By the end of the 1960s Eric Cousins had won Robert fifty races, including a few over the jumps, including the Midlands Grand National at Uttoxeter. He had also won at Newmarket, the headquarters of English racing. This was with his grey colt Hang On in a contest named the Crawfurd Handicap, about three weeks before the Jockey Club had blackballed Christopher Soames, just down the road at The Rooms. At precisely that time, Robert had become so engrossed with the challenge of actually breeding his own racehorses that he bought himself a stud farm in Cheshire, or at least he bought himself a rather decrepit two-hundred-acre farm in Cheshire with a view to turning it into a stud farm. It was called Swettenham Hall and it was situated in the most lonely part of the countryside to the north of Congleton. Basically, the only serious landmark in the entire area was the giant inter-planetary telescope at Jodrell Bank which you could just see from some of the paddocks. Its privacy, its good, damp, green land and its calcium soil seemed potentially perfect for rearing horses.
Robert attacked the entire project with immense style. He sought expert advice on the quality of the land, and then he ploughed up the paddocks which they judged were in a flood-plain to the River Dane, and he laid down a complete drainage system. He had top architects design his barns, the paddocks were all newly fenced with post-and-rail. He studied the National Stud’s operation at Newmarket, copied what he liked best, instructed his builders to renovate the great archway into the courtyard which supported the grand clock tower. There was a beautiful lawn set into the middle of the yard with a wide gravel path around its perimeter. With his normal brutal adherence to ‘the numbers’ and carefully advised by his father, Robert brought the stud farm up to scratch ‘right on budget’.
When it was finished, the Swettenham Stud looked as if it had been there for ever. As a matter of fact, so did Robert, elegantly tailored as usual, with a Rolls Royce purring in the background as he chatted to his new stud groom Joe French. All around the property the staff addressed him with the courteous familiarity of the more feudal reaches of the English countryside, ‘’Morning, Mr Robert …’, ‘By the way, Mr Robert, would that filly have a bit of a chance at Haydock on Friday?’
He renovated the turreted seventeenth-century manor house, repainting its stucco exterior gleaming white. Flower beds were planted, new trees set around the grounds, while Christine began re-decorating the interior. Robert began to fill the new paddocks with the broodmares he had collected in his few years of ownership. There was Audrey Joan, a sprinting filly he had bought after she had won the Portland Handicap with a smashing victory over Close Call and Forlorn River and who would later produce him four stakes winners. There was his lovely grey filly Flying By, a top-class sprinter who had cost him more than 9000 guineas at the December sales. Soon there would be his extremely tough brown filly Tora Santa, who was by the 1964 Derby winner Santa Claus, and who had won for Robert a big twenty-two-runner maiden at Ascot. Pride of place in the main paddock would go to his beloved Brief Star, heroine of the Ayr Gold Cup.
By the time Robert and Christine moved in, their first son Guy was seven years old and, with his two younger brothers, Ben and Adam, a new and enlarged Sangster dynasty was already in the making. Surrounded by his family, his broodmares and his paddocks and staff, Robert felt for the first time in his life that he had truly come home. Here at last was the environment he loved, far from the daily hassle and hustle that all young businessmen cope with as they take on more and more responsibility from their fathers.
Robert, at thirty-one, was now the kingpin at the Vernon Organization, relied upon by Sangster Senior to ensure the day-to-day running of their empire. But even he was unable to put into profit the division which handled credit betting on horseracing. Robert tried. He even tried to steer some of the more chancy bets of his own through the firm, on the basis that if he was to lose, he may as well lose it to the company. But, being Robert, there was something of quid pro quo to his thoughtfulness. Nick Robinson says it was simple really. Robert only bet with Vernons if it was a real long-shot which probably would not win. He would call Nick in the morning and say, for instance, ‘Put £25 on for me this afternoon, would you? On your Vernons account, Bright Hopes at Newmarket this afternoon, see if he will give you 16–1
Nick would telephone Vernons sometime before the race and ask for the odds, only to be told, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Robinson, we cannot give you better than 100–8 on that horse.’
‘Oh, you could do a bit better than that, I’m an old customer. Ask the manager for me, would you?’
Nick would then hear a rustling and someone call: ‘Er, Mr Robert. I’ve got Mr Robinson on the line. He wants 16–1 about Bright Hopes. She’s only 100–8 on our board.’ And then, in the distance: ‘Oh, that’ll be all right, Joe, give him the 16s.’
Of course they nearly always lost, so it never did anyone any harm, but Robert’s instincts were sound: if I lose, the family firm gets the money; if I win, I do better with Vernons than I would anywhere else. Very, very neat. Very, very Sangster. His father might almost have approved. But only just.
By the start of the 1970s Robert’s organization was well-established in sponsoring a major race at the local Haydock Park, the Vernons Sprint Cup. It was run at the October Meeting with a big prize and some very good horses had won it. But in 1971 there was a particular sense of drama. The outstanding sprinter Green God, who had finished first five times in a row that season, was a very questionable favourite because in his last race Green God had managed to get left at the start in France, and lost to Fireside Chat. Most good judges, including Robert, believed that Green God was the fastest horse in England, but in the Vernons he would face two other pretenders to the sprint championship, Sweet Revenge, who had won two big races in France demolishing Fireside Chat both times, and Apollo Nine, who had shouldered a massive weight of nine stone five pounds to win the Stewards Cup at Goodwood in August. The whole of England was talking about the ensuing six-furlong battle at Haydock Park which would surely decide the fastest horse in the country. Robert, by now a director of the racecourse, was as ever heavily into the ‘crack’ in the members’ bar, talking to trainers, owners, breeders and, on this day, managers of stud farms, the stallion masters who would be watching for the horse who might make a top sire. And the horse they were all watching was Green God.
On the day before the big sprint, there was a large gathering in the members’ bar discussing the day’s events, but more particularly discussing the forthcoming clash between Green God, Sweet Revenge and Apollo Nine. Robert was with a group of Irish bloodstock agents, everyone talking to everyone, whether they knew each other or not, as is the general form on such occasions. Robert was talking to his old friend Jack Doyle who pointed out that the tall, dark-haired young Irishman ‘across the way’ had settled terms with Green God’s owner David Robinson. The horse would be sold this evening for £160,000 and the deal would stand no matter what happened in the race. Green God would run in the colours of Mr Robinson for the last time tomorrow, leased back to his owner just for the day, and then he would leave England to take up stud duties at Castle Hyde in Tipperary.
How, precisely, did they arrive at that figure? That was what Robert wanted to know. What if Green God gets beaten?
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘that’s where they start. The buyers’ syndicate assumes he will get beat. If that should be the case, I would think they would hope to stand him at perhaps £1000 to cover a mare, which they plan to do about forty times a year. That’s £120,000 in three years. That means each share will cost £3000, because there are always forty shareholders. So he’s got to cover another forty mares during his first three years to get all the shareholders out clean on their investment. Well, he may not quite do that, but I don’t think an extra thirty would be asking a lot. And then they are out very little in terms of cash.’
‘But’, said Robert, ‘what if he wins?’
‘Now you’re talking,’ said Jack. ‘That’s what that syndicate is fervently hoping. Then, as Champion Sprinter, Green God will probably
