The curious tale of Little Owl and Willie Wumpkins
Hthe two characters gave Jim Wilson a Festival to remember, but he feels for absent amateurs this year
Little Owl and Willie Wumpkins might sound like characters from a Beatrix Potter book, but they were two horses who defined amateur rider Jim Wilson’s Cheltenham Festival 40 years ago.
A year earlier, in 1980, Wilson had been leading rider at the meeting – the last amateur to do so – with three winners. But he capped that in 1981 when Little Owl beat his stable companion Night Nurse by 1½ lengths in the Gold Cup, and Willie Wumpkins, aged 13, galloped up the hill to win a third straight Coral Golden Hurdle.
Brought up in Ireland to English parents but with a pedigree steeped in racing, including having Fred Winter as an uncle by marriage, Wilson went to work for trainer David Nicholson aged 19 and stayed seven years.
“I call it luck,” says Wilson, reflecting on the Gold Cup. “I had an aunt called Bobby
Gundry who owned horses. Peter Easterby took her into a field of 40 horses and she picked out the newest, shiniest four-year-old who had just come from the sales. Peter sold him to her for £2,200.
“He was tall, gangly and not overly robust, but the first year he won all three starts ridden by Jonjo O’neill. After a couple of years, he started over fences at Newcastle. Peter looked at Jonjo in the paddock and asked: ‘He jumps well at home, doesn’t he?’ And they came to the conclusion that they had missed him out and that he had never jumped a fence! He duly won that and all his starts until the Festival, when he had a disagreement with Jonjo and they parted company at the 10th.”
That Cheltenham week in 1980 had been an extraordinary one for the pipe-smoking amateur and ended up altering the course of his riding career.
Not only did he rule Cheltenham, he also had a victory at Southwell on the Monday, the day before the big meeting started, and rode a winner for his best man at Chepstow on the Saturday, two days after it finished.
“That Saturday night, I spoke to Bobby, who was in great form, and she gave me a b------ing for falling off one,” he adds. “At 4am on Sunday, I got a call saying she’d died and we knew she’d left Little Owl to my brother Robin and me.”
The seeds for Little Owl’s Gold Cup had been sown at Cheltenham the previous January. “It was very foggy, you could hardly see your hand in front of your face,” Wilson recalls. “But Owly remembered the fence where he’d had the contretemps the previous spring. However, by the time he’d jumped it twice, he was OK.
“In the Gold Cup, everything went right and the first thing I did on crossing the line was to put my hand up to Heaven to thank Bobby,” recalls Wilson. “You couldn’t book a pub until they opened at 6pm in those days, so the moment I could, I rang one in Andoversford and booked 100 covers.”
Little Owl never kicked on – he picked up a virus the following season and was never quite the same again, although he had made his mark on history.
In many ways, Willie Wumpkins was an even bigger hero, winning four races at the Festival, the first, the Ballymore
Hurdle, in 1973. Eight years later, he won what is now the Pertemps Final for the third time with Wilson on board.
He was owned and trained at Stow-on-the-wold by Wilson’s mother-in-law, Jane Pilkington, but he did not stand training, lost weight and had to be nursed back to health. He returned to Cheltenham for the 1978 Pertemps when he was “murdered” in the race, although Wilson still came in telling his mother-in-law they would come back next year and win it – and duly did.
“We knew, with his health, that we only had one go a year with him,” recalled Wilson. “We trained him for the one day.”
Having not ridden a winner at Cheltenham until he was 29, Wilson’s record of seven Festival winners for an amateur stood until 2019. He also won the Pertemps as a trainer with Taberna Lord in 1987.
There will be no amateurs riding at the Festival as they fail to meet the criteria for being “elite” sportsmen. “It’s sad, but I totally understand,” says Wilson who will, for the first time in 50 years, be watching from his armchair instead of being at Prestbury Park. “I feel sorry for them, of course I do – you don’t get too many chances to ride at our Olympics. But, at least, we have got racing.”