Ian’s November Journal

November has always been my favourite month.

Right from the day Gaykart just outpointed Pretty Puffin, with Eric Eldin getting the better of Lester Piggott on a bitterly cold Newmarket afternoon and urchins were begging ‘A penny for the Guy, mister?’ I adored the early fading light, Proust beside an ancient gas fire, my college friend Jeff Connor already working on the Mackeson Gold Cup.

Jeff loved jump racing and was one of the first to be more than happy with horses making their seasonal reappearance in a big race. Thus he made an impressive profit when Fred Rimell dominated the Mackeson in the late 1960s.

It was always the Mackeson to me, those tv adverts featuring bottles of milk stout playing football, rugby or whatever until one of them made a mistake and fell over, the massed ranks of Mackeson supporters heaving a collective sigh and an ‘Oh, Mackeson!’ whereupon the culprit would pick himself up, down a bottle of Reading’s finest brew and waltz through the opposition until, well, you know the rest.

In the flat-sharing days in London we played a lot of Gordon Lightfoot and there was plenty of November in his Does Your Mother Know? about a girl who’d left home and headed west and was feeling the pinch.

‘But the letters that you write,

In the faded winter light

Just tell her, they tell her,

That you’ve got ten dollars and your rent card’s paid

And when you get straight

You’re gonna come back east someday.’

When I worked in the drinks business, one of the products I sold around Hounslow and Isleworth was Hennessy cognac and members of the de Pracomtal family were regular visitors to Gilbey House in Harlow.

They were wonderful sponsors at Newbury and one year it was decided to invite all previous winning owners, trainers and jockeys of the big handicap to a special lunch at the course. I was new product development manager by this time and was asked to assist Arthur Hopkins, the most ‘cor blimey’ London public relations man you’ve ever met, when we started to compile the list and find everyone going back to Mandarin in the late Fifties. Arthur, a phone seemingly attached to his ear, was an old Fleet St hand. He didn’t ask how people were getting on, he just glanced at their shoes, like a polite yet distant commissionaire at a top London hotel.

We found all bar three of the surviving invitees and I said to Arthur that I’d see him at the lunch. But he had his own priorities, in this case a match at White Hart Lane for the Sunday Mirror. Unbelievable to me, but perfectly logical to Arthur, who passed away long before his time.

Anyway, to me it’ll always be the Hennessy with the last Saturday in November clearly marked in the diary. There was another year when they had a ‘press’ day on the Friday and we hacks all received a bottle of 40-year-old vintage cognac. No one can match generosity like that.

I remember so many Hennessy Gold Cups that they can’t all be mentioned here but the Cheltenham ‘Mackeson’ meeting features an outstanding result which has forged a permanent place in my overcrowded memory. This was the conditional jockeys’ handicap hurdle of 2005 because I knew of a ‘plot’ which seemed wildly optimistic but came from a reliable source and an extremely nice man.

Robert Stronge was a very good jockey but possibly too decent and retiring to ‘make it big’. As a trainer he had some ordinary horses, including the moody and rather unreliable hurdler Water King.

Now, Water King’s one strength was that he did best when fresh. So the plan, Robert told me (we’d played together in a little poker school in Swindon) was to give him a quiet run round at Chepstow before going to Cheltenham and hope for the best. Robert had also taken on the young rider, Shane Walsh, and was going to manage his career.

Well, these things don’t always work out. Water King didn’t go to Chepstow, he went to Uttoxeter and FELL in a hurdles race. But he didn’t hurt himself and there was no reason to miss Cheltenham.

When people here, and Irish friends, asked if there was anything special I said he was worth a tenner each-way. It was remarkable how many of them staked exactly that much, so they all picked up £793 on the Tote as the old rogue did his best for once and obliged at 50/1. By golly, you should have heard the noise. One former client of Marten’s, Howard Dawson, landed the forecast as well and cleared over £3,000. Happy, happy days.

So November would be special, even without my birthday on the 20^th. Mackeson day was often followed by Remembrance Sunday and I’d drive from Cheltenham to Southampton for my school old boys’ dinner on Saturday evening. I became toastmaster, following Ronald Allison, whom some of you will remember as the BBC’s royal correspondent.

I tried hard to tell guests more about various personalities, including Lawrence Binyon, whose verse ‘They shall not grow old’ from For The Fallen is quoted at many of these functions. He lived to 73 while the celebrated war poet Siegfried Sassoon not only survived two spells at the Somme but was still playing a sprightly game of cricket at Heytesbury in old age, his naïve approach to chances at mid-on easily forgiven by colleagues, until his death in 1967.

I felt the audience at that reunion knew very little if anything about him. But if I mentioned Southampton Water or cricket they perked up. Having been to Netley and Craiglockhart for recuperation, Sassoon was sent back to the Somme and, as the ship left the Isle of Wight behind, he wondered how he could ever have been so enthusiastic a recruit in the first place. He certainly thought he would die.

To end and start with song lyrics and a poem, I should add that another of my friends, the very fine cricket writer David Foot, knew only too well that Sassoon’s cheerful if vague contribution on the pitch concealed the ravages inflicted on a gentle, creative man.

This is from David’s book Between Bat & Ball. It’s a Sassoon poem which is both moving and beautiful, I think.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats

And in the ruined trenches lashed with rain

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bat

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats

And going to the office in the train…

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