Twenty-nine runners took part. Chalk Stream beat three. But now, as Robert and Christine drove home to the Wirral, there was no air of despondency. Robert’s eyes were on the future. He wanted more racehorses. Maybe quite of lot of them. He and Eric Cousins were not finished yet. Not by a long way.
In fact Eric was already regarded as a ‘hot’ trainer. Earlier that season he had won the 1961 Lincolnshire Handicap with a lightly weighted runner called Johns Court from a massive field of thirty-seven horses. Lee rode him and the horse won by three lengths at 25–1. Johns Court was sensationally fit that day, but he never won again all season. Not that this troubled Eric much. He also won the 1962 Lincolnshire with a different horse, Hill Royal, which also carried about seven and a half stone in a field of forty. Robert’s victory at Kempton was the start of a quite remarkable rampage in this race by Eric Cousins. He was to win it for the next three years in succession. Everybody was talking about Eric Cousins. Bookmakers were griping and moaning, handicappers were furious with him, and the Stewards of the Jockey Club were beginning to get very beady. How the devil could this ex-fighter pilot keep on producing horses so superbly fit on the day, never with as much as one pound too much on the handicap, invariably at a whacking great price?
Robert, of course, was by now right in the thick of it. He had prised loose some family cash and now had half a dozen horses in training – all bought by Eric at the sales, all judged by him to be capable of ‘improvement’. And as he improved them the Stewards became crosser. They usually have a short unwritten ‘hit list’ of trainers they believe are being devious in the extreme, losing races when it suits them, and then flying to victory with light weights and big bets. To suggest Eric Cousins was on this ‘hit list’ of trainers who might be called in to face the Disciplinary Committee would be childish in the extreme. He was at the top of it. And everyone knew the Stewards were watching his every move.
The phrase ‘Cousins and Sangster’ was being heard in high places, as the pair of them toured the North Country and Scottish tracks having what Robert recalls as ‘some of the most wonderful days of my life’. The racing was very much ‘bush league’ but to the young heir to Vernons Pools those races might have been the Derby. Every one of them gave him a charge of adrenalin. He never gave a thought to the beckoning glory of great classic races, with hugely expensive horses and massive prizes. For him, every race in which he had a runner was the Derby, especially when Eric told them to ‘get on’. Robert just loved the local courses, and he loved to drive up to Scotland with his golf clubs, playing nine holes in the long summer evenings after the races, then dining sumptuously with his close friends, preparing to face the enemy (the bookmakers) once more on the morrow.
In those years of the 60s, he and Eric had some mighty ‘touches’. They also had some diabolical strokes of ill-fortune which were just another part of the game, but which the Stewards neither knew nor cared about. Goodwood Racecourse, set high in the glorious Sussex Downs with a long southerly view to Chichester Cathedral and the Isle of Wight, was the scene of perhaps their most spectacular catastrophe. It occurred in 1963. Nick Robinson, by now almost a ‘blood brother’ to Robert, was heavily involved. In fact Nick’s grandfather, the redoubtable Sir Foster, former captain and wicket-keeper for Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, fly fisherman and occasional punter, could be said to have been the instigator of the entire disaster. The race was the 120-year-old Stewards Cup, a six-furlong sprint handicap which was traditionally run on the opening day of Goodwood’s July Meeting. It is always an enormous betting race, a regular target for ‘hot’ trainers with lightly weighted horses. It provides also one of the most spectacular sights in all of English racing as a big Stewards Cup field thunders to the top of the hill, the silks stark against the horizon, and then hurtles line abreast down the steep dip towards the grandstand.
Old Sir Foster had actually lost this race three years in a row, finishing second every time with a very fast horse called Deer Leap. The distances were, hideously, a neck and two short heads. Each time Nick and Robert, not to mention Sir Foster, had had a good bet. Each time they lost – in 1961 to the great Skymaster. The Stewards Cup was not much short of a bug-bear to all of them. Now, as the 1963 season headed towards midsummer, Eric Cousins imparted the nerve-jangling news that Robert’s horse Highroy was just about fast enough to avenge Sir Foster. In fact the horse’s entire preparation would be for the Stewards Cup, and he, Eric, believed he would win it. This possessed enormous appeal to the Robin Hood of Vernons. He, Robert, now had the means to win them back all of their lost money. For weeks before the race, they plunged the cash onto Highroy, as if defeat was out of the question.
However, when the overnight declarations came up, there was bad news. The venerable Newmarket trainer Jack Jarvis had unexpectedly decided to run Lord Rosebery’s sprinter Creole, and naturally summoned his stylish stable jockey Peter Robinson to ride – the same Peter Robinson Eric had booked for Highroy. This was a serious blow. Eric hustled around and booked Paul Tulk for Highroy, a capable jockey but not his first choice. The race was, as usual, run at a ferocious pace and on the line Creole beat Highroy a short head. Robert and Nick could not believe their luck. Eric was very fed up too. But he had a plan. Three days later on the Friday there was another Goodwood sprint, the Chichester Stakes, and in his view Highroy would have recovered sufficiently to run and win. ‘The competition is not so hot,’ he said. ‘And Jarvis does not have a runner. Peter Robinson will ride for us.’
Once more Robert and Nick plunged into the bookmakers, and once more they stood, gripped by nerves, high in the County Stand, their fingers white-knuckled on their binoculars. This was getting expensive. And once more Highroy got beat in a photo-finish, by a short head.
‘Christ!’ said Robert. ‘Can you believe that could happen? Can you believe that?’
‘Not easily,’ said Nick. ‘By the way, did you see who rode the winner?’
‘If you say Paul Tulk I’ll probably commit suicide.’
‘Don’t do it, Robert,’ said Nick, shaking his head gravely. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’
This was not the only time in 1963 when Robert felt the need for a drink. It was an awful season for him. Not one of his horses won anywhere. But this seemed only to spur him on to greater ambitions, to own more horses, to go racing more often, and to study formlines and breeding lines even more assiduously.
Curiously it had been a powerful owner-breeder and member of the Jockey Club who had inspired him to lose so much money on those Goodwood sprints. And now it would be the same senior establishment figure who would get it all back for him and more. Sir Foster Robinson had a two-year-old filly who had not yet won a race. She was bright chestnut in colour and rather lean and athletic in conformation. Her name was Homeward Bound. It was her ancestry which intrigued Robert: she was a half-sister to Chalk Stream, his very first horse, both of them being out of Sir Foster’s mare Sabie River. When Nick imparted the news that his grandfather’s trainer, John Oxley, thought she would win the Oaks, England’s premier mile-and-a-half classic for fillies, run at Epsom three days after the Derby in June, Robert could scarcely locate a bookmaker fast enough.
On the day of the race the bookmakers were still offering 100–7 against Homeward Bound winning the Oaks. They who handled the accounts of N. J. F. Robinson and R. Sangster lived, however, to rue their careless and uncharacteristic generosity. On a wet afternoon on Epsom Downs, Homeward Bound came with a tremendous run down the middle to win the 1964 Oaks by two lengths from Windmill Girl (the future dam of Arthur Budgett’s two Derby winners). It was the finest moment in all of his years of racing for Sir Foster Robinson, now aged eighty-four. It was not half bad for his grandson and his sidekick either.
The victory of Homeward Bound did not spur Robert Sangster on towards the upper reaches of thoroughbred racing – with thoughts of perhaps one day owning an Oaks winner of his own, or perhaps even a Derby winner, or any other classic winner. But rather it seemed to concentrate his mind on the intricacies of breeding racehorses, as indeed
