Relaxing over a drink in the evening President Bush loves the stories of Ireland. Phonsie wishes he was not President because sometimes the pressures of the world’s highest office means they must miss their magical fishing trip south together. But they usually find a way and the old friendships stay solid. Vincent O’Brien and President Bush probably share many admirable characteristics, as leaders in every walk of life often do, but one of them is a love of the company of Phonsie O’Brien.
Phonsie would travel to Keeneland as Vincent’s trusted confidant. His word would not be law – if he liked a horse but Vincent liked it less, the horse may not be purchased. Generally speaking, if Phonsie disliked a horse, they all disliked it. Vincent would also take the Curragh veterinarian Bob Griffin, who was probably the best racehorse doctor in Ireland. His speciality was lameness: any faults with tendons, joints, hooves, pasterns, shoulder muscles or the big sweeps of muscle in the quarters. Vincent’s association with Bob went back twenty-five years. He hated to buy any horse, even in Ireland, without Bob Griffin, but he would not buy a single one in Keeneland without him.
By the spring of 1975, John Magnier was in residence in Coolmore, slowly preparing a breeding empire in anticipation of the influx of American-bred horses they all hoped would establish themselves under Vincent’s patient care. John Magnier had grown up a lot since Robert had first met him four years previously. Now, as master of the new complex, he assumed a new authority, with his ever-present cigars jutting jauntily from his mouth. Tall, handsome and rather rakish-looking with an unmistakable touch of the ‘black Irish’ about him (the jet-black hair and the dark eyes of the Spanish seamen who were reputed to have swum ashore and settled after the defeat of the Armada by Drake in 1588), John was now always to be seen with cigar, tailored tweed jacket, and a somewhat sartorial cravat at his throat – like a Spanish diplomat on vacation. The mystique of his dashing appearance was only marginally affected by his occasional side-of-the-mouth confidentialities: ‘I’m telling you, there’s a hell of a fast young “chaser” going in the t’ree o’clock at Limerick tomorrow. He’ll be 20–1, but don’t let that put you off.’ This appearance of being a high-born sophisticate, perhaps more at home on the Champs Elysees or Bond Street, is an inadvertent deception. John Magnier is really a well-born Irish countryman, and he loves jumping horses, coursing greyhounds, golf and, of course, gambling on all of them. But you’d always somehow know he’d never be entirely lost on the Champs Elysees.
By now John was engaged to Susan, one of the three daughters of Vincent O’Brien. No father could have been very much more delighted at the choice his daughter had made. Not only was John a devout Catholic like all of the O’Briens, Vincent believed he was easily the cleverest and most far-sighted stallion master in Europe. Aided by Robert’s influx of capital, he was masterminding a programme of improvements for Coolmore, the like of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in Ireland. Stallion boxes were being renovated, new drainage systems dug into the paddocks, great beech hedges planted, paths laid, fences renewed, new staff taken on. The telephone system was completely renewed. Coolmore was on the march before they had even bought the new horses.
Robert Sangster spent the spring trying hard to get his life in order, which was a major challenge. He had reaped a pocketful of cash when they had syndicated Cellini after an adequate but not sensational three-year-old season. But, sadly, his marriage to Christine was in deep trouble. In the past three years Robert had spent an increasing number of months flying around the world in search of broodmares. He now had about one hundred of them, many in residence at Swettenham, but some in Ireland with his new partners. He also had a small racehorse-breeding operation in France, and one in Australia, where he had judged land and horses to be cheap given the sudden upsurge in the world market. Robert had rather a grand plan that somehow a northern-hemisphere breeding business based in Ireland could be married with a southern hemisphere project based in Australia, perhaps using stallions to work two different seasons. Well, it might have been fine for the stallions, but it was not right for Robert, because on one of his several trips to Sydney, he had fallen somewhat recklessly in love with the wife of one of Australia’s senior political figures, Andrew Peacock, spokesman for foreign affairs in the Liberal Party and regarded as a possible future Prime Minister. She was Susan Peacock, blonde, vivacious mother of three, with a love of expensive champagne and fast horses which rivalled and occasionally surpassed his own. In fairness, in the spring of 1975 they had not yet embarked upon their passionate and all-consuming affair. But they were about to, before the year was out. Robert knew it. Susan knew it. And Christine would very soon suspect it.
Meanwhile the technicalities of Robert’s massive inheritance were all but driving him mad. He had been given his first third of Vernons at the age of thirty in 1966, and had a liability of £15 million to pay the government’s Capital Gains Tax. In 1971 when Robert was thirty-five, he had received the second thirty-three per cent, and again he had had to borrow – this time £2 million to pay the Capital Gains Tax. When he was forty in 1975 he was scheduled to receive the rest – in Vernons stock – but again the tax was crippling, and the government would only accept cash, not stock, in payment. It was all but impossible to raise the money, and Robert suggested a public issue to raise some cash. Vernon, even at seventy-five, in the autumn of his life, was still an intensely private man with a strong independent streak, and he hated the idea of ‘going public’. But Robert’s position was clearly terrible: either he would have to sell a substantial share of Vernons in order to pay the government, or he would have to go public prior to receiving the last tranche of his stock. Vernon, with immense reluctance, agreed to the latter course.
He and Robert went to the London merchant bank Hill Samuel and, after weeks of negotiation, it was agreed that the public issue should be made, but that Vernons wide interests in bloodstock ought not to be included. Kenneth Keith, the towering ex-Guards officer and chief executive of the bank, made one formal condition: a financial director had to be appointed. Vernons, anxious for a senior money-manager to strengthen their board, chose Brian Wallis. Hill Samuel set the date for the Vernons flotation, but it was a politically turbulent year. The miners were on strike. Edward Heath’s Government was beleaguered, attacked on all sides by the Labour Opposition leader Harold Wilson – a Yorkshire coal miner’s son whom many in the nation thought could solve at least some of the problems. Heath, in some desperation, decided to go to the country and called a General Election for the day before the Vernons share issue. With half the British work force on a three-day week, due to chronic shortages of coal and thus electricity, Hill Samuel, concerned about the possibility of a Labour victory, advised Robert and Vernon to cancel the issue.
Hill Samuel were right. Harold Wilson swept to power and, as is predictable upon the arrival of a left-wing government in England, the London Stock Market collapsed. Robert was back to Square One. He had a year to find a solution. And he tried hard. He held meetings with Charles Clore, the chairman of Sears Holdings, which owned the big bookmakers William Hill, and suggested a merger but it could not be made to work. He held meetings with the senior executives of the Hanson Trust, Lord Hanson and Gordon White, but Robert felt they were ‘too tough’. He met with Laddie Lucas of the Greyhound Racing Association, and with the Rank Organisation, and with the other big bookmakers Corals. Robert made most progress with Ladbrokes, whose chairman Cyril Stein agreed a deal worth £14 million, which would have made Robert the biggest shareholder in the company, but Vernon and his managing director George Kennerly vetoed the deal.
That was the end of that. Robert, faced once more with crippling taxes on the third tranche of Vernons shares, could borrow no more. Nor could he sell. In addition, the new Labour Government would want ninety-eight per cent of his income from his capital. Robert Sangster had no option but to leave England, and to go into ‘tax exile’. He was not alone. The mass exodus of well-heeled, talented, industrious Englishmen did not in any way rival the tragic diaspora which had taken place to the south of Vincent O’Brien’s Churchtown family farm in the 1850s, but one principle was the same. Most of them had to go for financial reasons, inflicted upon them by an English government. To this day Robert says thoughtfully, ‘I was not a voluntary tax exile. I was always perfectly prepared to pay my share of taxes. But the government wanted