Robert gazed at the massive, six-foot-four-inch Tiny, nodded curtly, checked his gloves and climbed into the ring. At eighteen, he was five feet ten inches, weighed one hundred and seventy-two pounds, and he was giving away about forty-two pounds and several inches. But as Tiny advanced in round one, the words of Freddie Mills rang clearly in his mind: ‘Bobby, if ever you’re fighting a man who might be a bit short on experience, and he comes at you, bang him on the nose early – it’ll make his eyes water, unsettle him.’
Tiny came forward, swung twice. Robert, on his toes, backed away waiting for the next advance. Tiny, almost inviting Robert to hit him, again swung wildly. Robert ducked to his right, slipped inside and banged his opponent on the nose with a short left hook. Hard. The soldiers yelled with excitement. Tiny reacted with instant, unutterable rage. He wiped his smarting eyes, leaned back on the ropes for extra leverage and catapulted himself across the ring at Robert. His face was puce with fury, and his fists were drawn back behind his ears.
Robert backed up to the ropes, stood his ground and stared hard into Tiny’s angry eyes. His stance was slightly crouched, with his left jab ready. At the final split second, he shifted his weight to his left foot, and let fly with a text-book straight right hand that would have knocked down a stud bull. The force was doubled by the on-rushing momentum of Tiny, and Robert caught him flush on the jaw, just to the left of centre. Everything was correct, his wrist was locked, his elbow was locked, and his shoulder took the impact, just as Freddie Mills had instructed. Tiny, by the way, was unconscious before he hit the floor, where he remained, with the lights out, for a little over thirty seconds.
The soldiers went wild. Robert was unable to stop laughing, and the Army doctors were busy trying to revive Tiny. It was, upon reflection, Robert’s finest hour in the ring. He went on to win the Berlin Brigade Heavyweight Championship and was never defeated in more than a dozen fights, though most of them, against better boxers, were decided on points. ‘I never once had a chance to hit anyone that hard ever again,’ he recalls. ‘Actually, Freddie would have been proud of me that evening.’
For a young man so naturally captivated by heroism, both in the boxing ring and indeed in the history of his regiment, it was curious that he entirely abandoned his plans to become a second lieutenant and the vague ambition to become Captain Robert Sangster, which does after all possess a rather authoritative ring. But deep down he knew that his time in the Army was limited to just a few months and that back home the challenging, rewarding and glamorous world of big business awaited him. He had already acquired a taste for fast, expensive cars, beautiful girls, vintage champagne and the kind of well-tailored country clothes that young gentlemen of his wealth and education were apt to wear. Having bought himself a car in Berlin, Robert made the most of the great city. He was always zipping in and out of the Russian sector in search of the occasional pot of caviar and his memories of notorious forays into the more expensive night spots with a small group of adventurous, but largely impoverished fellow ‘squaddies’ still bring a beaming smile to his cheerful face even today.
Robert returned to the Wirral in 1957. By now the Vernon Organization was building parts for aircraft and owned a factory that produced a little three-wheel car which did eighty miles to the gallon, in sharp contrast to Robert’s new Mercedes Sports which was pushed to get eighteen to the gallon going downhill. He was glad to be home and was quickly absorbed with the many improvements and expansions his father had implemented during his time in the Army. One of the least successful was in horse-race betting: a credit bookmaking business run in conjunction with the football pools, an innovation which Robert noted swiftly was not making much money. He was also at a loss as to how to help improve it, since his knowledge of horse racing was extremely limited.
He knew one fact about the sport. It was a schoolboy belief that the best trainer of a racehorse lived somewhere in southern Ireland, and was named Vincent O’Brien. This man had trained the winner of the Grand National Steeplechase in each of the last three years Robert had spent at Repton, 1953–55, and achieved this with three different horses too. Robert reasoned that, since no one else had ever achieved this, O’Brien must be the best there is. At school the experts among his friends had asserted that the Grand National was for big, slow plodding ‘chasers’ and that the real kings of National Hunt racing were those who won the two main races at Cheltenham – the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle. One fifteen-year-old Irish tipster had then confided that a trainer called O’Brien had won each of those races as well, three times in a row. And that settled it in Robert’s mind. O’Brien must be the best.
Flat racing was essentially a mystery to him but, with Vernons now involved in credit betting, it was his bound duty to understand the basics of all gambling, the odds and the risks. As such he usually noticed the winners of big races like the Derby, where there might be a major pay-out. The 1957 Derby was run just a few days after he returned to the family fold and he saw that it had been won by Crepello. He also noted that the second horse, beaten only a length and half, was named Ballymoss. His price had been 33–1 and, happily for Vernons Credit, not many people had risked more than a few shillings each way. ‘I might have had a few quid on it if I’d known he was running,’ thought Robert. The horse was trained in County Tipperary by Vincent O’Brien.
Three weeks later Robert missed Ballymoss again when he won the Irish Derby by miles. But he did not miss much, since the horse started at an impossible price of 9–4 on. An entire year then slid by without Robert taking a shred of interest in flat racing, until the Royal Ascot meeting of 1958 took place. Because of pressure of work, he was not able to join a group of friends who had travelled south for the Gold Cup, all dressed up, complete with badges for the Royal Enclosure. He glanced rather enviously at the papers the following day to see if any of them had had their photographs taken, but none had. Every inch of the papers were devoted to the great Irish mare Gladness who had beaten all the colts to win the Gold Cup. She had been trained by O’Brien. That really settled it. Robert, at the age of twenty-two, reckoned he knew one shining, copper-bottomed, indisputable fact about flat racing. ‘Vincent O’Brien is the best trainer there has ever been,’ was how he phrased it to his friends, none of whom knew a whole lot more about it than he did.
Like many men of a steady temperament, but with a very busy mind, Robert Sangster was apt to come out with these slightly high-powered remarks from time to time. The fact that they were sudden, and usually sounded arrogant in the extreme, occasionally unnerved people. But they were always followed by a deep, good-natured chuckle at himself. Pompous he was not, but a mind like his needed an outlet, even though he had never actually heard of such legendary trainers as Dick Dawson, Frank Butters, Alec Taylor, John Porter, Fred Darling or Joe Lawson.
The usual setting for these pearls of modern wisdom from young Sangster was Liverpool’s Kardomah Coffee House, the lunchtime gathering place of 1950s’ upwardly mobile Liverpudlians. It was divided essentially into three sections: those set to inherit a considerable fortune; those who had a plan to amass a considerable fortune; and those who were merely working on a plan to earn a considerable fortune. Robert was a founder member of all three groups and, as the only one to already possess a fortune, he naturally became the unchallenged social leader.
The membership at table at which they gathered became an object of immense envy, admittance being unobtainable to those who did not fit these elite criteria. With Rugby Union only played at public schools in the 1950s, Robert and two or three of his colleagues from the highly reputable Birkenhead Park Rugby Football Club saw the playing of this esteemed sport as a qualification to their group.