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

As the 1974 season wore on, a mood of resignation was beginning to set in. John Magnier and Vincent were deeply unimpressed with the current crop of horses running in Europe, with the possible exception of Dahlia, the brilliant French filly who was superior to all other horses of both sexes, but was unlikely to make much of a stallion. John Magnier also liked the tenaciously tough Ascot Gold Cup winner Sagaro, who he thought one day would sire some good national hunt horses. Basically, he thought the entire answer to the breeding of fast horses over the next two decades rested very firmly in America. The problem was, how to get his hands on them.

Robert Sangster recalls with total clarity the moment Magnier solved the puzzle. He and John were having a quiet drink at Goodwood, right after a tough-looking American-bred colt by Vaguely Noble named Ace of Aces, owned by Nelson Bunker Hunt, had humbled the best milers in England to win the Sussex Stakes.

‘Look at that,’ said Magnier. ‘You could have bought him as a yearling for $30,000. Now he’ll probably be syndicated for upwards of $2 million to go back to Kentucky. I’m wondering if that might not be the answer: to raid the sales in the United States for yearlings, which cost one-twentieth of the price of stallions and hope to get it right once every four or five times. That way we’d own the stallions before they retired – and no one could get them away from us.’

He may have said something like it before, and he certainly refined the raw intellect of the thought many times again, but Robert Sangster says that was the moment, the moment when both he and John Magnier knew that at last they had a strategy to take the world of thoroughbred breeding by its neck and shake loose the key of gold. Robert recalls vividly the warm glow he felt as he pondered John’s words, the warm glow every businessman knows when he has been presented with a winning idea.

‘I poured myself a generous glass of Roederer Cristal,’ says Robert, ‘and I inhaled it as if it was draft lager, and I kept on saying over and over, “I like it, John, I like it, I really like it.”’

‘Baby stallions, Robert,’ said Magnier. ‘That’s what we’re after. The trick is to be absolutely professional about it. And remember, professionalism is about the total elimination of mistakes. It has nothing to do with money.’

Robert did venture the opinion that it would not be much fun if none of them could run. ‘We’ll have good times, and we’ll have a few bad times,’ replied John memorably. ‘But the good times will finance the bad. The trick is really very simple. We gut the catalogues from Keeneland and Saratoga as if they were fresh haddock. We’ll fillet out only those yearlings whose pedigrees are those of a stallion. There will be good racehorses out there in which we have no interest. We will not even bother to look at yearlings which do not have an unmistakable stallions’ pedigree. With Vincent, we have not only the finest classic trainer in the world, we also have the finest selector of a yearling, the man who bought Nijinsky among others. We also have the best possible advisors, Irishmen of the blood, who will spot faults, help Vincent, rally round to help us get it done. And when we go in to buy, we buy, never mind Yoshida, Scully or anyone else.’

Robert felt all of the old sense of adventure and gamble welling inside him. This was going to be nearly as good as Chalk Stream winning the Liverpool Autumn Handicap. He returned to Liverpool, to the office and to his breeding books. All through the winter of 1974–75 he studied the fates of the ten highest-priced yearlings of the past ten years, one hundred in all. He studied their racing careers and their stud values, and he reviewed some truly spectacular disasters, yearlings which had cost fortunes and could not run a yard. There were many which were not quite good enough but did not lose money, but there were also some spectacular successes.

His chart was huge and the permutations many. But however often Robert returned to the drawing board, there was one single conclusion which could not be diminished: the only man who could have made real money from buying such yearlings would have been the man who had bought them all.

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The Raiders from Tipperary (#ulink_1a762ae8-1a31-5094-9cc6-5ad4d722fefe)

The fields around it stand soft, silent and green in their innocence. They are swept by the sodden westerly winds of the Golden Vale of Tipperary, but not by the cares and the monstrous decisions made each year upon these ancient grasslands set to the south of St Patrick’s Rock. This is Ballydoyle, the training grounds of Michael Vincent O’Brien, upon whose slender shoulders the grandiose plans of John Magnier and Robert Sangster would ultimately rest. Here in this private six-hundred-acre domain, five miles down the road from the historic town of Cashel, he has laid down perhaps the finest racing gallops in the world: some flat, some uphill, some dead straight like Newmarket, some curved like Epsom. But they are all perfectly cut grass tracks, white-railed as neatly as Ascot or Belmont Park, each stretch designed for the happiness and comfort of young horses, but ultimately designed to reveal them in all of their power and all of their vulnerability. Down towards the bottom end of the grounds stands one lonely ruin of a greystone Norman castle, a sentinel of another age and, in a way, a terrible reminder of the tolerance this land has for suffering.

This is not so much a training centre as a kingdom. And Vincent O’Brien is its ruler. On the mornings when the horses work, ridden steadily through their easy paces by men with timeless Irish names like Gallagher, Murphy, Rossiter and Doyle, the great trainer watches from his private little grandstand, alert to every nuance of the galloping racehorse. The twitching of ears which may signify worry, the slashing of a tail which may foretell temper or discomfort, the slight swerve to the left or right – ‘Is he still feeling that tendon?’ – the sound of their breath upon the morning air – ‘Is the chestnut horse clear in his wind?’ – and ‘Why did the big bay horse drop behind? Is he still too weak? Will he want another six weeks on the “easy list”?’

No conductor of any symphony orchestra requires more sensitivity, more powers of observation, more finely tuned instincts, more passionate desires for perfection than the great classic racehorse trainer. If Maestro O’Brien has a critic, I feel certain even that critic would nonetheless grant him one enduring and undisputed accolade: ‘Vincent misses nothing.’

He is a Cork man by birth, originally from a little village named Churchtown, forty miles south-west of Cashel, beyond the Galtee mountains, close to the town of Mallow. Vincent himself, like all Irish boys from that corner of the country, knew that a short distance to the south were the vast waters of Cork Harbour, which flow for almost thirteen miles from the Atlantic to the City docks. Cobh, they call it, the Harbour of Tears, the last sight a million Irish people ever had of their homeland, when they fled not only the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century, but also England’s shockingly cruel evictions of the people from their tiny tenant farms. Almost every family treasured the memory of relatives who were forced to leave.

Dan O’Brien himself, with his eight children, was very much a member of the Irish farming gentry. He had two hundred acres, deep in this horseman’s country. The world’s first steeplechase, which finished at the church steeple of Doneraile, was conducted close to the O’Brien land. Dan was greatly respected and in the Directory of Munster, published in 1893, in the section marked ‘Churchtown (Clergy and Gentry)’, there are seven people listed. One of them is D. O’Brien of Clashganniff House, Vincent’s first home. His father kept several mares on his land, and owned and raced horses locally. He regularly bought and sold prospective ‘chasers and hunters’.

All of the children were well educated. Vincent himself went away to college, and one of his sisters was sent to school in Paris. Upon Dan’s death, however, in 1943, the family suffered their first experience of a shortage of money. Farming in Ireland in the late 1920s and 1930s had been very, very bad. England, as ever, was at the root of their problems, trying to impose tax on these rural farmers. Eamon de Valera, the Brooklyn-born Premier, who had fought in the streets with a machine-gun during the Easter Rising of 1916, not altogether surprisingly refused to pay it. England hit back by refusing to buy Irish produce and there were years of great hardship for the farmers of Cork, and Limerick, and Kerry and Tipperary.

Vincent O’Brien took over the care of the horses, but there was little money when, the following year, he took out a training licence of his own. From these difficult beginnings he emerged from obscurity in the 1940s, when he was famous only locally for the magic he could work on horses, to international acclaim. By 1974 he was, indisputably, the best trainer of a jumping horse ever, with four Derby winners to his credit, three of them in the previous seven years – a record which may never be bettered and which carries with it the general accolade among most experts that Vincent is the finest horse trainer this world has ever seen. On the flat, over fences, sprints, marathons, hurdle races, colts or fillies. The beautifully tailored, slightly built Irishman, with his fast eyes, gentle speech and mystical touch with all horses, has proved beyond any doubt the master of the Sport of Kings in all of its facets.

Those who know him best swear he can see into the soul of a young horse. John Magnier says Vincent can look at a yearling and in his mind he can see the horse as it will be two years from now, preparing for a three-year-old classic race. His meticulous mind, his obsession with every tiny detail, has driven generations of assistant trainers mad. When he is preparing two or three top horses for championship races he rarely, if ever, speaks to his assistants. Everything is written down in clear, concise memorandums, lest anyone should forget anything. He once said, ‘It is quite difficult to remember everything yourself. To allow someone else to forget something you have already remembered would be rather silly.’

Like all of his family, Vincent is both a devout Irishman and a devout Roman Catholic, attending Mass each week. He has always resisted leaving Tipperary and training horses in England or even America, with their much bigger prize money and their markets for racehorses. His unyielding faith in the devotion and the horsemanship of his Irish stable staff have too strong a hold for that. But modern air transport, enabling him to take horses safely and quickly to the races in England, France and even America, also played a part in his decision to remain close to his beginnings. Above all, he cherished the quality of the land, and indeed of life, in this paradise for countrymen who like to hunt, or shoot, or fish the lovely salmon rivers.

But in Tipperary and in Waterford, Kilkenny and Cork, Kerry and Limerick, memories are long and the folklores are deeply ingrained. All across the sometimes sad, but heartbreakingly beautiful southern counties of southern Ireland there are ruins of great houses, which stand grey-stone frozen in the abyss of a seven-hundred-year-old quarrel with Ireland’s rich and imperious neighbours east across the St George’s Channel. Indeed, six years after the Easter Rising of 1916, Corkmen and Kerrymen were fighting with fearsome courage, shoulder to shoulder, in guerrilla warfare against England’s detested Black and Tans. Families like the O’Briens cannot escape their traditions, and indeed their very roots in this kingdom of saints and scholars. Their love for this land draws them together as children not of a greater God but certainly of J. P. Donleavy’s ‘Almighty Gaelic God, for whom this land alone is worthy of his blessings’.

‘I could never leave here,’ Vincent once told me back in 1975 when I was preparing an art book of classic racehorses. He was gazing west at the time, and the sun was crimson as it placed long shadows over the tranquil gallops of Ballydoyle. He stood quietly for a few moments, perhaps recalling the pounding hooves of the flying Nijinsky, or Sir Ivor, or perhaps Roberto. And he stared down at the old Norman tower, one of Ireland’s many reminders of conquest. And then I remember him smiling as he turned away and began to walk back towards the house. But he stopped once more, and he turned again towards the distant farmlands from which, down the years, so many had fled. And he was not smiling any more. And he just stood there, a five-foot eight-inch giant among Ireland’s patriots and said quietly, ‘Never.’

Empire building is not a basic ingredient of the Irish character. As a race they have usually been too busy trying to fight their way out from under England’s own historic ambitions to bother with any such delusions of their own. Men like Vincent O’Brien and John Magnier were the exceptions. In this land, the land of W. B. Yeats, Eugene O’Neill, Sean O’Casey, and the Dublin-born writers Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan, the pen has usually proved at least as mighty as the sword. All the same, Arthur Wellesley of Maynooth, later the first Duke of Wellington, scored a few points for the warrior classes. The empire of Vincent O’Brien and John Magnier began in 1973 when the master of Ballydoyle bought fifty per cent of the nearby Coolmore Stud Farm, owned at the time by the ex-Battle of Britain pilot and ace international bloodstock agent Tim Vigors. Tim did not particularly wish to manage a major, and growing, stud farm and he readily agreed to Vincent’s suggestion that they bring in John Magnier to run it. Within a few months there was an even bigger merger being prepared. Vincent, Tim and John asked Robert Sangster to buy into the partnership and, when he did so, they proceeded to combine Castle Hyde and Coolmore into the strongest thoroughbred-breeding complex in Ireland.

At the time they stood stallions like the milers Home Guard, Thatch, Gala Performance and King Emperor, the sprinters Green God and Deep Diver, and the winner of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, Rheingold. They had also acquired, for a sum not far off £700,000, the miler Sun Prince, who had won at Royal Ascot at two, three and four, but who had been defeated roundly in his last race in 1973 (the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot). This had caused many long faces in the Irish bar, particularly those of Robert and John who had signed the deal before the race. Sun Prince, though about seven pounds off top class, was nonetheless outstandingly good-looking and John Magnier thought he would make a sire, given time. Altogether these stallions were a useful, commercial bunch, but they were not world-class, and they were definitely not precisely what the triumvirate of O’Brien, Magnier and Sangster had in mind for the foreseeable future.

They agreed that their opening attack would be on the Keeneland Select Sale in the July of 1975. Each of them had his priorities laid out. Vincent himself, the man who trained them, who watched each day of every horse’s development, had some fairly stringent views on stallions which he wanted to be followed. He knew that Nijinsky had sounded a trumpet call for his father, Northern Dancer, the tiny battling Canadian champion who had won the Kentucky Derby by a neck in a record time of two minutes flat in 1964. He believed that the tigerish little Northern Dancer, who was not much bigger than a pony, held the key to world breeding. As a racehorse the Dancer had never been out of the first three in eighteen starts. He had won fourteen of them, including seven wins and two seconds as a two-year-old. These were, in the opinion of O’Brien, the battle honours of a top stallion, because they displayed outstanding early speed at a very young age and they signalled the heart of a lion, which he had already bequeathed to his son Nijinsky. They also suggested soundness, on the basis that weak-legged horses do not run eighteen races in fairly quick succession, far less remain in the firing line for honours in every one of those contests. A testament to the horse’s quality was that in Northern Dancer’s first six crops of foals, born between 1966 and 1971, nineteen were major stakes winners. In addition to Nijinsky there were: One For All, True North, Franfreluche, Alma North, Minsky (trained by Vincent), Northfields, Lyphard, and Northern Gem.

Vincent was certain of where he stood. ‘We must buy the Northern Dancers,’ he told John Magnier and Robert. ‘We must buy them at all costs. And the same goes for yearlings by Nijinsky. I am telling you. We must have them. I am very certain of that.’

He was fairly certain of several other stallions as well. He had a very keen eye for any yearling by the lightning-fast American Two- Year-Old Champion of 1970, Hoist the Flag, a son of Tom Rolfe and thus a grandson of the immortal, unbeaten Italian stallion Ribot. He also wished to look extremely carefully at any progeny of the great American Horse of the Year of 1958, Round Table, son of the Irish stayer Princequillo, who was born about ten miles from Ballydoyle in County Tipperary, and became Champion Sire of North America. The other stallion for whom Vincent carried a constant torch was the ex-Argentinian Champion, Forli, an American-based grandson of the English Derby-winner Hyperion. This stallion was producing a lot of winners, several for Vincent, including Home Guard, Thatch and Lisa-dell. No one could select the Forlis like Vincent O’Brien, and it was deeply ironic that the fastest, toughest racehorse in the world during the next four seasons, the American, Forego, should actually be running for a different trainer. However, Forego ran for his breeder Mrs Martha Gerry in the USA. He had never come up at auction. But if he had ever done so, he would have ended up at Ballydoyle. No doubt about that. Vincent would never have missed this big, dark, rather stern son of Forli.

Vincent O’Brien’s one luxury when travelling across the world to buy horses is shared with many of his fellow countrymen. Vincent is apt to get homesick when not surrounded very closely by other Irishmen. In America he liked to be accompanied by his younger brother Phonsie O’Brien, who was formerly a fearless amateur rider over the fences – he survived a terrible blunder at the last fence in the 1951 Grand National, but held Royal Tan together to finish second to Nickel Coin. Phonsie, a superb judge of any racehorse or hunter, was himself a very useful trainer of steeplechasers. He also enjoys a towering reputation in Ireland as a wit, a raconteur, a fisherman and a Chinese cook. He is as close to Vincent as any brother has ever been to another, and the years have not mellowed the great trainer’s appreciation of Phonsie’s ever-green and always-renewable stories. The younger O’Brien’s gift for words does in fact enjoy a rather wider audience than that locally based in County Tipperary and its borders, not least in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.

President George Bush only has to hear the name ‘Phonsie’ and that great Texan grin of his seems to light up his whole face. They go fishing together almost every year, mostly with Nicholas Brady, Secretary to the United States Treasury. Their stamping ground is the warm shallow waters of the Florida Keys, which stretch in a nearly two-hundred-mile-long archipelago, swerving south-west from the entrance of Biscayne Bay all the way to Key West. The friendship began back in the late 1950s when Nick Brady’s father, James Cox Brady, first had horses in training with Vincent – one of them, Long Look, won the Oaks in 1964.

Jimmy Brady, who was Chairman of the New York Racing Association, naturally spent endless hours with Vincent discussing racing and breeding, on his fairly frequent visits to Tipperary. His son Nicholas however was not quite so devoted to the subject of horseracing and Phonsie would take him off to the quiet waters of the Blackwater, or the River Suir, to cast for trout, or perhaps, in season, for salmon. The two men both loved to fish and as the years passed Nick Brady became something approaching an artist among the pools and runs of the Tipperary, Cork and Kilkenny rivers. Sometimes he and Phonsie would go along to the River Nore, near Thomastown, and fish the reach above the great McCalmont estate of Mount Juliet. The fastest racehorse who ever lived, The Tetrarch, is buried here. And the river which flows swiftly past the hallowed ground is paradise for the salmon fisherman.

In turn Nick Brady invited Phonsie to America to fish with one of his oldest friends, George Bush, off the coast of Florida. And there they have gathered almost every year ever since. Their quarry is the fabled grey ghost of the flats, the chromium-coloured eagle-eyed bonefish, which forages in mere inches of water, and goes absolutely berserk upon taking the fly. Also he can swim like The Tetrarch could run. Fishermen, prowling the dappled, sunlit shallows silently in their flat-bottomed boats, are apt to go almost into a trance at the sight of the forked tail of a big bonefish. He is wary, frightened and warrior-brave, all at the same time. The chase is conducted slowly, in utter silence, but George Bush, Nick Brady and Phonsie O’Brien swear there is nothing quite like it when the bonefish hits. The line snaps taut, the fish takes off, racing across the flats in a lunatic trail of bubbles. The two American statesmen and the horseman from Ireland stand riveted by the musical scream of the reel, as stark and as lonely as a Beale Street clarinet.

Relaxing over a drink in the evening President Bush loves the stories of Ireland. Phonsie wishes he was not President because sometimes the pressures of the world’s highest office means they must miss their magical fishing trip south together. But they usually find a way and the old friendships stay solid. Vincent O’Brien and President Bush probably share many admirable characteristics, as leaders in every walk of life often do, but one of them is a love of the company of Phonsie O’Brien.

Phonsie would travel to Keeneland as Vincent’s trusted confidant. His word would not be law – if he liked a horse but Vincent liked it less, the horse may not be purchased. Generally speaking, if Phonsie disliked a horse, they all disliked it. Vincent would also take the Curragh veterinarian Bob Griffin, who was probably the best racehorse doctor in Ireland. His speciality was lameness: any faults with tendons, joints, hooves, pasterns, shoulder muscles or the big sweeps of muscle in the quarters. Vincent’s association with Bob went back twenty-five years. He hated to buy any horse, even in Ireland, without Bob Griffin, but he would not buy a single one in Keeneland without him.

By the spring of 1975, John Magnier was in residence in Coolmore, slowly preparing a breeding empire in anticipation of the influx of American-bred horses they all hoped would establish themselves under Vincent’s patient care. John Magnier had grown up a lot since Robert had first met him four years previously. Now, as master of the new complex, he assumed a new authority, with his ever-present cigars jutting jauntily from his mouth. Tall, handsome and rather rakish-looking with an unmistakable touch of the ‘black Irish’ about him (the jet-black hair and the dark eyes of the Spanish seamen who were reputed to have swum ashore and settled after the defeat of the Armada by Drake in 1588), John was now always to be seen with cigar, tailored tweed jacket, and a somewhat sartorial cravat at his throat – like a Spanish diplomat on vacation. The mystique of his dashing appearance was only marginally affected by his occasional side-of-the-mouth confidentialities: ‘I’m telling you, there’s a hell of a fast young “chaser” going in the t’ree o’clock at Limerick tomorrow. He’ll be 20–1, but don’t let that put you off.’ This appearance of being a high-born sophisticate, perhaps more at home on the Champs Elysees or Bond Street, is an inadvertent deception. John Magnier is really a well-born Irish countryman, and he loves jumping horses, coursing greyhounds, golf and, of course, gambling on all of them. But you’d always somehow know he’d never be entirely lost on the Champs Elysees.

By now John was engaged to Susan, one of the three daughters of Vincent O’Brien. No father could have been very much more delighted at the choice his daughter had made. Not only was John a devout Catholic like all of the O’Briens, Vincent believed he was easily the cleverest and most far-sighted stallion master in Europe. Aided by Robert’s influx of capital, he was masterminding a programme of improvements for Coolmore, the like of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in Ireland. Stallion boxes were being renovated, new drainage systems dug into the paddocks, great beech hedges planted, paths laid, fences renewed, new staff taken on. The telephone system was completely renewed. Coolmore was on the march before they had even bought the new horses.

Robert Sangster spent the spring trying hard to get his life in order, which was a major challenge. He had reaped a pocketful of cash when they had syndicated Cellini after an adequate but not sensational three-year-old season. But, sadly, his marriage to Christine was in deep trouble. In the past three years Robert had spent an increasing number of months flying around the world in search of broodmares. He now had about one hundred of them, many in residence at Swettenham, but some in Ireland with his new partners. He also had a small racehorse-breeding operation in France, and one in Australia, where he had judged land and horses to be cheap given the sudden upsurge in the world market. Robert had rather a grand plan that somehow a northern-hemisphere breeding business based in Ireland could be married with a southern hemisphere project based in Australia, perhaps using stallions to work two different seasons. Well, it might have been fine for the stallions, but it was not right for Robert, because on one of his several trips to Sydney, he had fallen somewhat recklessly in love with the wife of one of Australia’s senior political figures, Andrew Peacock, spokesman for foreign affairs in the Liberal Party and regarded as a possible future Prime Minister. She was Susan Peacock, blonde, vivacious mother of three, with a love of expensive champagne and fast horses which rivalled and occasionally surpassed his own. In fairness, in the spring of 1975 they had not yet embarked upon their passionate and all-consuming affair. But they were about to, before the year was out. Robert knew it. Susan knew it. And Christine would very soon suspect it.

Meanwhile the technicalities of Robert’s massive inheritance were all but driving him mad. He had been given his first third of Vernons at the age of thirty in 1966, and had a liability of £15 million to pay the government’s Capital Gains Tax. In 1971 when Robert was thirty-five, he had received the second thirty-three per cent, and again he had had to borrow – this time £2 million to pay the Capital Gains Tax. When he was forty in 1975 he was scheduled to receive the rest – in Vernons stock – but again the tax was crippling, and the government would only accept cash, not stock, in payment. It was all but impossible to raise the money, and Robert suggested a public issue to raise some cash. Vernon, even at seventy-five, in the autumn of his life, was still an intensely private man with a strong independent streak, and he hated the idea of ‘going public’. But Robert’s position was clearly terrible: either he would have to sell a substantial share of Vernons in order to pay the government, or he would have to go public prior to receiving the last tranche of his stock. Vernon, with immense reluctance, agreed to the latter course.

He and Robert went to the London merchant bank Hill Samuel and, after weeks of negotiation, it was agreed that the public issue should be made, but that Vernons wide interests in bloodstock ought not to be included. Kenneth Keith, the towering ex-Guards officer and chief executive of the bank, made one formal condition: a financial director had to be appointed. Vernons, anxious for a senior money-manager to strengthen their board, chose Brian Wallis. Hill Samuel set the date for the Vernons flotation, but it was a politically turbulent year. The miners were on strike. Edward Heath’s Government was beleaguered, attacked on all sides by the Labour Opposition leader Harold Wilson – a Yorkshire coal miner’s son whom many in the nation thought could solve at least some of the problems. Heath, in some desperation, decided to go to the country and called a General Election for the day before the Vernons share issue. With half the British work force on a three-day week, due to chronic shortages of coal and thus electricity, Hill Samuel, concerned about the possibility of a Labour victory, advised Robert and Vernon to cancel the issue.

Hill Samuel were right. Harold Wilson swept to power and, as is predictable upon the arrival of a left-wing government in England, the London Stock Market collapsed. Robert was back to Square One. He had a year to find a solution. And he tried hard. He held meetings with Charles Clore, the chairman of Sears Holdings, which owned the big bookmakers William Hill, and suggested a merger but it could not be made to work. He held meetings with the senior executives of the Hanson Trust, Lord Hanson and Gordon White, but Robert felt they were ‘too tough’. He met with Laddie Lucas of the Greyhound Racing Association, and with the Rank Organisation, and with the other big bookmakers Corals. Robert made most progress with Ladbrokes, whose chairman Cyril Stein agreed a deal worth £14 million, which would have made Robert the biggest shareholder in the company, but Vernon and his managing director George Kennerly vetoed the deal.

That was the end of that. Robert, faced once more with crippling taxes on the third tranche of Vernons shares, could borrow no more. Nor could he sell. In addition, the new Labour Government would want ninety-eight per cent of his income from his capital. Robert Sangster had no option but to leave England, and to go into ‘tax exile’. He was not alone. The mass exodus of well-heeled, talented, industrious Englishmen did not in any way rival the tragic diaspora which had taken place to the south of Vincent O’Brien’s Churchtown family farm in the 1850s, but one principle was the same. Most of them had to go for financial reasons, inflicted upon them by an English government. To this day Robert says thoughtfully, ‘I was not a voluntary tax exile. I was always perfectly prepared to pay my share of taxes. But the government wanted all of my income, and then a bit more. I could not stay. They drove me out. Anyone in my position would have had no choice but to do the same.’

Robert and Christine moved out of Swettenham. They rented a house, from the fabulously wealthy Swiss racehorse owner-breeder Countess Margit Batthyany, in Marbella on the southern coast of Spain. It was a terribly upsetting wrench for the entire family. That year, 1975, Vernon Sangster was elected Captain of Royal Liverpool and Robert’s mother Peggy was Ladies’ Captain at the same time. It was an unprecedented situation in the historic old golf club, and rightly a source of immense pride to them both. The three-time Open Champion Henry Cotton came up to play a few rounds with his old friend Vernon. Greatly though the old gentleman enjoyed it, he was fighting a bitter inner sadness. It nearly broke his heart that he could not play the Hoylake links, just once, as Captain, with his only son.

Despite all of his troubles, Robert pressed on as Syndicate Chief of the O’Brien-Magnier-Sangster partnership. As an established member of the Jockey Club, and a considerably rich one at that, almost all doors were open to him and he recruited accordingly. Charles St George, the immensely wealthy Lloyds insurance broker in whose colours Cellini had run, quickly joined the team.

The next man in was the son of one of England’s richest financiers Sir Charles Clore, young Alan Clore, whose inheritance at a very early age had been seven figures, and well over halfway to eight – pounds, that is, not dollars. Alan was extremely keen to break into the top end of the horseracing market and shared the general opinion that Vincent O’Brien was the man to take anyone there who possessed a big enough bank account. Sir Charles himself was an enthusiastic racing man and had owned a winner of the Oaks, Valoris, in 1966 – trained by O’Brien. Alan, who did not have the absolute addiction of his father for big business, was contemplating a career in bloodstock as an owner-breeder which he envisaged being very nearly full-time. But for this he knew he must obtain ownership in world-class stallions. He saw Robert and the team as his way forward.

For his next move towards serious money, Robert chose the aristocracy, casting his sights north to a great Scottish castle set in the Highlands to the west of Inverness, where the ice-cold waters of the Beauly river flow gently into the Moray Firth. Here stands Beaufort Castle, home of the Barons Lovat, a warlike, ruling Scottish family since the fifteenth century. The present lord, and Chief of the Clan Fraser, had served with tremendous gallantry as a commando in the Second World War. He fought both in Dieppe and at the Normandy landings, where he was wounded, and won a Military Cross for his bravery and leadership. His wife Rosamund was the only daughter of Major Sir ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, who stood trial for the ‘White Mischief’ murder of the Earl of Erroll in Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’ in 1941. It was however their son, Simon Fraser, aged thirty-five, the romantically titled Master of Lovat, who was of interest to Robert Sangster. Simon loved horse-racing and, like Charles St George, and Charles and Alan Clore, and indeed Robert, was an owner of Vincent O’Brien’s. But it fell to Robert, as the head and chief salesman of the syndicate, to form this diverse group into a fighting unit, prepared to go and do battle at the Keeneland Sales, and to stay in the bidding ring until they came out victorious.

The next member of the syndicate was the steel tycoon Jack Mulcahy, who had left Ireland at the age of twenty and made his fortune in the United States. Jack’s brother Dan was the cashier at the Munster and Leinster Bank in Cork, where Vincent had opened his first racing account back in 1943. Having met through Dan, Jack and Vincent became devoted friends over the years – the O’Brien family called him ‘Uncle Jack’. He owned the great miler and stallion Thatch and would be a stalwart of the syndicate, ambitious with his money, and firm in his belief that if a horse could run, Vincent could make it run for its life. And that if Vincent could not make it run, then no one could.

The final member of the syndicate was Mr Walter Haefner, the Swiss businessman who had bought the lovely Moyglare Stud in Maynooth a few years previously, and nursed similar quiet but strong ambitions to those of Robert himself – to buy, and one day to breed, champion racehorses.

Between them the partners were prepared to put up something in the order of $3 million to buy yearlings. The arrangements were fairly informal but, in the broadest terms, Vincent would buy fifteen per cent and be given a five per cent share in each horse as a bonus for being the best trainer in the world. John Magnier would then provide fifteen per cent, the shareholders would put up thirty per cent, and Robert would stand up for forty per cent, which may have required of him an investment of $1.2 million, or £800,000. They were not devoted to spending all of this money. But when the chips fell, and they entered the ring to buy, this was their upper limit.

Since the average price of a yearling at Keeneland in 1974 had been a little over $50,000, and horses selling for more than $300,000 were extremely rare, there was likely to be a major impact by the men who came to be known, affectionately, and with immense good humour, as ‘The Brethren’. Each of them closely followed the premise that Robert had discovered on his chart: the only man who can make money out of buying the best and most expensive yearlings is, in the end, the man who buys them all.

Robert trusted John Magnier and he trusted Vincent, but in the midst of all the activity he felt that he, like them, should have a personal friend and advisor standing with him when decisions of great moment were made. His choice was for a man he had known for only a couple of years but who always impressed him with his uncanny instinct for a good horse. He was Mr Patrick Hogan, of County Limerick, one of the greatest riders to hounds in the whole of Ireland, a horse coper, buyer of foals, and bloodstock agent of legendary dimensions – a man some people still swear is the best judge of a potential young steeplechaser who ever lived. In his day he was a brilliant amateur rider, setting a record in 1942 by kicking home thirty-two winners from only ninety-eight rides. He rode for the great Irish trainers, O’Brien, Tom Dreaper and Paddy Sleator. Once at Punchestown Racecourse he rode five winners and a second from six rides. To this day people still say his nickname, PP, stands for ‘Punchestown Pat’.

PP Hogan spent years as the fieldmaster for the great Irish Foxhunt, the Black and Tans. He also hunted for years over the steep banks and ditches of the Limerick country close to his home in the tiny village of Bruff, fifteen miles due west of Tipperary town, to the south-east of the Shannon estuary. This was the foxhunt of the great landowner the Earl of Harrington, and his son Viscount Petersham, each of whom considered PP without peer in pursuit of a fox, and beyond belief in terms of courage and horsemanship. A small wiry little man with the smile and charm of a leprechaun, PP could beguile any man alive with his stories of hunting and racing deep in the green heart of southern Ireland. He could also sell you anything, and after a few glasses of stout you would be well advised to check your wallet. You might just have purchased a share in a seventeen-hand ‘chaser’ when you were thinking it was all a bit of a joke.