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Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings

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2019
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Christopher Soames was finally elected in May 1968, by which time he was indeed Britain’s ambassador to France, and a Peer of the Realm, as Andrew Devonshire had forecast on that most awful of nights a year previously. His election went some way towards stabilizing relations with the diplomatic world, but it was always overshadowed by his blackballing. The outlook of many members, not least the Duke of Norfolk, had been changed irreconcilably. For them it was essential to recruit new blood into the Club, to make contact with new younger racehorse owners and breeders, who had experience beyond that of the land and the military. But despite some powerful voices in the Jockey Club pushing for a more enlightened and forward-looking approach to the new decade of the 1970s, there remained many reactionaries in the world’s oldest sporting club. They refused to elect to membership Mr David Robinson, England’s biggest racehorse owner, presumably because he made his vast fortune in renting television sets rather than fields of turnips or corn to tenant farmers. As a result Robinson turned his back on racing to fund the most beautiful new college at Cambridge University and dispense charitable largess around the country totalling some £26 million.

However, an era had passed. No longer could the membership be founded on quasi-medieval families, whose main qualifications had been derived through the execution of noblesse oblige: fighting wars, acquiring money and land from the peasant classes and displaying a sycophantic devotion to various dull-witted monarchs. Times were changing. This was the twentieth century. Had been for some time now. It was time to wake up, to breathe new life into the two-hundred-year-old organization which rules, runs and organizes horse-racing in Great Britain, and sets a standard of excellence and integrity for the Sport of Kings which is unmatched anywhere in the world.

Over the centuries the Jockey Club established itself firstly as the supreme rulers of Newmarket and all of the heathland gallops which surround it, virtually all of which the Club now owns. Then, with inordinate speed, before 1800, it became the sole ruler of all racing in Great Britain. In 1967 its traditions were without parallel, its authority unquestioned, its power in racing absolute over all men. Each member wears a little silver badge to admit him to every racecourse in the country, almost all of them with a private room for members. Royal Ascot is run principally for, and essentially by, the Jockey Club. Members have total priority in every aspect of a day at the races.

The Jockey Club still enjoys considerable royal patronage. The Queen and the Queen Mother are its two Patrons; Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne are honorary members, and in addition there are the two dukes, Devonshire and Sutherland. One way and another, it is an organization to which any owner of any racehorse might longingly aspire. Today it has more than one hundred and twenty members, still drawn from a frightfully narrow social stratum. With any one of the Queen’s subjects having only a 467,000 to 1 chance of ever being elected, the odds of acceptance are depressingly daunting for the socially ambitious, notwithstanding the 1967 outlawing of the hated blackball. Its membership is still heavily loaded with the military: high-ranking officers combined with haughtily born captains and majors who spent time in Her Majesty’s Service but never threatened to reduce the importance of Field Marshal Lord Montgomery in the roll of British Army strategists. There is certainly no record of a former private, lance corporal or even sergeant ever being elected.

It has always been difficult to assess the precise criteria required for membership, principally because the members have historically behaved in such an arbitrary way. Collectively they have demonstrated a whim of iron. Until the early 1970s there might be said to have been ten ‘Rules’ which had served as general electoral guidelines. They were never, of course, formalized, but they were unfailingly observed:

1 The Club does not like trade, nor the people involved in it.

2 The Club does not like ‘other ranks’ from any branch of the Armed Services.

3 The Club does not like professional sportsmen, or trainers.

4 The Club does not like jockeys.

5 The Club does not like journalists.

6 The Club does not like bookmakers.

7 The Club does not like commercial horsetrading.

8 The Club does not like ostentation – film stars, play actors, entertainers of any type.

9 The Club does not like foreigners.

10 The Club does not like persons of low rank, not Honoured by Her Gracious Majesty.

These ‘Rules’ for membership, unwritten, unspoken, but rigid, have stood the test of time. The centuries-old contempt for all jockeys was encouraged historically by Admiral Rous himself, a man who was proud of the fact that he ‘never shared his dinner table with one’. From the ranks of the race-riders, only one, the late Sir Gordon Richards, was ever made a member. No active trainer has ever been elected to membership. Among journalists, the three exceptions were men whose interest in racing and breeding was equal to their chosen trade. On the other hand, anyone even remotely connected with the betting industry was unmentionable. Owners and breeders showing too keen an interest in the monetary value of horseflesh, with inclinations to deal in bloodstock on a totally commercial level, were unacceptable – might result in a conflict of interest in the future. Show business people were also banned. Period.

However, politicians, undesirable though they may be, did not fall into any banned category. The outrageous breach of etiquette on the night of 3 May 1967, with the blackballing of the Rt. Hon. Christopher Soames, changed everything.

As the great men of the Jockey Club had stared in horror at that black ball in the wrong slot, a Rolls Royce had been moving swiftly away from Newmarket Heath, through the dark English countryside up towards the wooded borders of the ancient county of Cheshire. In the passenger seat sat the smiling figure of the thoughtful northern trainer Eric Cousins.

The driver of the car wore a similar smile, having just had a ‘rather nice little each-way touch’ in the 2000 Guineas, on a horse called Missile which had finished fast at 40–1, right behind Royal Palace and Taj Dewan. His trainer was the somewhat devilish little Irishman from Tipperary, Vincent O’Brien, whom the driver had admired since his schooldays. He had never of course met him, but one day he would become his most trusted friend.

The man at the wheel would, also, one day in the not-too-distant future, sail into the Jockey Club as a full member, without any questions. He would do so in total defiance of ‘Rules’ 1), 2), and 6). He would take ‘Rule’ 7) and single-handedly strangle it. And as for the section of ‘Rule’ 8) which deals with ostentation, well, he would somewhat unwittingly reduce that to rubble. As for the old creeds of Admiral Rous about gambling fortunes on bloodstock, the man driving the Rolls Royce would one day turn the entire thoroughbred breeding world into nothing short of an international commodity market. He would habitually risk gigantic fortunes, on the running of a racehorse. He would back his judgment on a scale never hitherto even dreamed about, by anyone. He would ultimately make Harry the Horse look like Winnie the Pooh.

His name was Robert Edmund Sangster.

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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.
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