The story of the Grand National steeplechase, held this year on Saturday the 13th of April at the Aintree Racecourse on Liverpool’s outskirts, is buried – although not very deeply – in its name.
Run for the first time in 1837, the steeplechase reaches far beyond the horseracing fraternity into British culture at large. It transcended its status as a national event years ago, and is now truly international, on a Grand – that’s an upper-case “G”, by the way – scale.
This year’s event will be watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world, which makes it amongst the largest televised sporting spectacles on earth.
While not always aware of the event’s deep history, people are at the very least aware of some of the famous horses who have won the handicapped steeplechase. Take the bay, Red Rum, who suffered throughout his life from an incurable disease of the hoof.
Red Rum was nursed by trainer, Ginger McCain, who ran him through the dunes and along the beaches of Southport in England. McCain also allowed him to gallop through the sea-water shallows, which proved to be therapeutic for his painful hooves.
In his first Grand National, Red Rum was trailing Crisp, an Australian horse, by 15 lengths over the last jump. In the long gallop to the finish line, Crisp’s weight disadvantage of 23 pounds began to tell. He slowed, and Red Rum hared after him, gobbling up the distance between them.
Watching the race it was difficult to decide which horse would reach the finish first. Crisp? Red Rum? It must be Crisp, his lead was too significant.
Finally, after the punters had shouted themselves hoarse, and many a rolled-up race-day program had been drummed upon a thigh, Red Rum pipped Crisp at the winning post by three-quarters of a length. At one point Red Rum had been 30 lengths adrift.
Crisp’s jockey, Richard Pitman, said many years later: “I dream of Crisp running so strongly and jumping so fearlessly, and then the sound of Red Rum’s hooves as he got closer and closer towards the end. I felt that I was tied to a railway line with an express train thundering up, unable to jump out of the way.”
Red Rum’s last-gasp win against Crisp was in 1973, and he returned the following year to claim victory again in the Grand National – a rare feat. He won the race three times in all and finished second twice. He died in 1995. In honour of his bravery and courage, Red Rum is buried near the finishing post on the course itself.
The Aintree course, which is just under seven kilometres (or approximately four-and-a-half miles) long, has been slightly shortened and re-measured in recent years.
It contains 16 fences, 14 of which are jumped twice. The Chair, a challenging jump because it is the highest fence on the course, as well as the water feature beyond it, are only jumped once. For the purposes of the Grand National, the Aintree course is lapped twice, meaning 30 fences are jumped in all.
The jumps – think here of long hedges – are themselves not only high but wide. They are made out of spruce brought in from the Lake District and woven into a plastic mould or structure which is flexible, so as to reduce damage to horse and rider in the case of a mis-timed or iffy or even a frightened jump.
Sometimes the jump is extended by a water-feature on the wrong side – or the blind side of the jump for horse and jockey – and sometimes the level of the ground on either sides of the jump is different. In steeplechasing parlance this is referred to as “a drop.”
The jumps, I think it fair to say, have encouraged fiddling over the years. There is a tradition of reducing jumps in height, for instance, or raising the level of the ground immediately prior to the jump. In some instances, brooks on the far side of the hedge have been filled in.
This is in the interests of both horse and rider. Even with blinkers, jumping a fence when you don’t know what’s on the other side, must be frightening, a leap, quite literally, of faith.
It is also frightening – presumably – having the course run by rider-less horses, a frequent event at the Grand National.
Such horses have minds of their own. Sometimes they jump as they are meant to, but sometimes they suggest they are about to jump while deciding at the last minute, not to jump, in which case they clog up the riding lanes and prove to be a dangerous nuisance.
Most of the jumps have names. Many of them are famous. Take Canal Turn, a sharp left-hander that funnels horse and rider into a bottleneck on the inside, sometimes awkwardly, so they are better placed to take advantage of the turn.
Or Valentine’s or Becher’s Brook, so named because it was here that captain Martin Becher was thrown from his horse, Conrad, during the riding of the 1839 Grand National, only two years after the steeplechase had begun.
We’ve already heard about Red Rum, an Irish horse with dickey hooves, but who knows about Foinavon, an Irish horse with no hope?
In the 1967 Grand National, Foinavon was a 100-1 outsider, having moved up in the bookies’ estimations because at one stage he was a 500-1 outsider before firming to be a 444-1 outsider.
The Pundit of Form and All Things Equine, no less a tipster than Charles Benson of the Daily Express, called him with damning understatement, “not the boldest of jumpers”.
Continued Benson blithely in his fatefully cavalier Express preview before the 1967 race: “He can be safely ignored – even in a race noted for shocks.”
So slight were Foinavon’s chances in the race that neither his trainer nor his owner was at the course that dank day in 1967 to witness his run. He hadn’t placed in any of his last 14 races and there was no reason to believe that would change now.
His owner, Cyril Watkins, looked at the foggy weather and decided to stay home and watch matters on TV, possibly sipping cocoa with his feet up in a pair of comfy slippers.
Foinavon’s trainer, John Kempton, thought so little of his chances that he preferred to ride a horse called “Three Dons” at a meeting at the Worcester Racetrack. He sent his father, Jack, to keep an eye on things in Liverpool.
Foinavon wasn’t regarded too highly by the jockeys, either. Three had turned down a ride on him prior to the race but 26 year-old John Buckingham, who had never ridden in the Grand National before, decided that there was nothing to lose. Outsider or not, Foinavon was worth the punt.
“They asked me and I mean,” said Buckingham in a 2010 interview, “I’d have ridden Dick’s donkey to be in the Grand National.”
The 1967 race was glamorous and widely-watched. Horse-race owners included celebrities, ambassadors and royalty. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had 18 cameras around the course and the international audience was estimated at 200 million people in over 140 countries.
The televised event was so slick (and the course, so long) that some of the race commentary from deep on the course was referred to as that provided by the “country cameras”.
For the first time ever, the BBC had four commentators for the event, shown live on their famous Saturday afternoon show, Grandstand. David Coleman anchored the commentary team, which was also made up of Peter O’Sullevan, Bob Haynes, Michael Seth-Smith and the Irish broadcaster, Michael O’Hehir.
Possibly because he was Irish, and possibly because it just turned out that way, O’Hehir was stranded at the back of the course. It proved a very, very useful place to be. Equally useful in what was to follow, was O’Hehir’s vast experience in the world of radio at large.
He commentated, for example, on the All-Ireland Football final at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan in 1947, pleading for Irish Radio not to cut the line when matches ran behind schedule.
He was so in demand that he moved beyond the confines of sport. He covered the return of Roger Casement’s remains to Ireland, the Irish Nationalist Casement having been hanged by the British as a pro-German sympathiser and spy during the First World War.
O’Hehir He also covered John F. Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in June, 1963, when, amongst other things, Kennedy visited the family’s ancestral home. Later that year he was in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated. His five hour-long narration of the Kennedy funeral earned him widespread respect. It turned him into a house-hold name in Ireland.
Hollywood heart-throb, Gregory Peck, star of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird and director John Huston’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, had a horse rather brazenly called “Different Class” in the 1967 Grand National.
Peck and his beautiful French wife, Veronique Passani, expected “Different Class” to show his colours that year at Aintree, so travelled to England for the event. Both were seen on the night before the race dancing the night away at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, taking side bets with other horsey-set high-fliers.
We know this because with American owners having horses in the race, the magazine, Sports Illustrated, sent reporter, Whitney Tower, to Aintree. Tower was a Harvard graduate, and comfortable in the company of the Pecks and other assorted high-fliers.
He wrote a fine piece, which I’ve drawn on here, but one which is marred slightly by its tone of knowing superiority. Tower was a horseracing and steeple-chasing man. These were his people. Yet he couldn’t ditch the snide undertow to his reporting: he might have been of them but he was clearly better than the people with whom he associated.
Not only was there glamour, dampened, ever-so slightly by cold fog over the course for much of the day, but there was what newspapers used to quaintly refer to as “human interest.”
A 67 year-old Californian jockey called Tim Durant raced in the 1967 Grand National on Aerial 111. With heart-warming predictability, the newspapers dubbed Durant “the galloping grandad.” Aerial 111, with Durant on his back, eventually fell to earth at the 19th fence. And grandad was eventually grounded.
While the race contained glamour, tradition and possible drama, it also contained a shadow self. Jumps were often vandalised, sometimes by animal-rights activists. Extra police with dogs guarded the Aintree stables on the night before the 1967 event to prevent any pre-race skulduggery. While all precautions were taken, little could anyone have imagined the drama that was – quite literally – just around the corner?
Forty-four horses started the 1967 Grand National, among them Foinavon, the horse deemed so unlikely to finish that his trainer and owner were enjoying themselves elsewhere. Among the favourites were Different Class, owned by Peck, of course, Anglo, Rutherfords, The Fossa, Kilburn, Leedsy, Honey End, Red Alligator and Bassnet (Bassinette).
The steeplechase went according to form in its early stages, although Bassnet fell at the first fence. Popham Down also lost his rider, Macer Gifford, but carried on regardless, enjoying himself, running with ease, and blithely getting in other horses way. So, too, did April Rose, who galloped on without rider, Piers Bengough.
The early leaders included Rutherfords, Penvuglo, Kirtle Lad, Rondetto, Tower Road and Princeful. When the horses reached Anchor Bridge, beginning their second lap, all six were there or thereabout.
Foinavon, after having been mentioned by the commentators early on the race, wasn’t heard of as he loitered towards the back. This presumably means that he and Buckingham weren’t anywhere where they could be seen.
The conventions of commentary were different in those days. It was acceptable, maybe even mandatory, to point out riders’ mistakes. There’s an alacrity – a joy, even – to be heard in a plummy accent pointing out a mistake, although you never get to hear what the mistake is.
It might be a mistake or line or technique, nobody thinks to tell you. And here you were thinking that a mistake was something dramatic. A costly mistake. Such as when a horse decides to stop dead in its track and turf the rider to the spongy turf.
By the time O’Hehir took over the commentary for his second stint behind the microphone, some of the original leaders remained. Others had fallen back.
In no particular order, O’Hehir identified Kirtle Lad on the inside and Princeful, who we are familiar with from earlier in the race, but added the names of Kapeno and Castle Falls.
Riderless Popham Down continued to make a nuisance of himself, although he was seldom referred to by the commentators, who clearly saw him as the invisible horse. Perhaps he was simply a non-starter?
At Becher’s, the 22nd jump, there was no trouble. All the horses, including April Rose and Popham Down, got through fine. According to O’Hehir, however, Rutherfords had lost ground, although this was but a blip on an otherwise fine run.
It was at the jump directly after Becher’s where all the fun started. The video of the race is slightly inconclusive, so it is difficult to say for sure whether it is Popham Down or April Rose who stops just before the jump. Whichever horse it was, they stopped, and were joined by the second riderless horse. Both formed a sort-of pre-fence fence.
Their stopping was compounded by the fact that the stationary horses didn’t address the fence as they would if they were jumping it. They stood parallel to the fence, which made them a larger barrier, which made them more difficult to miss, which made the horses which couldn’t miss them more difficult to miss and so on.
As Popham Down and April Rose drew their line in the Aintree sand, the front-runners collapsed into them. In no particular order the front-runners at this stage of the race were Castle Falls, Rondetto and Rutherfords. All three horses and many others ploughed into Popham Down and April Rose.
There was a pile-up of quite unbelievable proportions, with almost none of the horses actually making the jump but standing, bewildered with their riders, on the wrong side of the fence.
O’Hehir witnessed it all, and just about here came up with the exquisitely polite – not to say – strangely euphemistic lines: “…Rutherfords has been hampered.”
It would have been more accurate to say that Rutherfords has just gone down in an ungainly sprawling mess and an entire race worth of other horses had gone down with him, but this was 1967. Too much overt emotion was not the done thing.
To repeat, the commentator simply said: “..Rutherfords has been hampered,” as though a fly had just landed on the horse’s nose.
Let me not be unkind. O’Hehir dealt with all the 23rd fence threw at him – if you’ll excuse the pun – with elegance and aplomb. Paraphrase doesn’t do justice to O’Hehir’s grace under pressure, so let’s quote his actual commentary of the dramatic pile-up in full. Only in that way will we do his fragment of splendid commentary justice. Here he is, commentating on the 23rrd fence.
[Approximately 15-second clip from O’Hehir’s commentary here.]
A mighty 25 lengths off the pace when the pile-up happened, Buckingham and Foinavon were so out of contention that Buckingham managed to avoid the worst of the mayhem. He looked at the chaos, plotted a course round the outside, encouraged Foinavon over the fence and suddenly found himself in the lead.
He got the jump on every last horse that was in front of him
It was a lead Buckingham has said he didn’t realise he had. Of course it was a lead he didn’t realise he had. He was following others’ lead, not leading, only too happy to just be in the race. But now, the unthinkable. He was the leader. Others would follow him!
He left pandemonium behind. Some horses, refusing to go any further, had heaved their riders over the fence as though tossing coins into a well.
Three or four riders now stood on the wrong side of the fence, looking like Friday night drunkards unsure of where they had parked their car.
On the other wrong side of the fence there was complete and utter uproar. Jockeys were looking for their horses, struggling to re-mount. Others were trying to extricate themselves from the mess as best they could. Some horses galloped on without their riders, regardless.
Some ran backwards, in the direction from which they’d come, hoping they would find the finish line back at the beginning. Long gone, the start of the race couldn’t come too soon.
All of this made for such good viewing that a train on the raised tracks in the background stopped so passengers could watch it all. They were the best seats in the house.
The over-arching irony of the pile-up at the 23rd was that the 23rd was an innocuous fence. It was a fence identified by number, not name, an anonymous terminus on the way to somewhere else.
Canal Turn, with a far more dangerous reputation, was two jumps away. But the accident didn’t happen where it was expected to happen. It happened where it was wasn’t expected to happen, which perhaps suggests that it is useless expecting an accident to happen at all.
Foinavon negotiated Canal Turn successfully. He bounded on, enjoying his lead. Buckingham began to realise that he might have had the race won – indeed, that it was his race to lose.
In all, 17 jockeys from the original 44 starters managed to re-mount, but they had lost too much time. Honey End, the 15-2 favourite, followed Foinavon’s lead. He made up an impressive amount of ground, although it wasn’t quite enough to pip Foinavon and Buckingham at the post.
Honey End placed second, with Red Alligator third and Greek Scholar fourth.
O’Hehir suggested after the mass pile-up that the 23rd be named the Foinavon Fence. Giving an unnamed fence a name clearly isn’t a question for the indecisive or the faint of heart because it took 17 years, until 1984, for the Grand National committee to honour the Irish commentator’s suggestion. The 23rd at Aintree is henceforth called Foinavon Fence and you now know why.
In April 1967, on a foggy Saturday afternoon outside of Liverpool, Foinavon had his moment in the sun. He was turned down by three jockeys as a nag and no-hoper. His trainer and owner weren’t even there to see him. He was even referred to by a pre-race tipster as “not the boldest of jumpers”.
But Buckingham took a punt and rode him carefully through a gap in the fence at the 23rd jump, and in a time which compares favourably with other winners in other years.
Foinavon never had such a joyous day out again. Not bad for a horse who, as a stable companion, had a white goat called Susie.