fiddlers pike - twenty-six years on.

​I dare say some of you reading this, you lucky people who remain under house arrest, with little to do but visit modest sites like this one, will say ‘Fiddlers Pike? Who?’ When, if you are of a similar age-frame to myself, you reply should be ‘Never! Twenty-Six years since the old boy (he was thirteen at the time) ran in the Grand National! How easily we allow time to slip through our hands.
Rosemary Henderson was no spring chicken herself when the tapes went up for the 1994 running of the Grand National. She was fifty and I dare say plenty nervous about what she had let herself in for. At the finishing line she was still fifty but if you watch the replay, she was one very happy lady, giving Fiddlers Pike more praise and adoration than Minniihoma was receiving from a beaming Richard Dunwoody. At the time, and until Katie Walsh came along with Seabass, she jointly held the record for a female jockey in the Grand National, sharing the accolade for finishing fifth with, if my memory is not playing tricks with me again, Carrie Ford on Forest Gunner. Of course, Bryony Frost has since joined them in joint second place when finishing fifth on Milansbar.
The 1994 Grand National was run on very soft ground, which suited Fiddlers Pike. He would not have run otherwise. Rosemary Henderson, who owned and trained Magnus, as Fiddlers Pike was known at home, only ran him because the race suited him, not because it was a long-held ambition on her part to ride in the race.
If you watch a replay of the race pay close attention to Richard Dunwoody and Adrian Maguire on Moorcroft Boy, two jockeys at the height of their profession and giving both horses as confident a ride as you will ever see. I have to admit I only now appreciate the superb rides they gave their mounts as during the live running my eyes were forever drawn to Just So, trained like Fiddlers Pike in Devon, and ridden by Simon Borrough, putting up 3lbs overweight, which proved crucial. I had backed Just So. I backed him on the Friday, due to my work schedule making it unlikely that I would get to the betting shop on the Saturday. He was a 100/1 when I had my tenner on him. It seems the astuteness of my tipping got out into the wider world as he returned 20/1. Although he ran a grand race, at no point was he travelling as sweet as Minniihoma or Moorcroft Boy but he ran on like a trooper and if it wasn’t for a bad error at the second-last and that 3lb overweight it can be argued that he might have won and provided Aintree with the romance the race sadly lacks nowadays as he was trained by his owner Henry Cole, a permit trainer.
I have just read ‘Road To The National’, the autobiography of Rosemary Henderson and it is a book worth seeking out. It is an easy read. It begins at the beginning – she did not fall into the trap of starting with her trip to Aintree and returning to it at the end – and takes a quiet wander through her equestrian life. There are no histrionics in the book, no critical analysis of this, that or the other. There is no pretence, no envy. No ‘Poor Me!’ Injury is a part of life and only needs time to mend. Defeat can have its own rewards. There is no doubt in her mind and hence no doubt in her readers mind that she got lucky when Fiddlers Pike was given to her. He changed her life as much as her husband, the vet Bill Henderson, changed her life and she does not try to fool her readers that she did anything to improve him into ‘the horse of a lifetime’ he became.
He got into the Grand National because he won good races at Chepstow and Haydock, ridden, as always, by Rosemary. She admitted that she rode him to get round and if they won that was a bonus and she makes it clear that if she had not employed similar tactics at Aintree, he might have finished closer than he did. But at the end of the day she was happy, fully deserving of the glass of champagne she allowed herself before she departed with her body of supporters for Devon and the rest of her life.
I always judge a book’s worth if at its conclusion I want to know what has happened to the horse, jockey, owner, etc, since publication. Her adventures on Fiddlers Pike continued, as least she planned for them to continue, into the following season, and yes, I could find a form-book and find the answer for myself but that would be simply cold hard fact. Rosemary brought an easy-going warmth to her biography and I would have liked to have her story completed in her hand. I know, or at least remember, that along with her husband she emigrated to New Zealand, leaving Fiddlers Pike in the care of a friend. I have googled her but to no avail. I hope she is still in the land of the living and if anyone has any information on her I would be grateful to know.