TRAILBLAZER
Vincent O’Brien’s 1954 title was founded on big-race domination
LUDLOW, the small market town in Shropshire that John Betjeman once described as ‘probably the loveliest in England’ does not usually play a part in a major sporting story.
Last Wednesday however, its charming racetrack became the latest destination on Willie Mullins’ whistle-stop tour of Britain in his quest to become champion National Hunt trainer across the Irish sea.
His son, Patrick, rode Daddy Long Legs in the opening race of Ludlow’s Wye Valley Brewery Day. And they claimed the novice hurdle without coming off the bridle — adding £4,357 to his winnings in Britain for the season.
Ffos Las, Ludlow and Perth were just some of the spots the Mullins team pitched up to in recent weeks as he sought to keep ahead of Dan Skelton and Paul Nicholls before the British season concluded in Sandown yesterday. Since I Am Maximus’s Aintree Grand National win, Mullins made no secret of his ambition to bridge a 70-year-gap and become the second Irish trainer, after Vincent O’Brien, to finish top of the pile in Britain.
While the two legendary trainers now sit side by side in the history books for achieving that feat, things were a little different in 1954. O’Brien didn’t need to venture to deepest Shropshire or Perthshire. His two consecutive seasons as top trainer in Britain (he also finished second in 1954-55) were rooted entirely in his domination of Cheltenham and Aintree, so perhaps it is fitting that Mullins emulates the feat in a year when he made it a century of festival winners, while also claiming Grand National glory.
O’Brien had never set foot on an English racecourse before going to Cheltenham for the first time in 1948 when he won his first Gold Cup with Cottage Rake. In all, he’d win 23 races at National Hunt’s greatest festival over 11 years before turning his attention to becoming king of the flat.
For more than a decade, his life revolved around Cheltenham. As his brother and longtime righthand man Dermot told Raymond Smith in
Vincent O’Brien: The Man and the Legend,
the focus in the yard turned from the first of January. ‘Dermot had a term for it. Cheltenhamitis,’ Smith wrote. After his first success with Cottage Rake, the victory parade in Churchtown saw O’Brien carried shoulder-high through his native village, while Frank Vickerman, the English wool merchant who owned the horse, ‘went around the village’s three pubs in advance and told them to stock up on stout and that he would foot the bill,’ according to Smith.
Only five years before, O’Brien had contemplated becoming a butcher following the death of his father, Dan, from pneumonia. The family farm went to O’Brien’s stepbrother — the first-born of his father’s first marriage — and the man who would become the greatest trainer of all time thought about leaving the world of racing.
The intervention of Jackie O’Brien (no relation), a wool merchant in Fermoy, changed everything. He asked Vickerman, who had moved his textile business from Yorkshire to Dublin after the outbreak of the Second World War, to allow the young O’Brien train a couple of his horses. From there began an extraordinary career.
O’Brien was ahead of his time in how he dominated Cheltenham. In the late 1940s, it was customary for Irish trainers to send their horses to England by ferry; O’Brien was the first to fly them across.
An old RAF bomber was converted into a transport plane and in March 1949, his three Cheltenham challengers — Cottage Rake (Gold Cup), Hatton’s Grace (Champion Hurdle) and Castledermot (National Hunt chase) — were all flown from Shannon to Bristol in a journey that took three hours. In time, O’Brien would build his own landing strip at Ballydoyle to fly horses all over the globe but in 1949, it was considered a bit out there. That was until all three horses won, with Cottage Rake successfully defending his Gold Cup title despite the race being postponed for a month because of frost.
When O’Brien started ruling the Grand National, he became a trainer to be feared in England. From 1953 to 1955, he achieved the unique feat of winning the world’s most famous race with three different horses — Early Mist in 1953, Royal Tan the following year and Quare Times in 1955.
The first season, 1952/53, that O’Brien was champion trainer, he claimed his first Gold Cup and Grand National double, while also winning the Great Yorkshire Handicap at Doncaster. Place money didn’t count, so O’Brien finished top having made £15,515 from five wins. Runner-up Ryan Price had 78 wins to earn £15,359.
O’Brien targeted — and usually won — the biggest and most lucrative races and his success was celebrated wildly by an Irish public who had precious little to smile about during the grim 1950s.
When Early Mist won O’Brien’s first Grand National in 1953, thousands lined O’Connell Street as the horse was paraded towards the Mansion House for a ceremony officiated by then Dublin Lord Mayor Andy Clarkin — there was even a chocolate bar named in honour of the horse.
However, not everyone revelled in O’Brien’s success. When he was named champion trainer in England for the second time in 1954, his licence was suspended in Ireland for three months due to an apparent discrepancy between the English and Irish form of four of his horses — Royal Tan, Lucky Dome, Early Mist and Knock Hard.
Having returned from Aintree in triumph having claimed the Liverpool Hurdle, Coronation Hurdle and Mildmay Chase as well as the Grand National, confirming him as the superior trainer in England, he was summoned before a committee of the Irish National Hunt stewards to explain the inconsistent running of his horses in Ireland.
As his wife Jacqueline O’Brien recalls in the official biography she wrote with Ivor Herbert: ‘Vincent was shocked beyond belief, but he had been aware for some time that there was some ill-feeling towards him… the charge was that four horses had run inconsistently. Inconsistent running is not an offence. A horse is not a machine and may run inconstantly without blame to anyone.’
O’Brien explained there were various factors behind the different results, such as ground, pace of race, size of field. But it fell on deaf ears and at the time England was in thrall to the genius of a trainer from North Cork, he was out in the cold in his own country.
It was brought up in the Dail by Noel Davern, a deputy for Tipperary, who accused ‘green-eyed individuals’ of ‘being jealous’. And there was something to that.
As Herbert writes: ‘With that 1954 suspension, it is important to consider the attitude of the racing authorities towards this extraordinarily successful young trainer. He had started in the rustic fields of North Cork. He has moved to a remote farm in Tipperary. His family had never been part of Dublin society or the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.’
And they wanted to put O’Brien in his place. But his genius ensured that he was able to rise above that. For 70 years, he stood alone in racing history as an Irish trainer who was able to get the better of his British counterparts over a season — that was until yesterday when Willie Mullins burnished his own legendary status even further.