The Sport of Queens Read online

  Douglas and I never owned any of the ponies we rode, so we came to an inevitable parting with all of them. At first I used to be very upset by this continual loss of my dearest friend, but after a while I learned not to lavish on them such a personal and emotional love. I changed, too, from mourning the going of a well-behaved and charming pony, to regretting the departure of a difficult one which still needed a lot of training. I hated to see my job disappearing when it was only half done, but needless to say, when a customer appeared the pony was sold, perfect or not.

  From Holyport Mr Smith took some of the best ponies up to his riding school in London, where Her Majesty the Queen and Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret learned to ride. It was a great source of pleasure to me then, and it still is, to reflect that I helped to train several of the ponies which the two Princesses rode when they were children.

  The first race I ever won was an apple-bobbing contest at a gymkhana when I was eight, but I regret to say it was not due to the dashing style of my ponymanship in getting to the buckets first. In bed the night before I had been thinking about the best way of getting my teeth into the hard apple floating about on top of the water in the bucket, and had come to a stern conclusion. There was really only one thing to be done.

  Next day, therefore, when I threw myself off the pony and on to my knees in front of the pail, I took a deep breath, opened my mouth over the apple, plunged it under my head to the bottom of the bucket, held it there hard, and bit into it. I won the race by minutes, but Mother was not suitably overjoyed at her son’s success. She seemed to be more concerned with wringing out the soaking wet collars of my shirt and coat, drying my dripping hair, and prophesying death from pneumonia at an early date.

  Her fears were more than ordinary maternal fussing, because I had almost died from pneumonia when I was six months old, and I had caught colds often and easily ever since. With Douglas already a semi-invalid, she was always afraid that her shrimp-sized younger son was hanging on to life by a thread, and the tough constitution which I later developed still surprises her.

  From gymkhanas I graduated to the show ring, and in the summer spent every week-day I could wangle from school showing the ponies from W. J. Smith’s yard. Round and round and round I went, enjoying myself enormously, while Father did his best at the ringside to sell the pony from under me.

  For about ten years Horse Shows were my summer life, and with all that practice and Father’s expert example always before me, I had every opportunity to learn how to show a horse or pony to the best advantage. In any case, when I had been at it for a year or two I began to win pony classes and riding classes, and to add my share to the collection of rosettes won by horses and ponies during their brief stay in the yard, and displayed in a glass case in the office. The only rosettes I could keep were those for riding classes; I kept them all in a drawer, for it seemed a little indecent to pin up a lot of round scarlet notices telling me I was ‘Best Boy Rider’.

  I met Her Majesty the Queen for the first time when I was twelve. It was at Richmond Horse Show, where I had won the riding class and the hunting crop which was its prize. The whip was carefully presented to me by a small girl with an intent expression. I bowed to Princess Elizabeth and thanked her, and she smiled at me; I used the crop for years, and I have it still.

  I was very unemotional about the results of pony classes. I won if the pony was good enough and I lost if it was not, and as far as I can remember, without pride in the first case and without jealousy in the second. I suppose this was an echo of Father’s professional attitude to showing, for he left me in no doubt that it was always the pony which was being shown, and not me.

  Even when I won a riding class he usually greeted me, as I rode out of the ring with the spatter of handclaps warming my heart, with a remark designed to lower any high opinions I might be forming about myself.

  ‘I wouldn’t have put you first with your head sticking forward like that,’ he would say, or, ‘What do you think your heels are for boy? Use ’em next time.’ After a while he would just blow down his nose and say ‘Hmph,’ a noise indicating in general that I could have done better. Twenty years later, Jack Anthony, winner three times of the Grand National and one of the most famous of all steeplechase jockeys, reminded me of Father in my showing days whenever I had won a race on a horse he had trained. ‘You’ll learn one day, boy, if you go on trying,’ he used to say.

  Much though I enjoyed the shows I always looked forward to the end of them, to the crisp winter mornings and the stirring wail of the hunting horn. Hunting was the love of my life.

  On school days there were two hazards to be crossed before I could hope to set off behind the hounds. First, I had to persuade Mother that hunting was far more healthy for me than sitting in a stuffy classroom catching other boys’ colds, and then to convince her that I was not already running a high temperature. Like many children’s my temperature often rose for no obvious reason, and if Mother saw the slightest flush on my cheeks the thermometer was produced. Such was my success that the school inspector was a regular visitor to the house, and my private consumption of aspirin was phenomenal.

  Douglas’s ruthless sense of humour sent me out terrified to my very first day’s hunting, shortly after my seventh birthday. I had incautiously asked him what ‘blooding’ meant, as I had heard Father asking the huntsman to blood me on the morrow.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing much,’ he said, with awful glee. ‘They just cut open the fox’s belly and shove your head in.’

  The vision of this horror troubled my sleep and ruined the day I had longed for so much, but when the ghastly moment came the huntsman, of course, only smeared his bloody finger gently on my cheek, and gave me the fox’s brush.

  From then on I thought of little else but the thrills of the chase: my dreams were filled with hedges rushing past me and foxes of super-vulpine speed and cunning streaking ahead of me, and my waking hours were divided between memories of the last hunt and plans for the next one. As I drooped in school over the arithmetic I thought was useless to me, I was thinking, ‘I expect they are drawing Ashridgewood at this very moment’: and as I marched out into the wintry air after lunch to kick a football round a field, I was thinking, ‘Perhaps they have just killed at Haines Hill, and they’ll be hacking home soon.’ As a result, my marks for arithmetic were almost minus, and I cannot to this day kick a ball straight.

  Christmas Day suddenly lost its supreme importance in my childish calendar, for after the delights of opening parcels, and the cheerful carol-singing service in church, I was free to attend to the more serious business of Christmas, the business of polishing my saddle and boots until they shone like glass, ready for the year’s biggest meet on Boxing Day.

  The fascination which hunting held for me had nothing to do with the actual killing of the fox, although that is the only satisfactory ending to a chase: it lay instead in the glorious freedom of making my way across country as fast as I could and as boldly as I dared, in trying on my pony to follow a good horse across the fields and roads I grew to know stick by stone, and in making it a point of honour never to go through a gate if it could be avoided.

  Except for the year my grandfather died the alternating pattern of showing and hunting went on unchanged for me until the war interrupted it. My grandmother was left alone in her big house when grandfather died, for all her children were married and had homes and children of their own, and even Douglas had recently outgrown his ill-health and had returned to us, so I was sent down to be company for her. I lived with her for nearly a year, and my uncles and aunts and cousins came in turn to visit her, but they were quiet and sad days for us all. The house seemed like a shell of walls listening to the bustle and noise of the past, and it was not only the withdrawal of grandfather’s dominant personality that was grieving us, but also the awareness that for our family an era had come to an end.

  The farm was to be sold. Grandfather had left it to his children, but none of his three sons could buy out
his brothers and sisters, and none of them really wanted to take on Coedcanlas, for farming was not a booming industry in the early 1930s.

  To my disgust my education went on, and I walked the two miles each day to the little two-roomed school house in Lawrenny village,

  ‘with satchel and shining morning face

  creeping, like snail, unwillingly to school.’

  I would never have believed that I would be so eager to go to school that I would slip off early without anyone noticing me, and run for half a mile with many glances over my shoulder to make sure no one was following me: and if you suppose that the alternative if I stayed at home was extremely unpleasant, you are quite right. There was one job on the farm which was usually done by a boy, and I happened to the only one there. It was to clear the corn dust away from under the threshing machine, a job I hated. Even school was a kinder fate, but alas, on the days I reached that haven unobserved, someone was sent to haul me out of the classroom and back to my post. The threshing went on for about a week, and after that my views of school returned to normal.

  On the faithful old donkey I made my last melancholy journeys round the well loved fields, along the estuary, and through the woods, with the desperate feeling of a child that the foundations of my life were slipping away, and that nothing would ever be the same again.

  Once I was home, however, and back to my ponies, I rapidly shed my sadness and eagerly took up the old routine of hunting, showing, and avoiding going to school.

  When I was twelve I missed a whole summer term. After Easter Mother sent me to the dentist for my holiday checkup, and he said I needed a brace for my teeth. The two incisors which had helped me so admirably in the apple-bobbing race were now dominating my face: they were splendid, large, and white, but I could hardly shut my mouth over them. I went one Saturday morning and was measured for the brace which would draw them in a little.

  In the afternoon, in the covered riding school, I rode a nervous highly bred show pony called Tulip round and round, in an attempt to quieten and calm her. There came a moment when I wanted her to go one way and she wanted to go another, and as temperamental animals sometimes do when they are crossed, she stood straight up on her hind legs in fury. Unfortunately she overbalanced and fell over backwards on top of me. The pommel of the saddle landed on my face.

  I cannot remember much of what happened next; I awoke some time later in hospital, very sore and quite unable to speak. My two big teeth would need a brace no longer, for they had been retrieved by the surgeon from somewhere behind my nose. My upper jaw, palate, and nose were broken in several places, and I was altogether a depressing sight. Everything mended quickly, however, and I was still young enough for the large gap in front of my mouth to close slowly up as my other teeth moved round into the space.

  My smashed face was an excellent reason for a prolonged absence from school, although I was back in the show ring as soon as my skin had healed, and before I could talk properly again. The doctors earned my heartfelt thanks by telling Mother that I was not fit enough to return to Maidenhead Grammar School, and that I should be sent in the autumn to a smaller quieter place. There was no inspector to check on my attendance at the private school Mother chose, so I went less than ever.

  My accident on Tulip led to great adventures, for when he saw that I was going to be able to go to all the summer shows without classroom interruption, the great Bertram Mills asked Father to let me ride his show ponies for him. Father agreed, and I was ecstatic.

  Bertram Mills took a great delight in showing his many horses and ponies, and in seeing them win prizes for jumping, and all the summer, while his circus with its highly trained liberty horses and its lolloping rosinbacks was on its provincial tour, he devoted himself to his hobby horses at the shows. As far as I knew, he never showed a circus pony, or trained a show pony for the circus, but always kept his two interests apart.

  He was as familiar a figure at shows as at the circus, a cheerful man with a shining bald head, the former undertaker who conjured up romance and glitter for millions of children. He sent me all over England to shows with his ponies, and I usually travelled in the railway horse-box with them, sleeping on a bunk beside them on long journeys, and looking after them on the way.

  One time, that first summer, Bertram Mills sent me to jump a pony at Southport Show in Lancashire. We were there for two or three days, just too long for my meagre pocket money to withstand the tug of the nearby fun-fair, and then we went back overnight to Bertram Mills’ home at Chalfont St Giles. I spent the morning there jumping the other ponies, then Mr Mills said, ‘Thank you, Dick. You’d better be off home now.’

  Home. Father had driven me over, but was not coming to take me back, and my bus fare had vanished on the swings and roundabouts at Southport. Blushing, I explained my financial crisis to Mr Mills, and asked him to lend me half a crown.

  ‘I never carry any change,’ he said, ‘so I haven’t half a crown.’ He brought a piece of white paper out of his trouser pocket. ‘You’d better take this. I don’t want it back.’ It was a crisp new five pound note, the first I had ever owned.

  I climbed on to the bus clutching my treasure tightly, very sorry I should so soon have to part with it; but when I offered it to the conductor for my half fare to Slough, he could not change it. I travelled to Slough free. On the next bus, and the next, the same thing happened, and I went all the way home without paying, just because I had too much money.

  Every Christmas ‘Mr Mills gave me and my family tickets for his circus, and every January I spent fruitless hours trying to stand up on a pony’s narrow rump while it cantered round in a circle. The pony unfortunately had not been to the circus, and took most unkindly to its new role. By February each year I had decided after all not to be a mounted acrobat in spangled tights bursting through a paper hoop, and had renounced my ambitions to drive two horses with one foot on the back of each.

  My first appearance in hunter classes at horse shows was a case of life following closely in the well-worn traditions of Boys’ Paper fiction.

  Father was planning to show a horse at the Islington Royal Agricultural Show in the lightweight hunter class. On the eve of the show Father was suddenly stricken with sciatica and could hardly walk. This was a serious blow to the owner of Ballymonis, the horse which Father was due to ride, for conformation alone will not win a hunter class. The horse has to be presented in the best way to the judges so that they notice him and see how he moves, and it takes practice to do this. Father’s skill in the show ring was outstanding, so that finding a substitute for him at such short notice was no simple matter.

  ‘Dick can ride him,’ said Father, when all other suggestions had been turned down.

  At the show, the news that I was to ride Ballymonis was received with some consternation in hunter class circles. Mr Bernard Selby, the horse’s owner, looked at me sideways.

  ‘He’s very small,’ he said to Father in a doubtful voice. It was indeed true, for although I was then fourteen I still weighed only five stone.

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ said a friend of Father’s. ‘The horse is wild. It’ll run away with him.’

  Ballymonis had a habit of taking charge and ignoring his rider’s wishes, and had once at Richmond jumped straight out of the ring, but I had ridden him at home, and with youthful confidence had no doubt that all would be well.

  So round I went on my full-sized and high-spirited hunter, and Ballymonis, a sweet and beautiful horse, won his class. Mr Selby was so pleased that he gave me a new suit and an overcoat. Father’s sciatica got better, but he let me help him often in hunter classes after that; and I grew in experience.

  I had hoped to leave school on the day the law allowed, the day after my fourteenth birthday, but Mother insisted that I was still too young, and would not let me leave for more than another year. Of course she was right, but at the time I did not think so.

  2

  Rings and Wings

  WHILE many little boys were drivi
ng the Scottish Express round their nurseries, my rocking horse and I were going over Becher’s and Valentine’s, the Chair and the Canal Turn. The names of the fences at Liverpool were a chant, an invocation, a beckoning magic, and the spell they laid on me in my infancy has never been broken. Now that I know them so very well, and have a hundred memories of their hazards and glories in every sort of weather, their names have an even stronger evocative power, for I remember them with a more intense pleasure than ever I imagined them.

  If it is possible to inherit so vague a quality as a wish to be a jockey, I did so. My father was a jockey, and his father also.

  My grandfather, Willie Francis, and his half-brother Robert Harries, were two of the best amateur riders of their generation, and from 1885 to about 1905 they won every possible point-to-point and amateur ‘chase in the then flourishing centre of south-west Wales. Robert Harries was the Master of the Carmarthenshire Hounds, and he and Willie Francis filled in the gaps between races by hunting. Any pursuit which did not involve riding was, in their opinion, a waste of time.

  Willie Francis was crippled in early middle age by arthritis, and had to give up riding and farming. From then on he left to his wife most of the burden of directing their three grown sons and young daughter into good careers. Of all their children, Father was the only one who insisted that horses were to be his life, and his mother, because he pestered her to let him and because she did not realise that such a job would prevent him ever riding as an amateur, agreed that he should join the racing stable of Col Lort Phillips at Lawrenny. There, to the stable that had recently sent Kirkland to win the Grand National, he went when he was sixteen, and Col Lort Phillips soon took out a licence for him to ride in races.