Lester: The Official Biography Read online

  Lester and Noel Murless together won forty-five races in 1957, headed of course by the Two Thousand Guineas, the Derby and the Oaks. Seven of those races were won for the Queen, twenty for Sir Victor Sassoon. Of the 122 winners Lester rode that year, over half started favourite. Carrozza at 100-8 was the longest price of all.

  It was also the year of Lester's first Ascot Gold Cup, won on Zarathustra, trained not by Noel Murless but by Cecil Boyd Rochfort. Cecil Boyd Rochfort had two runners in the race, the other being Atlas, for the Queen. He gave his stable jockey, Harry Carr, the choice of mounts and, as every jockey has done too often for comfort, Harry Carr chose the wrong one. Zarathustra's longdistance record in earlier years had been excellent, but as a six-year-old he had not so far won. Against that, Atlas had won last time out. The wrong choice was easy to make. Lester rode Zarathustra that time only, taking the lead more than a furlong out and comfortably staying ahead to win by one and a half lengths. Zarathustra retired on his considerable laurels, and never raced thereafter.

  The very next time, 1958, Lester won the Ascot Gold Cup again, this time on Gladness, trained in Ireland by Vincent O'Brien. It was Lester's first ever ride for Vincent, and certainly neither of them foresaw the close partnership they would one day reach.

  Gladness took the lead two furlongs out, and won the Gold Cup by a length, unpressed. Vincent next ran her in the Goodwood Cup, Lester leading most of the way to win easily, and after that sent her to the Ebor at York, where she obliged at a canter. That Gold Cup, that Ebor Handicap, were Lester's top wins of the 1958 season.

  Gladness was a great galloper, Lester says, though one wouldn't have expected it.

  She was a big rough-looking mare, bred like a jumper, who ran first at the end of her three-year-old season and blossomed marvellously only at four. At five, she won only one small race in Ireland, but went on later to be a great brood-mare, all of her progeny proving winners.

  During 1958, Noel Murless's stable reached none of the great heights of the year before, but contained instead a clutch of two-year-old fillies of great promise for the future, among them Prince Aly Khan's grey twinkler, Petite Etoile. Lester won two two-year-old races on Petite Etoile, none of them top events, and also lost twice against better horses. Consequently, he approached 1959 without overwhelming faith in the little grey star.

  First time out in 1959 she won the Free Handicap at Newmarket. Lester rode one for the Queen in that race, and could judge Petite Etoile's performance only from afar, but saw nothing to enthuse him.

  Noel Murless had entered his three best fillies in the One Thousand Guineas, and gave Lester as stable jockey his pick of them: Petite Etoile, Rose of Medina and Collyria. Lester had won races on all three and was undecided, but he eventually chose Sir Victor Sassoon's Collyria, who was galloping splendidly for him at home.

  All jockeys choose the wrong horse now and again, and as Harry Carr had done before him, Lester got it wrong. Doug Smith, engaged for Petite Etoile, won the One Thousand Guineas -rather to the astonishment of her owner, Prince Aly Khan, who had expected his other runner, the French-trained Paraguana, to take the honours.

  Collyria ran badly, and throughout her career afterwards proved unpredictable, sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull.

  Coming up to the Oaks five weeks later, Lester was given the identical choice: Collyria, Rose of Medina, Petite Etoile.

  This time, although the One Thousand Guineas success was still considered surprising and although there were doubts that Petite Etoile would stay a mile and a half, Lester took thought of the speed she could produce and concluded that he shouldn't turn her down. "I thought if she got the trip she would be able to beat them all. So I rode her, and she won very easily that day. She was a pretty good filly."

  The "pretty good filly" was followed home at a distance of three lengths by the favourite Cantelo (trained by Bill Elsey), who won the St. Leger later that year, and then by stable-mates Rose of Medina and Collyria: Noel Murless's trio had finished first, third and fourth.

  Lester rode Petite Etoile steadfastly from then on, and with her during the rest of the season collected three other substantial prizes, the Sussex Stakes, the Yorkshire Oaks and finally the Champion Stakes at Newmarket in October.

  (Interestingly, in an autumn race not involving Petite Etoile, Lester again had to choose between Rose of Medina and Collyria. He chose Rose of Medina, and Collyria won. Life's full of ironies.)

  There were only three runners in the dramatic Champion Stakes. Lester, at the point where he had to start his winning dash, made a move to go through a space between the Irish-trained Barclay on the outside and a French colt, Javelot, nearer the rails.

  Both horses were ahead of him, and when Barclay's jockey saw Lester coming, he pulled over to shut him off. Lester had the choice of steering round to the outside, or squirting through the small gap between Javelot and the rails. Being Lester, he chose the gap. Petite Etoile shot through like a grey javelin and took the race by half a length, leaving the French jockey Freddie Palmer furiously shaken to his roots and Noel Murless and Prince Aly Khan gasping with shock on the stands. There was a lot of general shouting but no enquiry. Petite Etoile had neither bumped nor hampered Javelot, and Freddie Palmer was erroneously credited with having let her through out of the goodness of his heart.

  Noel Murless had wanted "a nice quiet race" and got instead a last-second victory snatched with breath-stopping audacity. The quiet Mr. Piggott shrugged and turned his deaf ears to the fuss. He had taken his chance, got through his gap, won his race: end of story.

  Petite Etoile snoozed the winter away and came back in 1960 to take her limelight as a four-yearold. The brilliant "little star", who was not actually small like her name but on the contrary notably sturdy, ran first in 1960 at Kempton in May, bringing home odds of 7-1 on.

  In June, on the day after St. Paddy's Derby, Petite Etoile with her long white nose strode away at Epsom with the Coronation Cup: and it was the last time Prince Aly Khan rejoiced in a winner, as he was killed a fortnight later in a car crash. For a while the news shattered the spirits of the stable, although nothing could stop the flow of winners. Noel Murless decided to run Petite Etoile, who had been inherited by the new Aga Khan (Prince Aly's son) in the King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in July.

  The race was not among Lester's happiest experiences. Everyone unrealistically expected the mare to be invincible, but she had recently been coughing, and in a large field on soft ground she couldn't make her way early enough to the front. Lester attracted a good deal of criticism from people who couldn't ride a donkey and as usual took it stoically. He had tried to win. Petite Etoile had tried to win. They hadn't managed it, for once.

  They had a lot of ground to make up in the straight, and they lost by half a length to Aggressor.

  Petite Etoile retired for a lengthy rest while her trainer pondered long-term tactics and possibilities for the following year.

  In April 1961, Petite Etoile, now five years old, had to struggle hard at Sandown to beat moderate opponents, but again took the Coronation Cup at Epsom in June, with more elan, and a fortnight later won at Royal Ascot, each time starting an odds-on favourite.

  Next time out, she ran at an evening meeting at Kempton Park, in the Aly Khan International Memorial Cup, with perhaps too much at stake. The race in memory of her former owner proved sadly to be the one she couldn't win, and she was unexpectedly beaten two full lengths by a horse belonging to Sir Winston Churchill, High Hat. This time no one could criticise Lester's riding. The great-hearted mare had been given every chance and hadn't been able to produce her flying last-minute speed.

  She had won nearly all of her races by one length or less, with Lester often thought to have left her winning run too late. She was a racer, however, who came always with late acceleration, and was not at her best if left too long in front. In Lester she had the perfect jockey, cool enough to wait, confident enough to set her flying just in time.

  She
ran again in 1961 after the Aly Khan Memorial, and won, still at odds-on, at Doncaster in September. Later the same month, she ran in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot, but in spite of Lester's best efforts she was without her old withering speed at the end, and lost by half a length. The reign-and the career-of one of racing's greatest mares was over: the sparkling little star went out.

  Behind the headlines and the ballyhoo, the late nineteen-fifties were the worst years of Lester's constant battle against weight. Between the years of twenty and twenty-four he suffered unforgiving hunger pains day after day, denying his body the normal consolidation of young manhood, facing the stark choice between career and physical deprivation.

  It's easy to underestimate what many jockeys endure for the sake of their jobs. Most people wanting to lose weight go on a comparatively gentle reducing diet and expect to revert to more normal food fairly soon. They do not unremittingly starve and sweat and still turn in top athletic performances, knowing that it will last for as long ahead as their talents and their bodies can stand it.

  In his late teens and early twenties Lester used to let himself off the worst hunger pangs after the end of the Flat season, with the result that each winter his weight crept up ten or more pounds in four months. Each spring, he was then faced with the same task as in 1954, at the end of the Never Say Die suspension, the quick and agonising reduction of an already sparse body.

  Finally he decided the partial let-up of winter wasn't worth the increasing difficulty he found each spring, and from about 1959 onwards he maintained his full spartan regime year round. His method was simple: eat what you like, but very little of anything. Take small portions and leave half. Drink half a cup of sugared coffee, black. Half a cup of tea. A few sips of Coca-Cola. Half a glass of champagne. He used to drink half a gin-and-tonic, but less as time went on.

  Shellfish, lamb cutlets, chicken, smoked salmon, all in tiny amounts, he likes.

  Disliked are potatoes, cake and curry. Ice-cream is adored, but the trouble with that, he says disgustedly, is that four ounces of ice-cream produce in him a pound of body weight, which he holds neither logical nor fair.

  Around four large cigars a day take the place of further food, as also does sunshine, when he can get it. One needs to eat less in the sun.

  At about thirty years of age, Lester's weight finally stabilised on this regime at roughly 8 st. 5 lb., enabling him to ride at a little under that if essential. Back in 1957, however, he was still at the grindingly horrific stage of shaping his body to suit his will, and apart from eating too little, was also reducing his body fluids violently.

  Many jockeys sweat away their mornings in saunas. Lester hit on a less time-wasting solution and turned his own car into a sweat box, driving to meetings in mid-summer with the windows closed and the heater full on. In addition, he wore several layers of absorbent T-shirts under a rubber sweat suit, and on top of that, an ordinary shirt, jacket and trousers. On arrival in the changing room, he peeled the whole lot off and hoped to make the weight on the scales.

  Those sweltering journeys, his wife said later, were not the best way for her to arrive at Royal Ascot looking cool, fresh and uncreased.

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  9 Susan, Maureen and Tracy

  SUSAN ARMSTRONG met Lester Piggott when he was fifteen and she was eleven.

  They each went to the Doncaster Sales with their parents in 1951 and stayed in the same hotel, the Mount Pleasant, on the road between Doncaster and Bawtry.

  Susan's mother and father knew Keith and Iris Piggott well: the four of them had been close friends in earlier years, but in successive housemoves had drifted apart.

  Susan's mother, born Maureen Greenwood, was living in Letcombe Regis with her mother when the newly-married Keith and Iris built their first home opposite her own. The three of them played tennis together often, a trio later turned into a foursome when Sam Armstrong, who trained horses at Middleham in Yorkshire, began visiting Maureen Greenwood in the mid nineteen-thirties.

  Maureen's mother remarried (to Bob Thorburn, a racehorse owner), Maureen later in her turn marrying Sam Armstrong and going off with him to the north, moving eventually to Newmarket when he transferred his stable there in 1945. Because of the distance from Berkshire, and because private travelling was discouraged during the Second World War, Maureen saw little of the Piggotts for many years.

  The two families had, however, known each other well enough and for long enough for the common ground to lie there between Susan and Lester, waiting.

  Neither remembers anything particular about their first meeting: they just know where and when it occurred. Neither, unsurprisingly, felt irresistibly drawn to the other. Lester went on racing. Susan went back to school, and that was that.

  Someone gave Susan a Horselover's Calendar with a picture of Lester sitting on a bucket looking up at a horse that was looking down at him. "By this time he was pretty well known," she says. The calendar must even so have been important to her, because she remembers it.

  She left school at fifteen and went to a finishing school in Switzerland for nine months. At sixteen she was home in Newmarket, working full-time for her father in almost every possible capacity: assistant trainer, teacher of apprentices and secretary.

  She rode out at exercise every morning. She shepherded the apprentices at race meetings, and she saddled her father's runners at the races. She did office work in the evenings. All this was before she was old enough to learn to drive.

  She says herself that she had almost no social life and no close personal friends, an exception being the four daughters of jockey Edgar Britt, who rode regularly for her father: but they still lived in the north, and she saw them seldom. She led a hardworking life, partly from force of circumstances but clearly also because she enjoyed it. She didn't want to go out to parties: she disliked parties then and does so still.

  She was therefore in many important ways already a perfect match for Lester Piggott.

  Like him, she came from a busy racing family who took hard work for granted. She liked a quiet private life. She was intelligent, and doing a job most people might have considered her too young for, with competence of a high order. The reputation her father enjoyed for training apprentices was largely Susan's work. She it was who day by day taught Wally Swinburn, Paul Tulk and "Kipper" Lynch, and gave further help to Josh Gifford, who had come from Cliff Beechener's stable, having won his first race at eleven.

  Susan knew a great deal about horses and rode excellently herself; and beyond all that she was (and is) extremely pretty.

  Lester, one day early in 1957, went round to the Armstrong house to collect a pair of shoes which Wally Swinburn had brought back for him from India, where the two of them had been riding during the winter. By then Lester knew Susan pretty well by sight because she was so often at the races. He said something to her about taking her out, sometime. She said she would go, but heard no more.

  Their first significant meeting came a little later in the same spring when the Britt girls came down from the north to go with Susan to the eighteenth birthday dance of Anne Carr, daughter of Harry Carr, then the Queen's jockey.

  Joe Mercer was there, who later married Anne Carr, and Jimmy Lindley, and a whole bunch of the young generation, including Lester. They all spent an euphoric evening and Lester again said something to the seventeen-year-old Susan about taking her out, but again did nothing about it.

  Although they talked to each other often on race days after that, it was more than a year later before the decisive move was made. Lester invited Susan to go to the musical "My Fair Lady" and then to dinner, the occasion to take place on the first evening of the Derby meeting in June.

  Susan accepted. Lester picked her up from where she was staying near the Epsom course with her parents, drove her to London and delivered her back to them afterwards. The event had been a success.

  "After that," Susan says, "the friendship developed. We saw each other all the time at the races, and he was often in Ne
wmarket because of riding for Noel Murless."

  They went to the pictures, went out to dinner. "It just became an understood thing between us that we would get married. It wasn't a sudden thing. It was just understood."

  They took their time. Lester had had other girl friends: Susan much enjoyed what she was doing. Marriage, as for many a couple, meant for him responsibility and for her the prospect of abandoning a job where she was outstanding and, instead, running a house and cooking, which for all her abilities she knew nothing about and didn't relish.

  They decided eventually that February 1960 would be a suitable time. Susan would be twenty, Lester twenty-four. There would be time for a honeymoon before Lester prepared for the new Flat season in March.

  As neither of them much enjoyed parties, they decided against a big wedding in Newmarket when "all the world" would come, and also against Lester's home town, Lambourn, settling instead on neutral ground in London. Accordingly, with a minimum of ballyhoo and with eighty relatives and friends (and a press photographer) in attendance, Lester and Susan married on 22 February 1960 at St.