine Street, whose career was on a major upswing with several television appearances to her credit and increasing work in London. Her parents owned the George Hotel in Penrith, a market town in Cumbria, fifteen miles south of the border town of Carlisle. Unsurprisingly Christine was not your average model. She was extremely well educated, having attended one of the best girls’ boarding schools in the north of England – Queen Ethelburga’s at Harrogate – and completed her studies at the Swiss finishing school Brillantmont in Lausanne. She was also extremely well mannered.

A grand society wedding was being planned at Penrith for the month of May, and the lunch club at the Kardomah was heavy with advice for the prospective bridegroom, particularly about the importance of the lunch club, even to a married man. It was into this slightly restless atmosphere that a stranger, named Nick Robinson, walked one morning in early March. He was new to the city and had been brought to the Kardomah by one of the regulars who worked in the giant packaging business built up by Nick’s grandfather, the eighty-year-old Sir Foster Robinson.

Nick’s background was not dissimilar to Robert’s. He had been head boy at his famous prep school, Hawtreys, on the edge of the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, and had completed his education at Harrow. He had entered the family business at their headquarters in Bristol, but upon his grandfather’s specific instructions had been sent to their Liverpool office for two years to learn the technique of the Sales Department. But where Robert was addicted to hard contact sports like boxing and rugby football, Nick’s game was horse racing. He had been brought up to it, as Robert had been to championship golf.

As they all sat in the Kardomah, the talk turned gradually to the sport which was so important to the newcomer. He told them of his grandfather’s sprawling Wicken Park Stud, in Buckinghamshire, where racing fillies became broodmares and spent almost all of the rest of their lives in foal. He told them of the great breeding stallions of the day, horses who thought nothing of covering forty mares in a season, like Palestine, Court Martial, Swaps, Nashua, Court Harwell, Alycidon and the new young Crepello who had beaten Ballymoss in the 1958 Derby. At that Robert remembered with a blinding flash: ‘That’s my man O’Brien.’ He seriously considered issuing the old ‘Greatest trainer of all time’ line across the young Mr Robinson, but decided against it. Instead he observed, more typically, that upon reflection he’d rather be a stallion than a broodmare.

For a table of young men so profoundly ignorant about the subject of racing thoroughbreds, Nick Robinson was getting a substantial amount of attention. They actually found it rather a fascination. But he really got them when he disclosed the deathless piece of information that the stable which trained for his grandfather thought he might win the Lincolnshire Handicap with his five-year-old bay gelding Chalk Stream. ‘And’, added Nick darkly, ‘it might just be possible to have a really nice touch, at about 20–1.’

Now he was really talking. This group understood money, perhaps above all else, and the chance of landing a sizeable chunk of it without working was, as they say in New York, hitting ’em right where they lived. Robert, already interested, was teetering on the verge of enthralment. ‘OK, Nick,’ he said. ‘Let me just get this straight. The Lincolnshire Handicap is a race, over what distance? One mile? Right. Now, how many are in it? About thirty? Christ, that’s rather a lot, isn’t it? Right. Now why do you think Chalk Stream might win?’

‘Well, for a start, he is a pretty good racehorse. He has some experience, plenty of speed without being a champion or anything, he’s been working extremely well for the past week or so, and above all he runs off a very light weight – under seven stone. We think he has a decent chance.’

‘What do you mean a light weight?’ said someone. ‘I thought they all carried the same weight, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair, would it?’

‘Now this is a tricky subject.’ said Nick doing his best to simplify it. ‘In big races they do all carry the same weight, but this is a handicap and all the horses are weighted differently. The Jockey Club handicapper is basically trying to get them all to finish in a line, a dead heat. So he piles weight on the good horses to slow them up and leaves the less good ones with just a little. The idea being that every horse has a fair chance.’

‘What kind of weight?’

‘Oh, just lead weight slipped into the saddle cloth.’

‘You mean, if the jockey weighs eight stone and the horse has to carry nine stone, they just put fourteen pounds of lead in the cloth?’

‘That’s it. Chuck in a couple of pounds for the saddle and there’ll be six pounds of lead either side of the horse’s flanks.’

‘Yes, but how do they know what weight to put in? How does the handicapper know that his weights will slow the good horse down enough for the slower ones to catch him?’

‘Well, that is a real speciality which can take almost a lifetime to master. But in the broadest possible terms, if, in a one-mile race, Horse A beats Horse B by three lengths at level weights, the handicapper will calculate it at two pounds a length, and he will ask Horse A to carry six pounds more than Horse B the next time they meet over a mile. In theory this should bring them across the line together. Of course it may not, because Horse A may have more in hand than everyone thought, and he may again win by three lengths, and the handicapper will give him six pounds more the next time. Eventually the handicapper will stop him from winning.’

‘So,’ said Robert, ‘if a horse keeps losing, his weight is likely to get a lot lighter?’

‘Precisely. And some trainers deliberately keep a horse losing – it’s called “working him down the handicap” – until he has a weight so light he could not possibly be beaten. I mean, for example, he’s carrying seven stone, when he should really be carrying nine stone …’

‘And that’s when they have a real bet?’ said Robert.

‘Correct.’

‘Christ! Is that what’s happening with Chalk Stream?’

‘I am not sure about that, but Arthur Budgett, his trainer, says he is “very nicely weighted” – and that’ll do for me. I’m backing him to win the Lincoln, 23 March.’

‘Where do they run the Lincoln?’

‘Lincoln. On a Wednesday. The race is always like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They try to go flat out from start to finish and if our horse wins … well, there’s no feeling of elation quite like it.’

‘Especially if your pockets are full of the bookmaker’s money,’ said Robert. ‘OK, Nick,’ he added, seeking some final assurance, ‘now just tell me very simply why you think Chalk Stream is actually going to win.’

‘Well, mainly because he damn nearly won it last year, dead-heated for second place. He has won three races, but last season he was very unlucky, placed second five times. Now I hear he is very well, working sharply in the morning and he has that low weight.’

Robert decided then and there that he would join the owner’s grandson and place a bet of £25 each way on the horse. He did so with another bookmaker, not Vernons Credit Betting, and they all waited, with almost daily conferences at the Kardomah, for the great day to come.

On Saturday morning, 19 March, they met at the coffee house early, prior to Robert driving his colleagues fast back out to the Wirral to play rugby that afternoon for Birkenhead Park. Nick was there first, poring over the Sporting Life, the specialist newspaper for the horse-racing industry. As far as the others were concerned it might have been printed in Latin. But Nick had known his way around that publication almost since birth, and now he had the page open at the Four-Day Acceptors, and he was studying precisely who the opposition would be, the booked jockeys and, above all, the weights.

‘The first thing to check’, he said, ‘is the top weight … damn it. Sovereign Path’s stood its ground.’

‘I suppose there is no possibility of you breaking into English?’ said Robert. ‘What d’you mean “Damn it. Sovereign Path’s stood its ground”?’

‘Well, Sovereign Path, who is a very tough grey horse, has already won six races, one of them by ten lengths. He nearly won a classic trial last season and he is the best horse in the Lincoln. I was rather hoping he would not be ready this early in the season. But he’s in and his jockey is booked. He’ll run. Still, he has a huge amount of weight – nine stone five pounds. No horse has carried that much to win the Lincoln this century. Anyway, I don’t really think he will be happy giving us thirty pounds.’

‘Could you tell me how you know all that stuff, about the biggest weight this century and everything?’ asked Robert.

‘Oh, those are just little facts that all horse-racing people know, or somehow get to know, round about the time of the Lincoln. I think the biggest weight was carried by Dorigen who won in 1933. I’m not sure of the exact amount, but it was less than nine-five.’

‘Well, it would take me about fifty years to learn it all,’ said Robert, and then, ‘Hey! What about this horse, Courts Appeal, he’s from the O’Brien stable in Ireland. Vincent O’Brien, best trainer in the world.’

Nick looked up, grinning. Robert, flushed with success, having detonated his one shining fact about racing, decided to elaborate, and he charged on. ‘Trained the runner-up in the Derby for the same owner, John McShain, a couple of years ago, as I remember. A very shrewd man.’

Nick replied, ‘Yes, and he trained Mr McShain’s mare Gladness to win the Gold Cup a couple of years ago, and they’ll probably make Courts Appeal favourite just because O’Brien is bringing him over from Ireland. But he won’t win, not with eight stone twelve pounds.’

At this stage Robert shuddered at the thought of his early view that this was a rather ‘uncomplicated sport’, since such a notion could clearly have been considered only by a lunatic. This was the most complicated sport he had ever known. It would, he thought, take a lifetime to comprehend it.

On the day of the race, all of them were strategically placed around the city with phone lines open to Robert’s credit office to hear the result. This was, of course, long before the days of commentaries being beamed into betting shops and call-in phone lines. And when they heard the result there was a terrible hush. Chalk Stream had finished nowhere. In fact he had finished twenty-ninth out of thirty-one. Understandably Nick Robinson was a bit sheepish and did not call Robert until he had ascertained that the gelding had been very hesitant at the start, had lost his place in the general mêlée for position, and never got into the race at all. Such things happen every day in racing, but Nick was nonetheless quite upset that his new friend had lost so heavily and told him they would have another chance. Chalk Stream would come good, of that he was sure.

What he did not know was that Robert Sangster did not give a tinker’s cuss about the result, or the £50. He could not remember having had such fun (at least, not since he had flattened Tiny Davies). For weeks now he had been personally involved in this major horse race. Somehow he had lived that Lincolnshire Handicap in his mind. It was almost as if he had been there at the racecourse, listening to the roar of the crowd as the field thundered into the last furling.

In his mind he could almost hear the vicarious pounding hooves, as Sam Hall’s lightly weighted chestnut gelding Mustavon, hard under the whip, fought a gripping battle with Jim Joel’s Major General to win by three parts of a length. It had been a terrific race. There was less than a length between the first three. The big weight had beaten Sovereign Path, as it also had beaten the O’Brien-trained favourite Courts Appeal. In a strange way Robert felt a part of all this, as if their studied calculations in the Kardomah had somehow influenced the result.

There was now only one thing Robert wanted in this life. He wanted to buy a racehorse. And the racehorse he wanted to buy was Chalk Stream.

Quite frankly, Nick was flabbergasted. But Robert did not habitually make jests about matters like £1000, the sum he was offering. Nick knew his grandfather had paid only 620 guineas for Chalk Stream’s dam, Sabie River, and he set about trying to get the horse for racing’s brand new devotee. There were many conferences between Sir Foster and his trainer Arthur Budgett, but after several weeks of negotiation they agreed to sell. Robert gave the son of the stallion Midas to Christine as a wedding present. Chalk Stream would henceforth be campaigned in the colours of Mrs Robert Sangster.

The first thing Robert needed was a trainer and he wanted one close to Chester so that he and Christine could visit the horse. He chose the thirty-nine-year-old Eric Cousins, a rather dashing ex-RAF pilot who had ridden fifty winners as an amateur over the jumps. He was a top-class horseman, a keen fox-hunter and had won the great long-distance handicap, the Ascot Stakes, at the Royal Meeting in 1957, just three years after taking out his licence to train. Better yet, he was developing a burgeoning reputation for his ability to place highly trained horses into exactly the right spot on the handicap. He had just moved his horses from Rangemore, near Burton-on-Trent, right into the heart of Cheshire, at Sandy Brow Stables, outside the country town of Tarporley, less than an hour’s drive from the Wirral.

Chalk Stream journeyed north from the historic Budgett stables of Whatcombe in Berkshire and met his new trainer. He was already fit and sharp, but Cousins set about trying to improve him. He ran him often and the horse showed courage running into the first four on four occasions and then winning, on one glorious afternoon at Haydock Park, eleven miles out of Liverpool. It was a little handicap named after the nearby village of Hermitage Green, but Chalk Stream won it by two lengths at 3–1. Robert and Christine and all of the entourage, including, of course, a massively relieved Nick Robinson, had the most wonderful celebration.

Then Cousins worked the magic again, sending Chalk Stream to victory at the old Manchester Racecourse in early October. It was quite a competitive little contest, its prize money sponsored by a local dog-food firm, and afterwards Eric Cousins announced that he would now prepare Chalk Stream for a shot at a big race, the Liverpool Autumn Cup, to be run on the flat at Aintree, almost opposite the Vernons Pools offices, on a Friday afternoon in the dying days of the flat race season, 4 November. The prize money was about £1000 to the winning owner.

Robert had rarely known such overpowering elation (not since Tiny hit the deck, anyway) as he experienced in the days leading up to that great North Country handicap. Just to have a chance. Just to be in there with a horse. To be at the local racecourse with all of his friends. What a day it was going to be.

The weights were announced. Chalk Stream was in with seven stone two pounds. ‘Is that good?’ asked Robert. ‘That’s very adequate,’ replied Cousins, which Robert took to mean: ‘We’re in with a real shout here.’ He proceeded to have what was the biggest bet of his life, £100 on the nose. Chalk Stream to win. ‘I’ll take 9–1.’ They all went in, some of them with ten bob, Nick with £25.

As the field of eleven went down to post on a cool, windy afternoon at Aintree, Robert and his men gathered in the owners’ little stand with a good view down the course. Eric Cousins had decided the horse was better over distances of beyond the mile of the Lincoln, and today’s test would be over an extended ten furlongs. The trainer mentioned to Robert before they went off that the start was the problem. Chalk Stream hated ‘jumping off’ and was apt to ‘dwell’ making up his mind whether to run. This split-second indecision had cost him his chance in the Lincoln, but today Eric Cousins fervently hoped he would break fast with the rest of the field.

But this time luck was against him. They came under starter’s orders in a good line, but as the tapes flew up, only ten horses rushed forward. Chalk Stream had done it again. Eric Cousins’s whispered oath was not heard by Mrs Sangster, but they all saw Chalk Stream hesitate and finally break several lengths behind the field. ‘Is he out of it?’ asked Robert. ‘Not yet,’ replied his trainer, but the field was racing towards the home turn with Chalk Stream very definitely last with a great deal of ground to make up. His rider, the five-pound-claiming apprentice Brian Lee, was sitting very still and then, halfway round the turn Chalk Stream began to improve. The commentator was calling out the leaders, ‘Royal Chief, Windy Edge, Laird of Montrose, Tompion, the favourite Chino improving …’

Chalk Stream was in the middle of the pack as they came off the turn. Lee switched him off the rails and the big gelding set off gamely down the outside. They hit the two-furlong pole. Chino struck the front, chased hard by Chalk Stream still with two lengths to find. The Liverpool crowd roared as Lee went to the whip and Chalk Stream quickened again. As they hit the furlong pole he burst clear of the field and then drew right away to win by three lengths from Tompion, with Chino the same distance back in third. Robert Edmund Sangster nearly died of excitement. Forget Tiny, this was the biggest moment of his life. To this day he says, ‘I will never forget the Liverpool Autumn Cup. Not if I live for a hundred years.’

Robert ordered the finest champagne for the celebration. Dinner went on into the small hours. ‘I wish’, he told his friends late that night, ‘that this day would never end.’ And in a sense, it never did. Robert Sangster had taken the very first steps towards becoming, one day, the most powerful owner and breeder of thoroughbred horses in the entire two-hundred-year modern history of the Sport of Kings.