golden miller, gamble & fakenham.

​After a quick count, I believe Golden Miller won 29-races, losing 25 and being disqualified on one occasion. He won 5 Cheltenham Gold Cups, an achievement I doubt will we ever see again and in 1934 he won the Grand National, which was some success as he proved time and again that he hated the place. In his book on Golden Miller, Basil Briscoe recorded the great horse has being unplaced at Aintree when on one occasion the great horse, according whichever account you read, either fell or was brought down at the first and after remounting made his view plain for all to see by refusing a few fences later.
It is always enlightening to see where the great horses first set foot on a racecourse. Golden Miller’s first race was as a three-year-old in a hurdle at Southwell. He later that season ran unplaced .in a handicap on the flat at Warwick and the April Stakes at Newmarket. Between Southwell and Warwick, Golden Miller won at Leicester and Nottingham over hurdles.
The following season he won over hurdles at Chelmsford twice, Manchester, Newbury, Gatwick and in only his fifth steeplechase he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The following season he was virtually unbeatable, only being beaten by the best chasers around, giving away weight. In 1934 he became the only horse ever to win the Gold Cup and the Grand National in the same season.
The horse went downhill when the owner, Dorothy Paget, took the horse away from Briscoe and put him with Owen Anthony, though he did win a fifth Gold Cup. In 1937, I believe Golden Miller achieved another milestone, albeit a regrettable one, in my book, by winning the Optional Selling Chase at Birmingham. He won it again in 1938, his final victory. No horse of his stature should be dishonoured by racing in so low a division. He won nine-races for Anthony, running his last race as 12-year-old at Newbury, finishing unplaced.
It was another era, a long-gone era when the world and horse racing looked much different to the era we abide in. He should have been retired after his fifth Gold Cup but he raced on. Dorothy Paget to her credit, though, ensured both Golden Miller and her Champion Hurdle winner Insurance, lived a long retirement at one of her properties in the south-east of England.
Golden Miller needs to be honoured to the same extent as Arkle is honoured. A run-of-the-mill handicap chase in April at Cheltenham, his name often shrouded by the name of a sponsor, is no way to honour a horse whose achievements will perhaps never be equalled, let alone bettered. Arkle, as supreme as he was, could not better the Miller’s haul of Gold Cups and no horse has won the Gold Cup and the Grand National in the same year. In the pantheon of great racehorses, Golden Miller deserves to be included in the elite of the top ten, if not the top five. If I had my way, the 3-mile novice chase, the Brown Advisory as it is called at the moment, should be renamed the Golden Miller, in the same way the 2-mile novice chase is ‘The Arkle’ and always will be.

Ffos Las is tasked with putting on a meeting on Saturday, including the Towton novice Chase from the abandoned Wetherby fixture, so that I.T.V. will have some jumping to televise for us to enjoy. Chelmsford, too, are to stage a meeting and Newcastle have brought forward their first race from late afternoon to 2 pm. A belt and braces strategy by the B.H.A. to overcome the winter weather which is odds-on to defeat both Warwick and Kempton. It is a gamble by the B.H.A. to ask Ffos Las to race but they should be commended for their pro-active response to the freeze-up-cum-waterlogging around the country. 0 out of 10 last week, 10 out of 10 this week. Someone at the B.H.A. has woken-up and actually done some work this week!

On January 19th the I.T.V. cameras will be at Fakenham. To his eternal credit, Fakenham’s clerk of the course, David Hunter, has invited, free-of-charge, local farmers to bring their tractors to the racecourse, parking them in full view of the cameras in the centre of the course, to show support for a community that is the heart of East Anglia. It is not a protest, simply a show of support. Congratulations to everyone at Fakenham for doing the little that might be enough to change the course of government thinking on the subject.