level, and he believed his son would benefit later in life from the raw hardness of such a world. He believed it was excellent training for a boy to understand sacrifice, courage, determination, the joy of winning, and the pain and disappointment of defeat. He saw no harm in Robert’s early devotion to the brutality of the prize ring, and the men who worked in it. He even allowed his son to take eight friends, on his tenth birthday, to the fights at Liverpool Stadium.
Robert was not in fact a great scholar at school, but he was good at maths and long on common sense. He was a very formidable front-row forward on the rugby field and he pleased the Repton cricket coach, the former Derbyshire spin-bowler Eric Marsh, so much that he allowed his wealthiest pupil to keep his car in a garage at his home. Considering that Repton had now been waiting nigh-on half a century for someone to replace their immortal England and Oxford University batsman C. B. Fry (and it clearly was not going to be Robert) this must rank as a gesture of the highest nobility. At boxing, Robert was never defeated in twelve fights in the ring at Repton.
Like all young men leaving school in the 1950s, Robert was required for two years of National Service and he selected one of England’s historic fighting regiments, the 22nd Regiment of Foot, The Cheshires, the headquarters of which were in Chester Castle down at the end of the Wirral peninsula. The regiment had been founded in 1689 by the Duke of Norfolk, the direct ancestor of the one so upset at the Jockey Club blackballing, who sailed his men from Liverpool to fight at the Battle of the Boyne. For nearly three centuries the Cheshires had fought for King, Queen and Country. They had defeated the Americans during the Revolution at the Battles of Rhode Island and New York; they had fought, on and off, in India for a hundred years; they fought in the great battles for Afghanistan in the 1840s under General Sir Charles Napier, once defeating 30,000 Baluchis when outnumbered by ten to one. They fought in the Boer War, and they fought and died by the hundreds at the Somme, at Ypres, all over Passchendaele, and at Gallipoli. In the Second World War the regiment fought with enormous heroism at El Alamein, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio.
Dearly wanting to be an officer in the Cheshires, Robert applied for training but the officer selection board wanted to assess him twice and after his first interviews they requested him to serve a little more time in the regiment and come back in a few weeks in order that they might talk to him again. In the meantime, however, fate intervened and he leapt at a posting with the Commanding Officer in exciting postwar Berlin and, casting his ambitions of leadership to the west winds of the Wirral, he flew to Germany. Private Sangster, foot soldier, reported for duty.
During the first couple of days men were assessed for sports activities. It was viewed as something of a joke among the ranks when this wealthy young chap from Repton College – famed mainly for producing four Archbishops of Canterbury including Dr Ramsay – stuck his hand up to volunteer for, of all sports, boxing. Also he was apt to make the occasional remark which branded him among instructors as something of a ‘smartass’ – and on the first day of training the PTI was expounding the rules of ‘non-hitting’ areas (back of the head, kidneys, and so on), when Robert uttered one wisecrack too many. The instructor chose to teach him a short, sharp lesson in Army etiquette. Summoning to the fore the big, beefy Brigade shot-putt champion, Private ‘Tiny’ Davies, he said, ‘Right men, I am looking for someone to box a demonstration with Tiny here in the ring. Ah yes, Private Sangster, I think you’ll do very nicely.’
Robert gazed at the massive, six-foot-four-inch Tiny, nodded curtly, checked his gloves and climbed into the ring. At eighteen, he was five feet ten inches, weighed one hundred and seventy-two pounds, and he was giving away about forty-two pounds and several inches. But as Tiny advanced in round one, the words of Freddie Mills rang clearly in his mind: ‘Bobby, if ever you’re fighting a man who might be a bit short on experience, and he comes at you, bang him on the nose early – it’ll make his eyes water, unsettle him.’
Tiny came forward, swung twice. Robert, on his toes, backed away waiting for the next advance. Tiny, almost inviting Robert to hit him, again swung wildly. Robert ducked to his right, slipped inside and banged his opponent on the nose with a short left hook. Hard. The soldiers yelled with excitement. Tiny reacted with instant, unutterable rage. He wiped his smarting eyes, leaned back on the ropes for extra leverage and catapulted himself across the ring at Robert. His face was puce with fury, and his fists were drawn back behind his ears.
Robert backed up to the ropes, stood his ground and stared hard into Tiny’s angry eyes. His stance was slightly crouched, with his left jab ready. At the final split second, he shifted his weight to his left foot, and let fly with a text-book straight right hand that would have knocked down a stud bull. The force was doubled by the on-rushing momentum of Tiny, and Robert caught him flush on the jaw, just to the left of centre. Everything was correct, his wrist was locked, his elbow was locked, and his shoulder took the impact, just as Freddie Mills had instructed. Tiny, by the way, was unconscious before he hit the floor, where he remained, with the lights out, for a little over thirty seconds.
The soldiers went wild. Robert was unable to stop laughing, and the Army doctors were busy trying to revive Tiny. It was, upon reflection, Robert’s finest hour in the ring. He went on to win the Berlin Brigade Heavyweight Championship and was never defeated in more than a dozen fights, though most of them, against better boxers, were decided on points. ‘I never once had a chance to hit anyone that hard ever again,’ he recalls. ‘Actually, Freddie would have been proud of me that evening.’
For a young man so naturally captivated by heroism, both in the boxing ring and indeed in the history of his regiment, it was curious that he entirely abandoned his plans to become a second lieutenant and the vague ambition to become Captain Robert Sangster, which does after all possess a rather authoritative ring. But deep down he knew that his time in the Army was limited to just a few months and that back home the challenging, rewarding and glamorous world of big business awaited him. He had already acquired a taste for fast, expensive cars, beautiful girls, vintage champagne and the kind of well-tailored country clothes that young gentlemen of his wealth and education were apt to wear. Having bought himself a car in Berlin, Robert made the most of the great city. He was always zipping in and out of the Russian sector in search of the occasional pot of caviar and his memories of notorious forays into the more expensive night spots with a small group of adventurous, but largely impoverished fellow ‘squaddies’ still bring a beaming smile to his cheerful face even today.
Robert returned to the Wirral in 1957. By now the Vernon Organization was building parts for aircraft and owned a factory that produced a little three-wheel car which did eighty miles to the gallon, in sharp contrast to Robert’s new Mercedes Sports which was pushed to get eighteen to the gallon going downhill. He was glad to be home and was quickly absorbed with the many improvements and expansions his father had implemented during his time in the Army. One of the least successful was in horse-race betting: a credit bookmaking business run in conjunction with the football pools, an innovation which Robert noted swiftly was not making much money. He was also at a loss as to how to help improve it, since his knowledge of horse racing was extremely limited.
He knew one fact about the sport. It was a schoolboy belief that the best trainer of a racehorse lived somewhere in southern Ireland, and was named Vincent O’Brien. This man had trained the winner of the Grand National Steeplechase in each of the last three years Robert had spent at Repton, 1953–55, and achieved this with three different horses too. Robert reasoned that, since no one else had ever achieved this, O’Brien must be the best there is. At school the experts among his friends had asserted that the Grand National was for big, slow plodding ‘chasers’ and that the real kings of National Hunt racing were those who won the two main races at Cheltenham – the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle. One fifteen-year-old Irish tipster had then confided that a trainer called O’Brien had won each of those races as well, three times in a row. And that settled it in Robert’s mind. O’Brien must be the best.
Flat racing was essentially a mystery to him but, with Vernons now involved in credit betting, it was his bound duty to understand the basics of all gambling, the odds and the risks. As such he
