Red Rum’s flat out start
QUESTION Was Red Rum originally trained to run on the flat?
YES, the three times Grand National winner Red Rum was bred to be a sprinter, not to race over the fences.
The bay gelding was born on May 3, 1965, at Martyn J. McEnery’s Rossenarra Stud near Kells, Co. Kilkenny. Owner Maurice Kingsley named him after the last three letters of his dam, Mared, and sire, Quorum.
Quorum had finished second in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket in 1957 and won the Jersey Stakes at Royal Ascot.
Mared was temperamental: she was a rich bay colour, but before a race would turn black with sweat and white with froth. She won only once in a brief racing career.
Red Rum’s flat career lasted for ten races. He dead- heated on his first appearance on April 7, 1967, at Liverpool when the Grand National meeting was a dual flat and jumps occasion. He was a month short of two years old and ridden by Paul Cook.
One more victory was achieved that year when he was ridden by D. W. Morris at Warwick. The following year saw Red Rum win first time out at Doncaster ridden by Geoff Lewis.
His final flat race came a few days later at the Grand National meeting. He was ridden by Lester Piggott and beaten by a short head, though many a good judge including the jockey believed he had won. There was no photo finish at that time.
Red Rum was sold soon afterwards to a jumping stable and went on to make history, winning the Grand National in 1973, 1974 and 1977.
D. Urquhart, Burntisland, Fife.
QUESTION What was the last country to use an alternative time system?
FRENCH Revolutionary Time was a shortlived experiment based on the decimal system: a ten-hour day with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute.
The French Revolutionary Government of 1792 decimalised practically everything. Some elements were successful and enduring: the standardised metric values for lengths, weights and measures have been widely adopted. Others were less welcome, such as the attempt to alter the Babylonian system of geometry by assigning 100 ‘grades’, not 90 degrees, to a right angle.
French Revolutionary Time became official on November 24, 1793, but was mostly ignored by the people. It has few practical advantages and replacing every clock in the country would have been too expensive.
A handful of watchmakers produced decimal chronometers and clocks. Some dials combined duodecimal hours and their sexagesimal divisions — the normal 24-hour day divided into 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes — with decimal divisions in a failed attempt to familiarise the public with the change.
Daily life and foreign trade put paid to French Revolutionary Time. It became non-mandatory on April 7, 1795, having lasted just 17 months.
Joseph Morris, Coventry.
QUESTION Were condemned prisoners reprieved following the suspension of the death penalty in 1965?
SIXTEEN men who had been condemned to death for their crimes were reprieved when capital punishment was abolished.
All death penalties were suspended when Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to office in October 1964.
On November 9, 1965, the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, a Private Member’s Bill sponsored by Labour MP Sydney Silverman, suspended capital punishment for this crime for five years.
The last person to be sentenced to death was David Stephen Chapman, a 23-year- old lifeguard at Scarborough’s North Bay swimming pool.
He had been out drinking with fellow lifeguard Paul Reid before they returned to take a swim in the pool. They were confronted by night watchman Alfred Harland and a scuffle ensued.
Chapman claimed Harland’s death was an accident, but Reid described how the other lifeguard had kept pushing the struggling security guard back into the water until he died.
On November 1, 1965, a jury at Leeds Assizes found Chapman guilty of capital murder and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Reid was convicted of being an accessory after the fact of grievous bodily harm.
Due to the impending legislation a few days later, Chapman was reprieved and sentenced to life imprisonment.
On July 23, 1964, Ronald John Cooper shot dead 67-year-old Joseph Hayes, the managing director of a ship repair company, in Barking, East London, during a robbery. He also shot and injured Elsie Hayes before fleeing with £1,878.
Cooper went on the run to New York and then on to the Bahamas, where he worked as a croupier.
If he had been caught and tried at the time of the murder, it’s possible he could have been hanged. By the time he was extradited, the court case was held and he was sentenced to death, he knew he would be reprieved.
The last two executions in Britain were carried out simultaneously at 8am on August 13, 1964, in Walton prison, Liverpool, and Strangeways prison, Manchester. Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans (real name John Robson Walby) were hanged for the murder of laundry man John West.
During the five-year suspension, one case led to fierce debate over whether the death penalty should be abolished.
On April 27, 1966, child killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady went on trial at Chester Assizes for the infamous Moors murders.
On December 16, 1969, the House of Commons reaffirmed its decision to abolish capital punishment for murder. On a free vote, the House voted by 343 to 185, a majority of 158, that the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 should not expire. Sarah Westwood, Birmingham.
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