A CHILDHOOD HERO; AS ODD AS THAT UNDOUBTEDLY MUST BE.

​As a child, though I played football on a daily basis, it was not, as it was with my friends, the central pivot of my aspiration and imaginings of life. For reasons only a psychologist could explain, my fascination as I grew up in a large city, was horse racing, and it began on my seventh or eighth birthday when plonked in front of the television set to watch ‘Grandstand’ as my parents went up the road to buy me a birthday present. If only they had known as they rode the bus that day that they had already given me the greatest present a parent can give a child – a life-long passion.
The formative years, seemingly, of both great and good riders are spent on ponies galloping carefree in the countryside pretending they are riding the favourite in the Grand National or Epsom Derby and living for the day they are allowed to ride a proper racehorse on the gallops. Bryony Frost’s father, to put an end to her pleading, promised she could ride a racehorse on her ninth birthday and found himself at the crack of dawn on the said day being hauled out of bed because the big day had literally dawned!
I suffered no such expectations. It did not even cross my mind that the jockeys life was for me. I didn’t even think for a moment to learn to ride. Or even to see a horse in the flesh. Horse racing for me, as a child, was something that came to me every Saturday through the miraculous invention of the television.
Strangely, and again defying all rational explanation, my hero at the time, almost my imaginary friend, was not Lester Piggott or even Fred Winter, but someone I doubt I would even had recognised if he had moved in next door – Bobby Beasley.
I suspect this allegiance, perhaps even worship from afar, was due to no other factor than I watched him win the Grand National on Nicholas Silver – I had an abiding love of grey horses at the time – and that catapulted him into centre spot in my imagination. Unlike the writers of autobiographies, I have little recollection of my formative years, only snapshots that have no context, and with a failing memory it is now almost impossible to remember how my adoration of this legend of the sport, as I now know, took shape. I remember once thinking how good it will be if her married Princess Anne, though why it would have been good escapes me. I suppose it is a case of what the heart wants the hearts yearns for.
The truth is, as everyone is now aware, that while a child in Bristol thought him worthy of hero worship, the man himself was self-destructing, his fall from grace beginning as far back as 1960 after winning the Galway Plate, a famous race I had no idea existed. Beasley was not even well-liked by his fellow jockeys and even those who recognised his great horsemanship and tolerated him because of it could find little better to say in his defence than he had a ‘strange personality’ fuelled by a persecution complex.
He will always remain in that elite club of jockeys to have won all three of National Hunt’s classic races, the Champion Hurdle on Another Flash, the Grand National on Nicholas Silver and the Cheltenham Gold Cup twice on Roddy Owen and Captain Christy. He was so highly considered as a jockey that both Fred Rimell and Fred Winter appointed him stable jockey, though he held neither position for more than a few months. Mercy Rimell described him thusly ‘he was difficult, and so temperamental that he took far more controlling than any of our owners!’ And this was the sort of a man I dreamed of marrying into the Royal Family!
His peers in the weighing room and the press, many of whom disliked him, could only applaud in wonder when he returned to the saddle five years after retiring to concentrate on becoming a full-time alcoholic. If asked, it is said by those who knew him best, that his proudest achievement in life was not winning the Grand National or Gold Cup but in beating the devil, by beating the drink that nearly and should have killed him. Later in life, just to have his triumph underlined, he ran a pub with his second wife and it is said some mornings he would turn on the lights and looking at the optics would say ‘I beat you bastards and am still beating you!’
Once free of the drink, when, as his first wife said, ‘the fight had gone out of him’, he became the good, gentle, quiet man I supposed him to be when he was my imaginary friend as a child. I admit it took me by surprise when I first learned he was not the saint of my childhood imagination and in reading ‘When Bobby Met Christy’, Declan Colley’s great book on his phoenix-like rise from the ashes of alcoholism, again I was disappointed with him for not bothering to tell Pat Taaffe, the man who above all others he owed the greatest debt, when he retired for the second time, not bothering to communicate with him on any level after riding Captain Christy to victory at Fairyhouse. But that, as I now know, was the sort of man Beasley was. Yet another Irish flawed genius.