THE HISTORIC 1965 GRAND NATIONAL.

​The 1965 Grand National was the first of the ‘last Nationals’. In the actually television commentary, the words ‘can this be the last time horses gallop to Becher’s Brook’ were used. Some people attended the race just to say they had witnessed the ‘last National’ and there were 47 starters, 14 more than the previous year. It must have been a sad, almost bittersweet, occasion.
Yet the race itself proved to be a bit of an epic, with two horses with a similar background fighting out the finish. The winner, Jay Trump, was the result of an accidental mating and began his racing career at a dirt track, Charles Town, where the horses were just commodities and where affection was thin on the ground. To quote from Jane McIlvaine’s book ‘The Will To Win’, Jay Trump ‘Couldn’t get out of his own way on the dirt. Besides, the horse is a rogue. Last year he ran into a post and nearly killed a boy. You can’t get a jockey to ride him.’ I suspect Charles Town was not as bleak and unforgiving as McIlvaine portrayed it, though it was the last place on Earth anyone would expect a Grand National winner to come from.
The incident where Jay Trump ran into a post when circumstance forced him to jump a running rail almost cost him his life and would have done if his then owner was not more of a saint than a sinner. If the racecourse had a horse ambulance the pain and injury perhaps would have been reduced, the hole in Jay Trump upper leg large enough for part of the muscle to fall out and the bone to be exposed.
But when Tommy Smith came looking for a cheap horse to buy, a horse who would make a steady hunter if he couldn’t jump the post and rails of the Maryland Hunt Cup, it became a case of Jay Trump or go home with no horse. And for some reason Tommy Smith just liked the horse. He could visualise muscle where only weakness was on display and a gleam in a coat made dull by a lack of grooming and care.
As a foal, Freddie, too, nearly died and like Jay Trump was bought cheaply, with no thought of being campaigned on the big stage. He was to be a hunter in the Border Country and, if he proved equal to the task, a point-to-pointer. That was all that was expected of him. Yet he was to become one of the most popular chasers of the sixties, carrying 11st 10lbs to be beaten just under a length by Jay Trump and 11st 7lbs when runner-up the following year to Anglo, a horse incidentally who began his racing career called Flag of Convenience and who dropped Tommy Smith in the stable yard on his first morning riding out at Fred Winter’s.
I ought to mention that Pontin-Go, fifth to Team Spirit in 1964, had run in the 1963 Grand National under the name Gay Navarree.
To return to Jay Trump. It was very much a case of ‘he came, he saw, he conquered’, as he only ran six times in this country, the only rides Tommy Smith enjoyed during his stay as he was determined not to chance injury and jeopardise what for him was the fulfilment of a life-long dream to ride in the Grand National. What he was attempting to do was something no one else had achieved. Yes, Battleship had come from America and won the Grand National but he was ridden by a professional English jockey. Jay Trump was attempting to be the first American owned and American-ridden winner of the world’s greatest horse race. As the race is nowadays, I suspect it is an honour he will hold for many years into the future. And there was no fluke about their victory as apart from Rondetto sliding to the ground four out when seemingly full of running, he finished, along with the gallant Freddie, twenty lengths clear of the third horse.
It is widely known that Jay Trump and Tommy Smith had won the Maryland Hunt Cup twice prior to his Grand National success, what is less publicised is that on returning home he won a third Maryland Hunt Cup. With nothing else to prove he was retired soon after to live a long and active life in the hunting field, dying aged 31. The horse who had started life as a commodity for punters died one of the most celebrated horses in American racing history as is buried at the winning post at Kentucky Horse Park chase course, the Red Rum of American steeplechasing.
Freddie, too, lived a long life, making it to 28 years-of-age.
Tommy Smith fared, perhaps less well. He retired from riding the same day Jay Trump retired, went into health-care, trained racehorses for a while before a riding accident caused such an horrific injury, he was a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. He died in 2013. It is a bitter coincidence that Fred Winter, too, suffered an injury that rendered him incapable of living out his life without 24-hour care.