Magical Grand National still casts a spell
The Grand National isn’t what it was. Sad, of course, but then what is? On the one hand it’s bigger. According to the BBC website it’s estimated – guessed – that today’s race will be watched by 600 million people. That’s an impressive figure, testament, you may say, to the race’s enduring popularity. On the other hand, the tapes will fly up and commentators cry “they’re off” at a quarter past five; that is testament to the power of television. It used to start a couple of hours earlier.
I go back to before there was any TV coverage, when we crouched round the family wireless to listen to Peter O’Sullevan’s commentary, which was more informative than TV screen and commentary are now. You could rely on him to let you know when the horse that carried your shilling-stake fell or unseated its jockey. (I’ve always liked that word “unseated”, a nice way to describe a fall at 30 miles an hour amidst crashing hooves.)
There was, I remember, a year in the early 50s when the commentary was dreadful. Aintree’s owner, the redoubtable Mrs Topham, once –I seem to remember, or like to think I remember – a high-kicking chorus girl, had fallen out with the BBC and barred them, declaring that she would provide her own commentary, recruit her own commentators. Where she found them I don’t know, scooped them up at a street corner perhaps. They were splendidly clueless.
The Grand National, like the Cup Final, was bigger in those days because there was less competition from other sports. This applied to Flat racing as well; the Derby was a bigger – national – occasion than it is now. National Hunt racing was a poor relation of the Flat; even Cheltenham was only for the enthusiasts. There was not only less competition; there were fewer meetings. One year, admittedly probably a bad winter, the champion jockey – I think Bryan Marshall – rode only 68 winners. Fred Winter’s record of 121 winners stood for a good many years. This was well before the days of motorways, helicopters and private planes which allowed the great A P McCoy to ride a couple of hundred winners and more year after year.
It really was National Hunt racing then inasmuch as a good many runners in the National would have graduated from the hunting-field and then point-to-points; fewer would have had a flat-racing pedigree. Of course, this has always been part of the Romance of the National: a big event that might be won by a farmer who trained a couple of horses as a hobby. In, I think, 1951, when only three horses finished, and one of them, Derrinstown, had been remounted, the winner, a mare called Nickel Coin, came in that category. I don’t think she lived in a pigsty, but the stable she shared with only a couple of other horses, was next door to one. She was trained on stout and eggs.
Horses fall and are sometimes killed, and, conscious of changing public opinion, fences have been adjusted to make them less challenging, less dangerous. There are probably fewer fallers and more horses usually finish, but there are still deaths. It’s possible that the marginally less challenging fences encourage horses to take them faster, more carelessly. I don’t know. The race can never be made completely safe, and it’s easy to understand why some people think it cruel.
But horses are natural racers, natural competitors. Anyone who has worked with them knows that. The old proverb – you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink – applies, re-worked, to jumping steeplechase fences. We can agree that it’s right to make adjustments that will make the course a bit safer, but if the National became just another steeplechase, a bit longer than most, it’s difficult to suppose its attraction wouldn’t fade. As it is, over the last quarter-century it has survived worse than criticism from Animal Rights fanatics – even an IRA bomb scare, which required the course to be cleared and the race postponed till the Sunday – or was it even Monday?
Everyone who has followed the National has favourite memories, or at least vivid ones, like the collapse of the Queen Mother’s Devon Loch a hundred or so yards from what looked a sure win, a moment as compelling and mystifying as anything conjured up by his jockey Dick Francis in his subsequent career as a bestselling novelist. For many of course the greatest of all Aintree heroes was Red Rum who won the race three times and whose statue now stands by the paddock. It is one of the charms of the National, and National Hunt racing in general, that horses have longer careers, long enough to become old friends, and aren’t quickly transferred to breeding, or bedroom, duties.
One of my National favourites was Freddie, a small horse that came from the hunting-field in the Scottish Borders. He never won the National, finishing second twice, but elsewhere he was one of the very few to beat the champion Arkle – the Federer of Steeplechasing – not admittedly at level weights. All the same, an achievement, just as it would be to take a set off Federer, even if he was handicapped to start every game 15-love down.
I haven’t had a bet on the National for a couple of years or so now, but I think I must do so this weekend. We have two horses from the Borders that are in with a chance. (Well, everybody is really; you never know what will happen in the National).
One is called “seeyouatmidnight” and he is trained in Berwickshire by Sandy Thomson who used to play on the wing for Kelso when they had a great rugby team back in the Eighties. The horse’ s name seems appropriate because he has just squeezed into the field, at almost the last moment, this vile winter having come close to preventing him from getting the necessary qualifying race. The other, Captain Redbeard, is trained even nearer home, at Clarilawmoor a few miles from Selkirk. The Captain’s trainer Stuart Coltherd is a farmer and former Royal Burgh Standard Bearer in the Selkirk Common Riding. I remember him as a young man asking to borrow my wife’s horse. Now – how time flies – his 19-year-old son, Sam, is the jockey. I wonder if it’s fair to burden him with my money.