‘Now this is a tricky subject.’ said Nick doing his best to simplify it. ‘In big races they do all carry the same weight, but this is a handicap and all the horses are weighted differently. The Jockey Club handicapper is basically trying to get them all to finish in a line, a dead heat. So he piles weight on the good horses to slow them up and leaves the less good ones with just a little. The idea being that every horse has a fair chance.’
‘What kind of weight?’
‘Oh, just lead weight slipped into the saddle cloth.’
‘You mean, if the jockey weighs eight stone and the horse has to carry nine stone, they just put fourteen pounds of lead in the cloth?’
‘That’s it. Chuck in a couple of pounds for the saddle and there’ll be six pounds of lead either side of the horse’s flanks.’
‘Yes, but how do they know what weight to put in? How does the handicapper know that his weights will slow the good horse down enough for the slower ones to catch him?’
‘Well, that is a real speciality which can take almost a lifetime to master. But in the broadest possible terms, if, in a one-mile race, Horse A beats Horse B by three lengths at level weights, the handicapper will calculate it at two pounds a length, and he will ask Horse A to carry six pounds more than Horse B the next time they meet over a mile. In theory this should bring them across the line together. Of course it may not, because Horse A may have more in hand than everyone thought, and he may again win by three lengths, and the handicapper will give him six pounds more the next time. Eventually the handicapper will stop him from winning.’
‘So,’ said Robert, ‘if a horse keeps losing, his weight is likely to get a lot lighter?’
‘Precisely. And some trainers deliberately keep a horse losing – it’s called “working him down the handicap” – until he has a weight so light he could not possibly be beaten. I mean, for example, he’s carrying seven stone, when he should really be carrying nine stone …’
‘And that’s when they have a real bet?’ said Robert.
‘Correct.’
‘Christ! Is that what’s happening with Chalk Stream?’
‘I am not sure about that, but Arthur Budgett, his trainer, says he is “very nicely weighted” – and that’ll do for me. I’m backing him to win the Lincoln, 23 March.’
‘Where do they run the Lincoln?’
‘Lincoln. On a Wednesday. The race is always like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They try to go flat out from start to finish and if our horse wins … well, there’s no feeling of elation quite like it.’
‘Especially if your pockets are full of the bookmaker’s money,’ said Robert. ‘OK, Nick,’ he added, seeking some final assurance, ‘now just tell me very simply why you think Chalk Stream is actually going to win.’
‘Well, mainly because he damn nearly won it last year, dead-heated for second place. He has won three races, but last season he was very unlucky, placed second five times. Now I hear he is very well, working sharply in the morning and he has that low weight.’
Robert decided then and there that he would join the owner’s grandson and place a bet of £25 each way on the horse. He did so with another bookmaker, not Vernons Credit Betting, and they all waited, with almost daily conferences at the Kardomah, for the great day to come.
On Saturday morning, 19 March, they met at the coffee house early, prior to Robert driving his colleagues fast back out to the Wirral to play rugby that afternoon for Birkenhead Park. Nick was there first, poring over the Sporting Life, the specialist newspaper for the horse-racing industry. As far as the others were concerned it might have been printed in Latin. But Nick had known his way around that publication almost since birth, and now he had the page open at the Four-Day Acceptors, and he was studying precisely who the opposition would be, the booked jockeys and, above all, the weights.
‘The first thing to check’, he said, ‘is the top weight … damn it. Sovereign Path’s stood its ground.’
‘I suppose there is no possibility of you breaking into English?’ said Robert. ‘What d’you mean “Damn it. Sovereign Path’s stood its ground”?’
‘Well, Sovereign Path, who is a very tough grey horse, has already won six races, one of them by ten lengths. He nearly won a classic trial last season and he is the best horse in the Lincoln. I was rather hoping he would not be ready this early in the season. But he’s in and his jockey is booked. He’ll run. Still, he has a huge amount of weight – nine stone five pounds. No horse has carried that much to win the Lincoln this century. Anyway, I don’t really think he will be happy giving us thirty pounds.’
‘Could you tell me how you know all that stuff, about the biggest weight this century and everything?’ asked Robert.
‘Oh, those are just little facts that all horse-racing people know, or somehow get to know, round about the time of the Lincoln. I think the biggest weight was carried by Dorigen who won in 1933. I’m not sure of the exact amount, but it was less than nine-five.’
‘Well, it would take me about fifty years to learn it all,’ said Robert, and then, ‘Hey! What about this horse, Courts Appeal, he’s from the O’Brien stable in Ireland. Vincent O’Brien, best trainer in the world.’
Nick looked up, grinning. Robert, flushed with success, having detonated his one shining fact about racing, decided to elaborate, and he charged on. ‘Trained the runner-up in the Derby for the same owner, John McShain, a couple of years ago, as I remember. A very shrewd man.’
Nick replied, ‘Yes, and he trained Mr McShain’s mare Gladness to win the Gold Cup a couple of years ago, and they’ll probably make Courts Appeal favourite just because O’Brien is bringing him over from Ireland. But he won’t win, not with eight stone twelve pounds.’
At this stage Robert shuddered at the thought of his early view that this was a rather ‘uncomplicated sport’, since such a notion could clearly have been considered only by a lunatic. This was the most complicated sport he had ever known. It would, he thought, take a lifetime to comprehend it.
On the day of the race, all of them were strategically placed around the city with phone lines open to Robert’s credit office to hear the result. This was, of course, long before the days of commentaries being beamed into betting shops and call-in phone lines. And when they heard the result there was a terrible hush. Chalk Stream had finished nowhere. In fact he had finished twenty-ninth out of thirty-one. Understandably Nick Robinson was a bit sheepish and did not call Robert until he had ascertained that the gelding had been very hesitant at the start, had lost his place in the general mêlée for position, and never got into the race at all. Such things happen every day in racing, but Nick was nonetheless quite upset that his new friend had lost so heavily and told him they would have another chance. Chalk Stream would come good, of that he was sure.
What he did not know was that Robert Sangster did not give a tinker’s cuss about the result, or the £50. He could not remember having had such fun (at least, not since he had flattened Tiny Davies). For weeks now he had been personally involved in this major horse race. Somehow he had lived that Lincolnshire Handicap in his mind. It was almost as if he had been there at the racecourse, listening to the roar of the crowd as the field thundered into the last furling.
In
