Amidst the huge amount of laughter generated by these chosen few, many a great business plan was hatched in the Kardomah. Robert was more inclined than the others to think very carefully before he spoke, because he was the one person at that table who had the financial clout actually to launch a new idea. He knew that a well-thought-out business proposition to his father would be backed, because Vernon Sangster had a firm belief in the inherent entrepreneurial talents of his only son and heir. Now that he had given up his youthful ambition to change his name by deed poll to Rocky Sangster and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, Robert was eager to make his mark and knew that he deserved to be taken seriously and, if necessary, supported. This was just as it had been between Vernon and his own father Edmund Sangster in the years immediately following the Great War.
Robert fitted into the business world of Liverpool surprisingly well. To meet him it was impossible to avoid the impression of a well-tailored young bon vivant, with several girl friends and eight powerful cylinders to maintain. But he worked hard and was watchful of the firm’s money, ever mindful of how to make more. He also cherished an unspoken, even to himself, ambition to start something of his own within the Vernons Organization just as his father had done so many times.
By the spring of 1960 Robert, now coming up to twenty-four, was planning to get married. He had met and spent almost a year with the very beautiful, tall, dark-haired, Manchester model Christine Street, whose career was on a major upswing with several television appearances to her credit and increasing work in London. Her parents owned the George Hotel in Penrith, a market town in Cumbria, fifteen miles south of the border town of Carlisle. Unsurprisingly Christine was not your average model. She was extremely well educated, having attended one of the best girls’ boarding schools in the north of England – Queen Ethelburga’s at Harrogate – and completed her studies at the Swiss finishing school Brillantmont in Lausanne. She was also extremely well mannered.
A grand society wedding was being planned at Penrith for the month of May, and the lunch club at the Kardomah was heavy with advice for the prospective bridegroom, particularly about the importance of the lunch club, even to a married man. It was into this slightly restless atmosphere that a stranger, named Nick Robinson, walked one morning in early March. He was new to the city and had been brought to the Kardomah by one of the regulars who worked in the giant packaging business built up by Nick’s grandfather, the eighty-year-old Sir Foster Robinson.
Nick’s background was not dissimilar to Robert’s. He had been head boy at his famous prep school, Hawtreys, on the edge of the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, and had completed his education at Harrow. He had entered the family business at their headquarters in Bristol, but upon his grandfather’s specific instructions had been sent to their Liverpool office for two years to learn the technique of the Sales Department. But where Robert was addicted to hard contact sports like boxing and rugby football, Nick’s game was horse racing. He had been brought up to it, as Robert had been to championship golf.
As they all sat in the Kardomah, the talk turned gradually to the sport which was so important to the newcomer. He told them of his grandfather’s sprawling Wicken Park Stud, in Buckinghamshire, where racing fillies became broodmares and spent almost all of the rest of their lives in foal. He told them of the great breeding stallions of the day, horses who thought nothing of covering forty mares in a season, like Palestine, Court Martial, Swaps, Nashua, Court Harwell, Alycidon and the new young Crepello who had beaten Ballymoss in the 1958 Derby. At that Robert remembered with a blinding flash: ‘That’s my man O’Brien.’ He seriously considered issuing the old ‘Greatest trainer of all time’ line across the young Mr Robinson, but decided against it. Instead he observed, more typically, that upon reflection he’d rather be a stallion than a broodmare.
For a table of young men so profoundly ignorant about the subject of racing thoroughbreds, Nick Robinson was getting a substantial amount of attention. They actually found it rather a fascination. But he really got them when he disclosed the deathless piece of information that the stable which trained for his grandfather thought he might win the Lincolnshire Handicap with his five-year-old bay gelding Chalk Stream. ‘And’, added Nick darkly, ‘it might just be possible to have a really nice touch, at about 20–1.’
Now he was really talking. This group understood money, perhaps above all else, and the chance of landing a sizeable chunk of it without working was, as they say in New York, hitting ’em right where they lived. Robert, already interested, was teetering on the verge of enthralment. ‘OK, Nick,’ he said. ‘Let me just get this straight. The Lincolnshire Handicap is a race, over what distance? One mile? Right. Now, how many are in it? About thirty? Christ, that’s rather a lot, isn’t it? Right. Now why do you think Chalk Stream might win?’
‘Well, for a start, he is a pretty good racehorse. He has some experience, plenty of speed without being a champion or anything, he’s been working extremely well for the past week or so, and above all he runs off a very light weight – under seven stone. We think he has a decent chance.’
‘What do you mean a light weight?’ said someone. ‘I thought they all carried the same weight, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair, would it?’
‘Now this is a tricky subject.’ said Nick doing his best to simplify it. ‘In big races they do all carry the same weight, but this is a handicap and all the horses are weighted differently. The Jockey Club handicapper is basically trying to get them all to finish in a line, a dead heat. So he piles weight on the good horses to slow them up and leaves the less good ones with just a little. The idea being that every horse has a fair chance.’
‘What kind of weight?’
‘Oh, just lead weight slipped into the saddle cloth.’
‘You mean, if the jockey weighs eight stone and the horse has to carry nine stone, they just put fourteen pounds of lead in the cloth?’
‘That’s it. Chuck in a couple of pounds for the saddle and there’ll be six pounds of lead either side of the horse’s flanks.’
‘Yes, but how do they know what weight to put in? How does the handicapper know that his weights will slow the good horse down enough for the slower ones to catch him?’
‘Well, that is a real speciality which can take almost a lifetime to master. But in the broadest possible terms, if, in a one-mile race, Horse A beats Horse B by three lengths at level weights, the handicapper will calculate it at two pounds a length, and he will ask Horse A to carry six pounds more than Horse B the next time they meet over a mile. In theory this should bring them across the line together. Of course it may not, because Horse A may have more in hand than everyone thought, and he may again win by three lengths, and the handicapper will give him six pounds more the next time. Eventually the handicapper will stop him from winning.’
‘So,’ said Robert, ‘if a horse keeps losing, his weight is likely to get a lot lighter?’
‘Precisely. And some trainers deliberately keep a horse losing – it’s called “working him down the handicap” – until he has a weight so light he could not possibly be beaten. I mean, for example, he’s carrying seven stone, when he should really be carrying nine stone …’
‘And that’s when they have a real bet?’ said Robert.
‘Correct.’
‘Christ! Is that what’s happening with Chalk Stream?’
‘I am not sure about that, but Arthur Budgett, his trainer, says he is “very nicely weighted” – and that’ll do for me. I’m backing him to win the Lincoln, 23 March.’
‘Where do they run the Lincoln?’
‘Lincoln. On a Wednesday. The race is always like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They try to go flat out from start to finish and if our horse wins … well, there’s no feeling of elation quite like it.’
‘Especially if your pockets are full of the bookmaker’s money,’ said Robert. ‘OK, Nick,’ he added, seeking