the young man who rode battleship.

​Some people gain immortality in their chosen sport, even if the immortality they have earned is of the parochial kind, known forever by a minority, unlike Mohammed Ali or Pele who at their peak were familiar to everyone on the planet. Bruce Hobbs is one such sportsman, even if racehorse trainers do not fit the mould of either a sportsman or immortal hero.
As a racehorse trainer Bruce Hobbs had a successful, if not glittering, career, winning hundreds if not thousands of races. He was responsible for Stilvi, Tynavos, Catherine Wheel, Tachypous, Tromos and many other horses whose names are part and parcel of my early years as a devotee of this sport. The names of his top-class flat horses will though fade from memory, to live on only in the pedigrees of yearlings in sales catalogues and in the yellowing pages of old form books. The name that will never fade, will always be remembered for one day in racing history is the name of the great, though small, American stallion Battleship who crossed the ocean blue a horse in transit and returned to a ticker-tape welcoming home celebration.
36 horses lined-up at Aintree on 25th March 1938, most of whom were better fancied to win the race than Battleship and his seventeen-year-old rider Bruce Hobbs. Blue Shirt and Cooleen went off the 8/1 joint favourites, with both finishing the race to tell the tale. John Hislop, later to gain everlasting turf fame by breeding and owning Brigadier Gerard, one of flat’s greatest ever horses, was less fortunate riding the Duchess of Norfolk’s Hurdy Gurdy Man, falling when out of contention.
Hobbs believes that the one mistake Battleship made, when he was down on his nose at the third last, was responsible for him winning – in Reg Green’s wonderful history of the Grand National ‘A Race Apart’, it is described as a ‘shocking mistake’ - as he would have been in front too soon otherwise and which allowed or forced him to give Battleship a breather. Hobbs, displaying wisdom beyond his youth, slowly but surely clawed back the lost ground, passing the tiring Workman between the final two fences before edging past Royal Danieli on top of the finishing line.
Battleship was trained on behalf of Marion Scott, wife of Hollywood film star Randolph Scott, by Bruce’s father Reg, who did not believe for one moment that the diminutive Battleship would jump round Aintree and gave him little chance of winning, wanting to withdraw the horse in the lead-up to the race, as he had done the previous year. It was only the owner’s insistence that they ran that allowed him to earn the greatest achievement of his career.
At the time Battleship was the smallest horse to win the Grand National, the first horse to win sporting blinkers and Bruce Hobbs, as he remains to this day, the youngest jockey to win the world’s most famous horse race.
In 2020 the world is fighting something of a phoney war against a virus manipulated by politicians and others to rent a change to the very fabric of civilisation. The official world-wide death toll is considerable, of course, yet it is nothing when compared to the very real war men and women had to contend with only 18-months after Battleship’s epic victory over the black birch of Aintree. The 2nd World War enveloped everyone and everything. Bruce Hobbs, in 1938 was a sporting hero, a kid barely out-of-school, and by the end of 1939 he was a soldier, his destiny to be decided in the desert fighting to stem Rommel’s progress in North Africa.
There was a war to be won and Hobbs set out with the same grit, determination and youthful zeal as he had displayed at Aintree. He won the Military Cross and admitted in peacetime to have enjoyed his soldiering career. In ‘No Secret So Close’, a quote from Surtees, Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker, also holder of the Military Cross, by the way, does what I believe to be a remarkably poor job in telling the life story of Bruce Hobbs.
If this was an autobiography, Bruce Hobbs would be perfectly entitled to dedicate more than a single chapter on his war service, even if he might have been too modest to mention the action that led to the award of his Military Cross. But when such an eminent writer as Fitzgeorge-Parker takes on the task of writing the life story of a racehorse trainer, the market for such a book would overwhelmingly be racing enthusiasts, and it is a literary crime to spend so much time on the man’s war years and by comparison so little on what the subject matter is known for. I’m afraid the writer committed the same error with ‘Ever Loyal’, his biography of Neville Crump. 
Writers have their own style, of course, and all are valid. But if I were to point any budding writer in the direction of a writer and a book that is an exemplar of its kind, I will suggest the story of ‘Battleship’ as told by Dorothy Ours – one of the best books ever written about a racehorse. But then Battleship had a very quiet 2nd World War.