THE RIDER OF RED RUM.

​I have in my possession a poverty-stricken looking book titled ‘My Rum Life’. It is the autobiography of Brian Fletcher, a jockey who really should be a legend of the sport but somehow after his retirement in 1976 faded into self-imposed anonymity.
His pocket-sized book, published by Viking, is devoid of pictures, except one of him jumping a plain park fence on Red Rum which adorns the cover. Photographs, especially in Fletcher’s day, were expensive to include in a book, though it may be possible that Fletcher had no mementoes of his halcyon days as a multiple Grand National winning jockey. Certainly, the tone of his narrative leaves an indelible mark on the reader that he carried a large chip of resentment on his shoulder. Perhaps a chip on either shoulder.
He won three Grand Nationals and claims it should have been at least four as he was convinced that he would have won on Red Alligator the year they all fell down at the fence after Bechers. Of course, conveniently, he omits to include in his thinking that if he had won in 1967 Red Alligator would have carried the best part of a stone more in 1968. He did win, though, ridiculously easily, possibly one of the easiest wins during my lifetime. He also claimed Red Rum would have won in 1975 if he had ridden him and not Tommy Stack who he thought rode an ‘awful race’.
Fletcher lost the ride on Red Rum because, he claims, Ginger McCain thought he was being too easy on the horse, not ‘using the whip enough to have him finish second instead of third. Fletcher told McCain he thought the horse ‘had gone’ and suggested he should be retired. As Fletcher stated many times in his book, he was always a jockey for telling connections the truth as he saw it. Obviously in this instance McCain thought Fletcher a long way from the truth and had the last laugh when Red Rum won his third Grand National two years after Fletcher retired and after his book was published. The great omission in ‘My Rum Life’ is that for the reader it would be interesting to know Fletcher’s reaction to that historic 1977 Grand National.
The narrative of the book is made disjointed by Fletcher hopping forward and backward in time. The injury in 1972 that almost cost him his life is only dealt with in the second from last chapter. The final chapter being the how and why he retired. It was as serious a head injury as could be and he was out-of-action for ten-months. He was advised to retire but anyone reading his autobiography could only form the opinion that at Fletcher’s core was a sheaf of stubbornness, and he did go on to win two more Grand Nationals, so who is to say he was wrong to ignore medical opinion. He said that all he could think about during his long spell in hospital was his wife and career, yet in the final chapter he informs his readers that his wife left him, taking their son, and that he blamed himself for the breakdown in their marriage. I suspect the fall in 1972 at Teesside Park was the cause of everything that went wrong in his life, perhaps changing his character, emphasising the less charitable aspects of his persona.
He always was an odd-ball, I suspect. He won three Grand Nationals and did not celebrate any one of them with either the connections of his winning horse, the Aintree executive or attend the official function at the Adelphi Hotel. He would walk instead to the home of a local couple, Mr & Mrs. Capstick, with a few bottles of the champagne from the case that he begrudgingly bought his fellow jockeys, as tradition dictated, and had a victory supper with them.
He died in 2017, January 11th, aged 69.
 
To refer back to the decision of the Ascot stewards not to disqualify Diego Du Charmil on Saturday. It seems that it only the Racing Post’s Tom Segal who shares my opinion that the Ascot stewards, in trying to decide if the winner actually jumped the fence and did not infringe the rules of racing, completely ignored to adjudicate on the not inconsiderable infraction of the rules that makes it a riding offence to wipe-out a fellow horse and rider. If Diego Du Charmil had been disqualified, as he should have been, the owner of Capeland, the innocent victim in all of this, would have collected fourth prize, some consolation for the injustice meted out to Capeland by both fate and the stewards. Innocence should never be punished. The B.H.A. should review this race, holding a second inquiry if necessary.