‘They’ll freeze us out,’ said John. ‘The sheer weight of their dollars will dominate the industry. Big prices for yearlings always mean big prices for stallions. Over here we will find ourselves looking at second-line stallions, and they in turn will produce second-line racers, which will in turn make third-line stallions. In this business you have to get the best, and breed the best to the best. There is no other way. And I am afraid the Americans could cause us to become strictly a third-rate power in the bloodstock business.’
Once more Robert and John reconvened in southern Ireland. They spent time going to visit Deep Diver and Green God at Castle Hyde, and they went over the list of shareholders. The entire business was sound, and again they talked long into the night, once more agreeing that the answer was to form powerful syndicates that could take on the Americans financially at the breeding end of the industry. But like all major business reviews, they were apt to simplify what was already easy, and complicate what was already confusing. The issue was the same. Robert remained the obvious man to head up the sales operation to the big potential investors. But he needed credentials. Four weeks later, from a rather unexpected quarter, he got them.
At the conclusion of their meeting in Portman Square on II December 1972, the Jockey Club announced the election of three new members. The first was the tall Old Etonian Champion Amateur Steeplechase rider Christopher Collins, heir to the Goya perfume business; the second was David Alan Bethell, the fifth Baron Westbury MC (confidant of the Royal Family, former Captain in the Scots Guards, twice wounded, North African campaign); the third was the Cheshire Regiment’s former private soldier and scourge of the rails bookmakers, Robert E. Sangster KO (Heavyweight Campaign, Berlin). Proposed by the local Liverpool peer, the Earl of Derby, and seconded by the third Viscount Leverhulme, a near-neighbour from the Wirral, Robert was elected, unopposed, for basically the same reasons as Chris Collins. After the nasty scare the Members had received over Christopher Soames’s blackballing five years previously, the Club had agreed to bring in new blood, young men of vision, who were important investors in bloodstock and seemed likely to show an interest in the administration of racing in Great Britain in the coming years. Under this new post-Soames regime, the Jockey Club had recruited several racehorse owners and breeders who had demonstrated outstanding abilities beyond the paddocks: Sir Robert McAlpine of the giant construction company; the stockbroker John U. Baillie; the Midlands industrialist Brian Jenks; the De Beers Consolidated Mines (diamonds) director Sir Philip Oppenheimer; the electronics mogul Sir Michael Sobell. And now they had Robert Sangster, untitled, uncommissioned, unconnected and unpretentious – embryo bloodstock adventurer par excellence.
Robert did in fact know dimly, somewhere in the back of his mind, that his fellow stewards at Haydock Park were planning to propose him for membership, but since everyone knew – post-Soames – that you were unlikely to be thrown out these days once proposed and seconded by persons of high rank, he never gave it much thought. News of his election came as rather a surprise to him. But he and John Magnier knew simultaneously that their number one problem was solved. In the world bloodstock business, there is no higher form of credential than to be recognized as a Member of the English Jockey Club. This remains true in all racing countries from Tokyo to Longchamp, from the Antipodes to Santa Anita. Membership denotes total respectability, total honesty, total uprightness. Besides, a meeting with such a man might secure you an invitation to the Jockey Club Room at Newmarket, or Epsom, or perhaps even Royal Ascot. Members of the English Jockey Club are well received everywhere, and in Australia and the United States they are quite often feted.
What the Members did not however fully appreciate was Robert’s former close association with a bookmaker – his own family credit account division which Robert shut down before it became a total embarrassment both financially and socially. And nor were they fully appraised of his most recent venture which saw him as the owner of a financially doomed bloodstock agency in Newmarket which was currently acting as a paper-thin shield for a pile of debts that stretched from Deauville to Saratoga. In the fullness of time, Robert would describe his involvement in this absurdity as: ‘A bit hasty!’
The Newmarket Bloodstock Agency was its name and it was presided over by the tall, balding Richard Galpin, a man whose charm and relentless salesmanship hid a business brain which was apt to function in a rather unorthodox manner. His personal memoirs might easily have been entitled, What They Would Never Dream of Teaching You at the Harvard Business School. Within a few weeks of his Jockey Club membership being finalized, Robert had bought up the shares vacated by Richard’s cousin and become, in effect, the owner of this most shaky enterprise. His decision to become the head of a bloodstock agency was probably encouraged by the fact that his old friend Nick Robinson had elected to part from his family firm, following the death of his grandfather Sir Foster. Robert decided that he and Nick had better run the bloodstock business between them and Nick was duly appointed chairman.
‘It was’, Nick recalls, ‘one of the most nerve-racking periods of my life. Five minutes on the phone with Richard would give me an instant headache. And if I hung up on him, he’d ring right back and keep on talking as if nothing had happened!’
Within a few days of taking over, Nick Robinson reported to Robert that all was not absolutely ideal with the new agency. Because, not only did he own the company, he also owned twenty horses in Australia which Galpin had bought speculatively the previous year. Unsold by the Agency, they were currently in training, at high cost, now at Robert’s expense. ‘Worse yet,’ Nick added, ‘Galpin wants to go back to Australia and buy some more!’ Robert replied in rather colourful language, which meant, broadly, that perhaps Richard should rethink his Antipodean strategy.
The ensuing few weeks were full of rancour. Nick had decided to go to the upcoming Fasig Tipton Sales of two-year-olds-in-training held annually at Hialeah, in Miami. No expert in the subtleties of conformation himself, he received a five-minute lesson in a bloodstock agent’s technique from Galpin. ‘Feel his legs, like this. Then get up and say something, like “Well, they’re not perfect, but neither were his father’s, and that didn’t stop him running, did it?”’ Without any huge confidence Nick departed for Miami, with a local trainer, Ian Walker, leaving Galpin in charge of the office. Over the next few days he would ponder long and hard as to why the normally shrewd and sure-footed Sangster was fooling around in this chaotic enterprise anyway.
Nick arrived at the sales in Florida and reported immediately to the Fasig Tipton office in order to establish his credentials, as the new chairman of the Newmarket Bloodstock Agency. His reception was inordinately frosty and he was told that the head of the sales company, the rather pompous John Finney wanted to see him. Nick was taken to the back row of the empty sales ring and asked precisely when the Newmarket Bloodstock Agency intended to pay for their purchases at the Saratoga Sale in New York the previous August. It was the first indication Nick had received of any debt problem Robert might have inherited from the previous owners: problems with unsold horses were one thing, but these debts were completely unaccounted for. A thousand little red lights started to flash before Nick’s eyes.
He called Robert immediately, direct from Finney’s office, and recounted the problem as succinctly as he could. The facts were relatively simple. Galpin had bought a very expensive horse for the tight-fisted London electrical tycoon Sir Jules Thorn, a man notorious for claiming a six-month credit line to anyone to whom he owed money. That included industrial suppliers, accountants, trainers and definitely bloodstock agencies. Sir Jules was famous for it. In this case however his reluctance to pay Galpin had been almost fatal because Galpin had bought in dollars and billed Sir Jules in English pounds. During the six-month suspension of payment, the dollar had firmed and the pounds with which Sir Jules had paid Galpin had not covered the dollar amount owed to Fasig Tipton. The shortfall ran into several thousands. Galpin had pleaded with him, but Sir Jules had not grown as rich as he was by listening to the bleatings of penniless agents. Unsurprisingly, he informed Galpin the problem was not his. Thus, in the usual way of such men, he had no further interest in it and would not pay another cent.
Robert’s options were narrow. Either he could pay Finney and allow Newmarket to continue to trade in bloodstock, or he could request Nick to return home and wind up the company, and try to sue Sir Jules for the loss. Robert bit the bullet and paid.