It is 40 years since jockey Hywel Davies cajoled the owner of Last Suspect to run in the 1985 Grand National and then pulled off an astonishing 50-1 win – and all this after he had “died” seven times in an ambulance after a fall three years earlier.
The Eighties and Nineties were peak time for Welsh jockeys winning the National with Neale Doughty successful on Hallo Dandy in 1984 and Carl Llewellyn victorious on Party Politics in 1992 and Earth Summit in 1998.
In terms of absolute Welshness, however, Cardigan-born Davies claims he is the only one fluent in Welsh, a language he still speaks daily to his 95-year-old mother on the phone.
If there is one thing I am certain of in my own career, it is that in a finish Davies was the strongest jockey I ever rode against. But getting Last Suspect, a quirky old character, to win the National involved more reassuring pats down the neck.
In 1982, Davies almost entered the jump-racing history books for all the wrong reasons. Solid Rock had pile-driven him into the ground at the last fence at Doncaster and the jockey had to be revived seven times on the way to hospital. “I saw the doctor a year later looking pale and he said it was me that did that to him!” he jokes now. “I’d kept dying on him.”
Last Suspect had been with Jim Dreaper in Ireland, where he had reached the top of the handicap but, eventually he told Anne, Duchess of Westminster, his owner, to send him to Britain.
By the time Last Suspect arrived at Captain Tim Forster’s Wantage yard he had already developed a reputation for being moody and unreliable, was a tail-swisher – which has always been regarded as equine body language for reluctance – and in his start before the National pulled himself up.
“He was running into places, occasionally pulling himself up if the race wasn’t going his way, but he started coming down the handicap,” recalls Davies. “He was in the National but unbeknown to me the Captain and the Duchess decided to take him out to save them the embarrassment of him pulling himself up.
“I walked into the office one morning and Marigold, the Captain’s secretary, said it was a shame they were taking Last Suspect out of the National that day. It was the last-forfeit stage.
“I went to the dining room where the Captain was having a kipper for breakfast. I said: ‘Guv’nor, I hear you’re taking the horse out of the National; if you do that you might as well retire him. Why don’t you ask the Duchess to change her mind?’ He replied: ‘I’m not having anything to do with it! You ring her.’
“So I ran back to the office, asked Marigold to get hold of the Duchess and tell her that her jockey needs to speak to her urgently. Her maid answered and said she was under the hairdryer. I reiterated that I needed to speak to her urgently.
“‘Well young man, what’s so drastic that I had to come out from the hairdryer,’” says Davies in a deep voice mimicking the old Duchess. “I said: ‘Ma’am, it’s the only race for him’. She said: ‘Well, it’s your neck, if you want to break it, that’s up to you!’
“So I ran back to the dining room to tell the Captain. ‘Oh my God!’ he said. He pushed his kipper away and though he never smoked before midday he pulled out a packet of Players cigarettes, lit up and said: ‘F— it, I suppose I’ll have to start training the horse now!’
“I knew I had to give him a lot of light and keep him sweet. If I started bullying him I knew he’d down tools. I had to pretend it was a Sunday jaunt. He was on and off the bridle but, when he was on, he was on. The first circuit he was sweet, second circuit he started running in snatches.
“He jumped the Canal Turn too well, kind of half a length down on the lead but he wasn’t a horse you take a pull on. All the time I’m thinking: ‘I’m too close, too close’, then his tail started. Then he missed the third-last completely. I thought: ‘That’s game over, [I’ve] lost five lengths and three others got away from me’. I was beat.”
At the last, Last Suspect was fourth, going nowhere, eight lengths behind Mr Snugfit who appeared to be cantering. But so much can change in those famous last 494 yards at Aintree.
“I gave him a smack after the last and he said ‘Ok’ and flew. He put everything in. When the race finished he was empty.”
At the time Davies was 28. Other things such as champion jockey and Cheltenham figured more prominently in his dreams, but it ended up being his biggest achievement. “I went down to my home town of Cardigan, population of 6,000 and there must have been 7,000 people there,” he recalls of a victory parade on a cart pulled by a shire horse.
Last Suspect went back a year later, but that time it was the jockey who was against running. “It was the biggest waste of time, he was never going to do that twice,” he reflects.
That time he put the brakes on at Becher’s Brook. “I wasn’t going to make him jump it but, as I was pulling up, John Francome comes alongside driving his horse, who said: ‘If he’s not going, I’m not going.’ The last I saw of John was of him sailing over Becher’s without his horse and shouting an expletive.”
