lightly weighted chestnut gelding Mustavon, hard under the whip, fought a gripping battle with Jim Joel’s Major General to win by three parts of a length. It had been a terrific race. There was less than a length between the first three. The big weight had beaten Sovereign Path, as it also had beaten the O’Brien-trained favourite Courts Appeal. In a strange way Robert felt a part of all this, as if their studied calculations in the Kardomah had somehow influenced the result.
There was now only one thing Robert wanted in this life. He wanted to buy a racehorse. And the racehorse he wanted to buy was Chalk Stream.
Quite frankly, Nick was flabbergasted. But Robert did not habitually make jests about matters like £1000, the sum he was offering. Nick knew his grandfather had paid only 620 guineas for Chalk Stream’s dam, Sabie River, and he set about trying to get the horse for racing’s brand new devotee. There were many conferences between Sir Foster and his trainer Arthur Budgett, but after several weeks of negotiation they agreed to sell. Robert gave the son of the stallion Midas to Christine as a wedding present. Chalk Stream would henceforth be campaigned in the colours of Mrs Robert Sangster.
The first thing Robert needed was a trainer and he wanted one close to Chester so that he and Christine could visit the horse. He chose the thirty-nine-year-old Eric Cousins, a rather dashing ex-RAF pilot who had ridden fifty winners as an amateur over the jumps. He was a top-class horseman, a keen fox-hunter and had won the great long-distance handicap, the Ascot Stakes, at the Royal Meeting in 1957, just three years after taking out his licence to train. Better yet, he was developing a burgeoning reputation for his ability to place highly trained horses into exactly the right spot on the handicap. He had just moved his horses from Rangemore, near Burton-on-Trent, right into the heart of Cheshire, at Sandy Brow Stables, outside the country town of Tarporley, less than an hour’s drive from the Wirral.
Chalk Stream journeyed north from the historic Budgett stables of Whatcombe in Berkshire and met his new trainer. He was already fit and sharp, but Cousins set about trying to improve him. He ran him often and the horse showed courage running into the first four on four occasions and then winning, on one glorious afternoon at Haydock Park, eleven miles out of Liverpool. It was a little handicap named after the nearby village of Hermitage Green, but Chalk Stream won it by two lengths at 3–1. Robert and Christine and all of the entourage, including, of course, a massively relieved Nick Robinson, had the most wonderful celebration.
Then Cousins worked the magic again, sending Chalk Stream to victory at the old Manchester Racecourse in early October. It was quite a competitive little contest, its prize money sponsored by a local dog-food firm, and afterwards Eric Cousins announced that he would now prepare Chalk Stream for a shot at a big race, the Liverpool Autumn Cup, to be run on the flat at Aintree, almost opposite the Vernons Pools offices, on a Friday afternoon in the dying days of the flat race season, 4 November. The prize money was about £1000 to the winning owner.
Robert had rarely known such overpowering elation (not since Tiny hit the deck, anyway) as he experienced in the days leading up to that great North Country handicap. Just to have a chance. Just to be in there with a horse. To be at the local racecourse with all of his friends. What a day it was going to be.
The weights were announced. Chalk Stream was in with seven stone two pounds. ‘Is that good?’ asked Robert. ‘That’s very adequate,’ replied Cousins, which Robert took to mean: ‘We’re in with a real shout here.’ He proceeded to have what was the biggest bet of his life, £100 on the nose. Chalk Stream to win. ‘I’ll take 9–1.’ They all went in, some of them with ten bob, Nick with £25.
As the field of eleven went down to post on a cool, windy afternoon at Aintree, Robert and his men gathered in the owners’ little stand with a good view down the course. Eric Cousins had decided the horse was better over distances of beyond the mile of the Lincoln, and today’s test would be over an extended ten furlongs. The trainer mentioned to Robert before they went off that the start was the problem. Chalk Stream hated ‘jumping off’ and was apt to ‘dwell’ making up his mind whether to run. This split-second indecision had cost him his chance in the Lincoln, but today Eric Cousins fervently hoped he would break fast with the rest of the field.
But this time luck was against him. They came under starter’s orders in a good line, but as the tapes flew up, only ten horses rushed forward. Chalk Stream had done it again. Eric Cousins’s whispered oath was not heard by Mrs Sangster, but they all saw Chalk Stream hesitate and finally break several lengths behind the field. ‘Is he out of it?’ asked Robert. ‘Not yet,’ replied his trainer, but the field was racing towards the home turn with Chalk Stream very definitely last with a great deal of ground to make up. His rider, the five-pound-claiming apprentice Brian Lee, was sitting very still and then, halfway round the turn Chalk Stream began to improve. The commentator was calling out the leaders, ‘Royal Chief, Windy Edge, Laird of Montrose, Tompion, the favourite Chino improving …’
Chalk Stream was in the middle of the pack as they came off the turn. Lee switched him off the rails and the big gelding set off gamely down the outside. They hit the two-furlong pole. Chino struck the front, chased hard by Chalk Stream still with two lengths to find. The Liverpool crowd roared as Lee went to the whip and Chalk Stream quickened again. As they hit the furlong pole he burst clear of the field and then drew right away to win by three lengths from Tompion, with Chino the same distance back in third. Robert Edmund Sangster nearly died of excitement. Forget Tiny, this was the biggest moment of his life. To this day he says, ‘I will never forget the Liverpool Autumn Cup. Not if I live for a hundred years.’
Robert ordered the finest champagne for the celebration. Dinner went on into the small hours. ‘I wish’, he told his friends late that night, ‘that this day would never end.’ And in a sense, it never did. Robert Sangster had taken the very first steps towards becoming, one day, the most powerful owner and breeder of thoroughbred horses in the entire two-hundred-year modern history of the Sport of Kings.
Robert Sangster learned, before the 1961 racing season even opened, what it was like to be hit hard by the Jockey Club handicapper. For the Liverpool Spring Cup, Chalk Stream was put up nine pounds in the weights. In addition, on the day of the race, he behaved very mulishly at the start, finally condescended to run, and trailed in ninth of thirteen. Fortunately Eric Cousins, liking neither the weights nor Chalk Stream’s general attitude, had told Robert on no account to have a bet. The weight was a problem, but the real trouble was in Chalk Stream’s mind. In Cousins’s opinion he may have been one of those horses which carry for a long time bad memories of a race. They remember the whip and the aching that all athletes experience in the final stages of a hard struggle. Chalk Stream had had a tough one at Liverpool in November and he did not really want to line up at the start ever again.
But he had an easy time in the Spring Cup – the jockey did not drive him out when defeat was inevitable – and Eric again tested him in mid April, and he finished second at Wolverhampton coming with a strong, steady run from two furlongs out. Again it was a not hard race, nothing like the great battle he had fought in November, coming from far back to victory when the money was down. Eric Cousins decided the time was right to bring Chalk Stream to a fever pitch of fitness and send him out to try and win the Great Jubilee Handicap worth nearly £3000 (probably £30,000 in today’s currency) on the fast, flat course of Kempton Park to the south-west of London.
Naturally Robert and his team, who would be making the two-hundred-mile journey south for the race, wanted to know two things: was he going to run well, and did they have a bet. For once Eric Cousins was cautious. He told Robert very carefully, ‘In a handicap like this he cannot afford to throw it away at the start. If he is difficult
