the pitmans.

​I have recently read, back to back, the autobiographies of Jenny and Richard Pitman. Jenny will be pleased to know that I thought her book ‘The Autobiography’ the more entertaining of the two. It would be interesting to know which of the two ‘legends of the sport’, both of whom went on to seek financial benefit in writing racing-based novels, outsold the other.
I think it is truthful to claim that they were both far more successful after they went their separate ways than when they were married. Jenny Pitman trained some of the best staying chasers of her era and Richard rode the great horses trained by Fred Winter. And, of course, together they produced a Cheltenham Gold Cup winning jockey.
Jockeys and trainers, when writing accounts of their lives, have a weakness for wasting chapters describing how idyllic, not withstanding the poverty of their surroundings, was their childhood. Richard, to his credit, did not indulge himself, allowing his reader only a summary of his pre-adult life. Jenny, alas, devotes the opening three chapters to her childhood and her family. Do we need to know the names of all their ponies from Shetland to junior show-jumping? I always think one short setting-up chapter is more than enough for the successful trainer or jockey in any autobiography, unless, of course, there is a real dramatic incident to recall. With a biography, I can forgive two or three chapters given over to ‘the early years’, after-all, a writer must undertake research to understand and make himself more knowledgeable of his subject matter and this material cannot be simply crumpled-up and tossed in the waste-bin.
Although I always admired Jenny Pitman’s obvious love and concern for her horses, my feelings toward her are stained by the ‘Golden Freeze affair’, which resulted in Carvill’s Hill not only not winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup but rendering him unfit to ever run again. Jenny may claim that Golden Freeze was running on his merits and was not a stalking horse but any review of the 1992 Gold Cup suggests otherwise. I believe her judgement of events was clouded by her ‘dislike’ or ‘envy’ of Martin Pipe and in Peter Scudamore’s autobiography he claimed that Michael Bowlby, the rider of Golden Freeze and Jenny’s brother-in-law, apologised several weeks later, saying he was only ‘riding to orders’.
But there is no doubt she was a brilliant trainer, even if her reputation always preceded her. Although neither mentions the incident, though I believe when Richard’s book was published he was still married to Jenny, I recall him telling the tale of when he was late home one night – I believe a jockey he had gone racing with had been injured and he had accompanied him to hospital – and having sifted the evidence and found him guilty as charged of ‘seeing another woman’, as he opened the front door he was sent reeling by a right hook to the jaw! I hope I have at least nine-tenths of the facts in the correct order. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story!
Richard’s book, ‘Good Horses Make Good Jockeys’, is less enlightening. He rode some of the great horses of all-time, Pendil, Bula, Lanzarote, Killiney and of course Crisp. Through television I gained the view of Richard as a man of modest character, keener to talk himself down rather than up and this is perhaps the obvious explanation why he condensed his association with those great horses into a single chapter. I think Jenny appreciates that the public care more for the horses than the people of the sport and she was more open to writing about them as individuals, as characters, while Richard was restricted by what was still prevalent in his day, the macho strong upper jaw. 1976, the year ‘Good Horses Make Good Jockeys’ was published, was very much a different age to today, when men were men and women were grateful for it.
Of course, Richard’s book has the best, and most honest, title. When Fred Winter took him on, he said, ‘You’ll never be a champion but you’ll do’, two predictions that hit the nail squarely on the head. He never was to become champion jockey, as his successor John Francome was to achieve, but rarely let ‘the governor’ down. And he experienced the greatest ride any jockey could ever hope for when Crisp came within a whisker of achieving the impossible fete of giving 26lbs to the greatest Aintree horse of all-time.
The most interesting part of Richard’s book, and something that will embarrass him to recall, is his defence of jockeys trying to cheat at the scales, arguing that weighing out light was a lesser evil than wasting so hard to draw the correct weight that a jockey was too weak to do the horse, and its connection, justice. If any jockey pulled that stunt on one of Jenny’s horses, I don’t think anyone would disagree that her trusty right hook was not the appropriate punishment.
In later life, when in his sixties, I believe, Richard donated a kidney, inspiring me to attempt to do likewise. Unfortunately, I was advised that my kidneys were not a perfectly matched pair and was turned down. Given that I am teetotal and that Richard must have supped gallons of champagne and other libations in his time I thought that a rather harsh lesson in life to learn.