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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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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.
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