Peter Walwyn
Champion Flat racing trainer whose career reached its height in 1975 when Grundy won the Derby
PETER WALWYN, the racehorse trainer, who has died aged 84, was most famously associated with Grundy, winner of seven of his 10 races, including the 1975 Derby. It was in the mid-seventies that Walwyn’s career was at its height. In 1974 he won the Oaks with Polygamy and the Irish Derby with English Prince, finishing the year as leading trainer and the first to send out more than 100 winners in a season.
That autumn the two-year-old golden chestnut Grundy took the Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket in fine style, romping home by six lengths in very soft ground. Walwyn had already twice come close to winning the Derby (Shoemaker had come second to Blakeney in 1970, and Linden Tree had chased home Mill Reef in 1971), and he felt that Grundy would have an outstanding chance.
As it turned out, he enjoyed “the most glorious day of my life, bar my wedding day” when Grundy, sent off the 5-1 second favourite, won at Epsom under Pat Eddery by three lengths from the filly Nobiliary.
Grundy also won the Irish 2,000 Guineas and the Irish Derby; and his battle with Bustino in the 1975 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, in which he finally prevailed by half a length, is still sometimes referred to as “the race of the century”. During his racing career Grundy set the then record in prize money for an English-trained horse, £373,563. Walwyn retained the title of champion trainer in 1975, again sending out more than 100 winners.
Over the years Walwyn’s owners included Evelyn de Rothschild, Charles St George, Lord Howard de Walden and Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum. He was also sent horses by the Wildenstein family, but this was a relationship that failed to prosper: they were, Walwyn said, “unpleasant and ungrateful people”.
Nicknamed “Basil Fawlty” by one of his stable lads, Walwyn was a stickler for tradition and not shy of saying what he thought. For example, he had little time for Frankie Dettori’s habit of performing a flying dismount in the unsaddling enclosure after he won a race. “It is completely unnecessary and could easily scare a horse,” Walwyn declared, “to say nothing of the risk of breaking an ankle.” It was a “gimmick for the benefit of the public … [that] should be prohibited officially.”
Another jockey who failed to impress him was Willie Carson, whom Walwyn described as “very opinionated” and whom he accused of seldom consulting him after Carson had ridden one of Sheikh Hamdan’s horses (Carson was retained by the Sheikh): “I felt that probably even Sheikh Hamdan’s butler, if he had one, would know more about the jockey’s verdict than I did. Willie certainly rode some winners for us, but he also lost some big races which I felt he should have won.”
In his memoir, Handy All the Way: a Trainer’s Life (2000), Walwyn wrote: “For many years there has been a small number of people whom I have disliked, because, in my opinion, they have done us wrong. I have always had an inkling that it would be good have a bus to take them all over Beachy Head … Willie Carson would have an upstairs seat; Alec Wildenstein would definitely be the driver.”
Peter Tyndall Walwyn was born at Hastings on July 1 1933, the son of Charles “Taffy” Walwyn, a soldier who rode in Army showjumping teams and was a winning point-to-point rider. As a First World War battery commander he won an MC and a DSO, and was three times mentioned in despatches.
The Walwyns, Peter claimed, were descended from a nephew of King Arthur, and one of his forebears was said to have been a standard bearer for Henry V at Agincourt. His grandfather, James, served at the Second Relief of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. Peter’s paternal grandmother was descended from William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English. Fulke Walwyn – later a celebrated National Hunt trainer – was Peter’s first cousin.
Both his parents loved hunting, and Peter was brought up in a rambling country house near Moreton-in-marsh, Gloucestershire. At his prep school in Surrey, he was by his own admission “never any sort of scholar, and even worse at games” – but he “squeezed” into Charterhouse, where he lamented the lack of a beagle pack. Peter May, who would become one of the greatest cricketers of his generation, was head boy at the time.
When Walwyn went for National Service, the Army doctors diagnosed a back problem which ruled him out of getting a commission in the Scots Greys. Instead he became Gunner Walwyn 22589717 with the Royal Artillery at Oswestry. Later, stationed at Catterick, he served as ablutions orderly in charge of scrubbing the latrines. He finished his spell in the Army as a corporal with the Intelligence Corps, based in Austria.
Determined to make his way as a trainer, in 1956 he embarked on three years as assistant to Geoffrey Brooke at Newmarket. He was then invited by Fulke Walwyn’s sister, Helen Johnson Houghton, to hold the trainer’s licence at her yard at Blewbury, Berkshire. (In those days women were not allowed to train under their own names.)
In January 1960 Walwyn married Virginia Gaselee, always known as “Bonk”. (This was, Walwyn was at pains to point out, “long before the name had its modern connotations”, and the nickname derived from how she and her brother Nick had been called “the two Bonks” by their grandfather.)
The newly-weds bought a small stable, Windsor Lodge, at Lambourn in Berkshire, for £12,000, and Walwyn had a winner with only his second runner, Don Verde, at Worcester, in October 1960. Among the first horses to arrive at the yard was Be Hopeful, which would eventually win 27 of its 115 races.
In 1965 Walwyn moved to larger facilities at Seven Barrows, not far from Windsor Lodge, which came with 300 acres. By now he was a trainer to watch. In 1967 he was sent horses by the Irish owner-breeder Major Dermot Mccalmont, and in 1969 Walwyn sent out Lucyrowe to win the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot by an official 12 lengths (Walwyn put it at more like 18). In the same year he trained the champion two-year-old filly, Humble Duty, which in 1970 went on to win the 1,000 Guineas by seven lengths under Lester Piggott. It was Walwyn’s first Classic winner. Humble Duty went on to take the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot and the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood.
In 1971 Walwyn got into trouble with the racing authorities over the running of Rock Roi in the Ascot Gold Cup. The horse suffered from arthritis, and on the advice of his vet the trainer put him on a course of an antiinflammatory drug. The dosing instructions said that the drug should not be given less than 72 hours before a race, and Walwyn stopped the course more than four days before the event. Rock Roi won, but tested positive for an illegal substance. Although the amount detected was minuscule, the Jockey Club subsequently disqualified Rock Roi. Walwyn was fined £100 (the minimum penalty) and exonerated of any sharp practice.
Walwyn could not know it, but his triumphs of 1975 would never be repeated. In 1977 he won the Champion Stakes with Vitiges and finished the season with 111 winners, but the following season his stable suffered its first serious attack of “the virus”; for two months (from early August to early October) he failed to send out a single winner.
As is often the way when trainers encounter ill-fortune, the stable never fully recovered. By 1991 he was down to 67 horses, sending out only 27 winners, and in 1992 he moved back to Windsor House after 27 years at Seven Barrows, which was taken over by the jumps trainer Nicky Henderson.
Walwyn finally retired in 1999, lamenting the way in which latter-day owners chopped and changed their trainers. “Since I grew up,” he wrote, “I have had only one lawyer, one accountant, and one stockbroking firm; trust and loyalty have always been extremely important to me. Unfortunately, the average racehorse owner today is probably a self-made businessman who wants a quick return and has not grasped the basics of horse management.”
Peter Walwyn won many friends as an active chairman of the Lambourn Trainers’ Association, and was appointed MBE in 2012. He was elected a member of the Jockey Club in 1999, and received the Daily Telegraph Lifetime Award of Merit.
His wife died in 2014; they had a son and a daughter.