Lester: The Official Biography Read online

  Sensationalism, he knows, sells papers. An illnatured headline rivets attention as pats on the back do not. "You can't blame the Press," he says. "They have to think up a story on days when nothing's happened. They have to fill up that space every day. It must be hard." All the same, he says, many of the pressmen have invented a lot of things he never said or did. "Some of them should be writing `True Confessions'."

  For instance, one of them wrote a story about a robbery at Lester's home in which £3000 was stolen from under the floorboards. This story, often repeated since, was pure fiction. No robbery of any kind took place.

  Among the journalists he approved of were Peter O'Sullevan, John Oaksey and Peter Scott, and for those he would make an effort. Also at one time, he collaborated with Brough Scott in a "Lester Piggott" column in London's Evening Standard.

  During his many appearances in London before the Stewards, what he mostly thought of was how to escape from the Jockey Club premises without being intercepted by the Press. On the day of the 1962 Bob Ward suspension, he found himself hemmed in on the pavement by determined scribblers, at which point Peter O'Sullevan drove up (timing it to the second), opened his car door and invited Lester within.

  Lester left the rest of the Fourth Estate swallowing impotent fury while Peter O'Sullevan, driving away with the prize, offered a hundred pounds from the Daily Express for an exclusive interview. Lester took the money, Peter got his story, and each, from the perspective of years, looks back to the incident with amusement.

  Only once did Lester actually sue anybody for libel, and that was a French magazine which accused him of having links with the Mafia. He won his case and was paid damages, along with Charles Engelhard and Charles St. George who had also been mentioned.

  "The Press could say what they liked about my riding," he says, "but that was different."

  The French Press are regulated far less strictly than the British, French newspapers make up scurrilous stories as a matter of course, and only provably outrageous damaging lies get taken to court.

  In England, because Lester has so seldom refuted anything written, the misconceptions abound, and constant repetition of the same mistakes has turned them into widely held beliefs. Most of the population of Great Britain, for instance, believes that Lester seldom smiles. The legend of "old stone-face" has been reinforced by every scowling photograph any editor could dig up.

  The fact actually is that Lester often smiles and often laughs, and there are hundreds of smiling photographs on record. He smiles, however, from pleasure, and never to placate. He has felt no need, ever, to placate the Press, which is perhaps why they don't often print him smiling.

  He pointed one day, while we were taping for this book, to a Press photograph of himself being led in on one of his Derby winners.

  "I was smiling there," he said, positively.

  I looked at the grave pictured face. "That isn't exactly a beam, Lester," I said.

  "Well ... I was smiling before that, and I was smiling after that. There, I was smiling inside." There's a general misconception, partly because of the straight-faced photographs, that for Lester being a jockey was a grim humorless business. All wrong. He passionately loved it. "I couldn't have done it if I hadn't. You've got to have fun if you want to win."

  Fun is a constant word in his vocabulary. "It wasn't much fun" has always been a reason for his not repeating any experience. It wasn't much fun, in the end, making endlessly repeated journeys to Ireland, his chief reason for leaving Vincent O'Brien.

  "It's very important to want to go where you're going," Lester says. "If you don't, it's time to find a reason for not going."

  Fun, for Lester, means enjoyment, not giggles.

  His desire and capacity for enjoyment has seldom been mentioned, undoubtedly because so much of it goes on inside his head, unexpressed. He thought it would have been ridiculous, after he'd won races, to jig about and laugh a lot. "Everyone would have thought I was an idiot." Perhaps more importantly, he would have seemed an idiot to himself.

  There's an uneasy misconception that Lester doesn't care for anyone except himself, which is perhaps of all the misconceptions the most hurtful. His quiet kindnesses to all sorts of people get little publicity, but the recipients do sometimes talk.

  Martin Blackshaw, for instance, the jump jockey, was once hurt and in hospital in France after a fall. Lester found the number and telephoned, asking if he were all right, asking if he needed any money or any other help. Martin Blackshaw was surprised and grateful enough to tell the Press.

  A fan of Lester's, an elderly lady called Florrie Ramsey, once sent him a box of chocolates when he himself was injured long ago. Lester called in to see her when he was racing at York, near her home, and continued to do so sporadically for many years.

  Every fan letter gets answered, a considerable time-consumer. Many of the fans have been writing for years and are to Lester old friends. His handwriting is small, neat, legible, and slopes forward. He never minds signing autographs at race meetings, his only complaint being about children. "They come up to you and push their books under your nose, and I wouldn't mind that except that they will stand on your toes." (His toes, in paper-thin racing boots, were unprotected and highly vulnerable!) "I like children, and I like to see them at the races. It's good for racing that they come."

  Lester has paid bills for people in trouble and often visited injured colleagues in hospital, and every time, if a journalist has got to hear of it, such an act has been greeted with vast surprise, whereas the truth is that Lester isn't and never has been the chunk of flint he's repeatedly been reported to be.

  Certainly, mindful of his mother's teaching, he's not a soft touch, but where he likes, and where he loves, he is constantly generous. He built a comfortable one-storey house for Keith and Iris about two hundred yards from his own in Newmarket, and when he's at home sees them at least once daily, taking good care of them in their eighties.

  He and Susan provide their elder daughter Maureen with horses for eventing, and he overtly delights in her company. To Tracy, their younger, he gives with an open hand and can't suppress a smile when he looks at her. One of the things that most exasperates his daughters is hearing their father called mean.

  I understand when people complain that Lester is inconsistent in his behaviour towards them, because he is; but it should be borne in mind that a) if he doesn't answer, he hasn't heard the question; b) if the answer is a grunt, he is concentrating on something else and doesn't want to be distracted; and c) he never talks for the sake of talking. Silence is natural to him, not a sign of boredom.

  He occasionally gets depressed. ("Everyone gets depressed, don't they?") His depressions have nothing to do with actual events, nothing to do with reverses, disappointments or injury. Low periods come for no identifiable reason, but usually when he has too little to do. They may last for two or three days, during which he may be quieter than ever.

  At scattered times he may relax, be great company, expansive, full of jokes. There's no point in wondering if it's the silent or the talkative fellow that's the true Lester.

  They both are. His outer mood may swing from one to the other, but it doesn't follow that his inner feelings change at all. He doesn't see why anyone should be disconcerted, and it doesn't bother him if they are.

  When he's grown tired of anything he's doing, he still tends to walk away from it, just as he did from the children his mother asked to tea. When he's interested, his energy and stamina are endless. When he wants something, he is tenacious in pursuit.

  He is not self-analytical. He turns his perceptions outward, and is acutely, unselfconsciously observant. He still sees what goes on around him with the sharp uncluttered objective freshness of childhood, and he doesn't interpret or bend what he sees to match some preconceived theory.

  He is obliging and easy-going most of the time (which some pressmen will find amazing), and the things which irritate him are what irritate most people, like having to wait about. />
  Central to his character is his pleasure in speed. He often says that if he hadn't been a jockey he would have been a racing driver, and for years he drove as if British roads were race-tracks. Two six-month suspensions for speeding and one for three months were the result. A miracle in those days, his friends said, for him to hold his driving and riding licences simultaneously.

  Lester's views of other people are remarkably tolerant. "Too tolerant," Susan says, emphatically.

  In all the years we worked on this book, Lester never said anything nasty about anybody. His most stringent criticism took the form of "He's mad, you know", and once only he (justifiably) described someone in four anatomical letters. The only alterations he asked me to make to what I'd written, apart from errors of fact, were deletions to two separate paragraphs in which I described how people had done him positive harm when he had in no way harmed them.

  Of the first, he said, "It's a bit strong. Couldn't you cut that a bit?"

  "But Lester," I protested, "it's true."

  "Yes, I know," he said, "but he's still around.

  That won't do him any good. He's got a living to make you know."

  On the second occasion, the man in question was dead. "Yes," Lester said, "but his son isn't. I don't want to hurt him."

  I watered down the paragraphs.

  Vincent O'Brien says, "Lester could afford to say nasty things about people, and probably with good reason. Such a good trait, that he doesn't."

  Even-tempered and normally in a good humour, Lester never lets his brief furies against reverses and injustices linger on as grudges and resentments. "I never stay angry long. I soon forget it. You can't do anything about what's happened. Being angry does no good." He likes peace in his mind, in fact, so that he can think of something constructive, like how to win tomorrow.

  It's all part of his preference for damped-down emotion that he likes cats and dislikes dogs. Cats come and go in his house, tolerated, gently ignored. He says the first of them was acquired long ago to please the children, but they are like him, walking quietly and independently about their business, self-sufficiently arranging their own lives. Dogs, which demand much, are alien.

  Lester's views on the human race are simple. "I don't care whether they're black, white or yellow, everybody's the same. I've travelled so much, and colour doesn't matter. I don't dislike people. They don't bother me. I get along with people pretty well. It's stupid not to.

  "I got on well with nearly all the other jockeys, especially Gordon, but most of all with Scobie Breasley. I like him. We rode together every day for probably twenty years. I was closer to him than to anyone else. He was a good jockey, very tough. I think he was the best of all the Australian jockeys I've seen, including George Moore, who I think was next best."

  Pressed to say who he didn't like, Lester came up with not a name but a category. "I don't like people who can't stop talking. I go the other way when I see them coming."

  His closest friends have tended to be older than himself, among them several of the owners he rode for, people of power and substance, enjoying racing as a pastime but basically of serious mind. Some of these friendships, like that with Charles St.

  George, have lasted thirty years. Others, like that with Charles Engelhard, the great gusty tycoon addicted to Coca-Cola, ended only in death.

  Early among these friendships came that with Sir Victor Sassoon. Although usually in a wheelchair as a result of injuring his back in a flying accident, Sir Victor would come to Britain each summer from his home in the Bahamas and often walk into the winner's enclosure with the help of sticks. He was a knowledgeable breeder who owned four Derby winners, Hard Ridden, Pinza, Crepello and St. Paddy.

  In the year of Lester and Susan's marriage, he invited them to stay with him in Nassau, and he was, they affirm, the kindest and most generous of men. His death in 1961 was to them, as to the Murless family and racing in general, a dreadful blow.

  When he had owned horses in China (before the revolution) and Hong Kong and India, Sir Victor had raced them under the pseudonym of "Mr. Eves". He called both his stud farm and his house in Nassau "Eves". When Lester and Susan built their yard in Newmarket, they called it "Eve Lodge" as a tribute to his memory.

  Lady Sassoon is Maureen's godmother: Maureen's full name is Maureen Iris Eve.

  When Lester was hurt in Paris, Lady Sassoon was there to drive Susan to the hospital and generally look after her. The affections have run strong and deep. Mrs. Hue Williams, then Mrs. Vera Lilley, owner of Lester's 1961 St. Leger winner, Aurelius, is another good friend, as was Prince Aly Khan.

  Newmarket is a town where people spin separately in their own little orbits, not mixing a great deal socially. Everyone knows everyone, everyone meets at the races, and that's where it rests. Among Lester's closest contemporary local friends are probably Henry and Julie (Murless) Cecil and Trish and Geoffrey Wragg, the trainer of Teenoso. Julie Cecil, who was a child when Lester first went to ride for her father, says she always knew when he was trying to get out of riding one of the stable's horses. "He used to sit on the window seat in the sitting-room of Warren Place and start swinging his legs."

  Geoffrey Wragg, Lester says, was at one time more interested in putting radio sets together than in training horses. Trish Wragg clips news stories about Lester and makes up his cuttings books. Trish and Susan are close friends.

  Lester himself doesn't spend much time thinking about people. He thinks most about horses but also a fair amount about world affairs. He reads the local newspapers when he's in Australia, Singapore, America ... wherever they're printed in English.

  He's thoughtful and well-informed. In England, he reads the Sporting Life and The Daily Telegraph.

  I have known Lester on and off for a very long time. I am fifteen years and five days older than he is, so that from age and also from geographyNewmarket is a hundred miles from where I live in Oxfordshire-we have never been contemporary neighbourly companions. Our fives, on the other hand, have touched at many and varied points, and we have grown to know each other well.

  It was when we rode against each other as jump jockeys that I first became aware that the brash aggressive character of the newspapers didn't square with the polite unassuming reality in the changing-room. He wasn't surly, he wasn't uncooperative; he was thoroughly sensible in outlook and manner. He would race against anyone without quarter, but that was fine, so did we all. For several years when Lester and I rode regularly for the same trainers, Frank and Ken Cundell (he on their Flat horses, I on their jumpers), we rode out together occasionally at morning exercise, and I gave him legs-up onto Zucchero in parade rings while Ken Cundell was waiting at the starting gates.

  I wrote a bit about Lester during the sixteen years I worked for the Sunday Express, but not a great deal as my column was chiefly about jumping.

  When my wife Mary and I owned (and she managed) an air charter business ferrying owners, trainers and jockeys to race meetings, Lester was one of our most frequent passengers. Others included Jimmy Lindley, Joe Mercer and Pat Eddery, but it was Lester, eventually, who with Susan became directors of the company, and remained so until we sold the business in late 1975.

  The charter flights were always made by professional commercial pilots, but my wife once flew Lester herself-just the two of them-on a private flight from Oxford airport to Shoreham in Sussex. When our insurance advisors got to hear of it, they flung up their hands in horror. "Don't do it!" they cried, "Lester Piggott is the second hottest property to the Queen".

  The second hottest property thought it a great joke.

  It was early in 1973, while he was a director of the air business, and while I was still writing for the Sunday Express but had already published eleven novels, that Lester first asked me to write this book. A contract was drawn up to last for ten years, which seemed ages at the time, but we were well into the second ten-year contract before he retired.

  During that time, we worked a good deal together, taping convers
ations in various places, in his home and mine, and in London, America and Penang.

  In Penang because, in 1980, Mary and I with Lester and Susan and Maureen and Tracy spent three weeks' holiday together in Penang and Singapore. Also in Penang were Susan's brother Robert Armstrong and his wife Mary Ann; and the whole lot of us passed a warm and agreeable time going on beach picnics by speedboat, fishing, swimming, dining and lazing about eating (gorgeous) ice cream. The tapes Lester and I made there under the palm trees are loud with birdsong.

  He wanted in this book to have someone say for him what he has been unable to say for himself; to write the truth, even if some who read it prefer still to cling to the misconceptions. He wanted someone to write it who understood his way of life, who'd suffered some of the same disappointments, who'd felt the same urge to pursue winners at whatever physical cost, who'd had the same sort of moments of total fulfilment.