'After a big win there was always a party'

This article was first published on Monday, May 12, 2014, and has been republished after the death of Cath Walwyn, wife of legendary trainer Fulke Walwyn

If the gods are still making them like Cath Walwyn the world would be a finer place if we were let into the secret of where they are being hidden.

Possessed of every marble, she has been in Upper Lambourn for 62 years since arriving to marry Fulke Walwyn in 1952 and the esteem in which she is held both locally and beyond is proof of that curious truth that genuine class has about it a classless quality.

And of course she spans the lifetimes of legends. Who else can have counted the Queen Mum as a friend, been a regular at the Manton of George Todd and known the curiously sad madness of Dorothy Paget? And that is before you throw in the likes of Mandarin, Mill House and The Dikler. Her day-to-day has been the stuff of other people’s heroes, both horses and human.

She has just enjoyed a cracking season over jumps with Saint Jerome, berthed in the heart of her Lambourn stamping ground with Jamie Osborne. The four-year-old carried her red and black colours to success three times and was recently sold at a good price.

Mrs Walwyn – I’m sorry I can’t do Cath and I am not as brave as one of Osborne’s older lads who calls her darlin’ – has me installed with a glass of champagne within a minute of opening the door of Saxon Cottage. Her sole concession to the passing of 85 years is the warning that she is a touch deaf. She says: “I used to have two hearing aids but I am down to one at the moment. The other my dog ate.”

She was born to no small degree of privilege, but she wears it like a cloak of invisibility underpinned by an air of steely authority. Her father, Sir Humphrey de Trafford, owned Newsells Park Stud and was twice senior steward. She says: “He should have bred two Derby winners in a row but Alcide was got at before the Derby in 1958, although he won it the next year with Parthia.”

For the record, Alcide won the Chester Vase and Lingfield Derby Trial before the villains struck him and he went on to land the Great Voltigeur by 12 lengths and the St Leger by eight. A year on, he took the King George.

But Walwyn’s patrician background is splendidly misleading because, without descending into over-familiarity, she is not limited by the silly divides that hamstring the rest of us. She says: “I go down to the betting shop every day and a lot of the regulars are my friends.

"I play a bit of roulette and have a few small bets but my bigger bets are on the golf [please note, no L in pronunciation, just goff] and I bet on tournaments every weekend and follow them on television.”

And there is no artifice here. The daughter of a gentleman who bred Classic winners and ran racing, she has no need to mix with the likes of you and me but it would never cross her mind to do otherwise. Snobbery is the province of the stupid and insecure and she has never been either.

As Osborne says: “The essential thing to grasp about Cath is her concern for everybody. She is extremely popular in Lambourn and that is no accident. The great thing about folk of her generation and background is that staff – those who work for you – are part of the family and valued as such. There is nothing in the least condescending about it, it’s simply all about knowing how to treat people and it is, without doubt, a dying art.”

Arkle heads for victory over Mill House in the 1964 Gold Cup

Mark Cranham (racingpost.com/photos)

And, of course, in Fulke Walwyn she was allied to one of the true titans of the training ranks. Winner of the 1936 Grand National on Reynoldstown, he was five-time champion trainer and sent out Mont Tremblant, Mandarin, Mill House and The Dikler to win the Gold Cup. His record of 40 festival winners stood proudly until Nicky Henderson passed his mark in 2012.

She says: “We were married for nearly 40 years and he was totally dedicated to training. Our great head lad Darkie Deacon always says ‘the guv’nor never missed evening stables’ and these days there is hardly a yard in the country where evening stables still exists.

“And after the lads had gone he’d be out in the yard again to check on things and glean a bit more detail such as how a horse has eaten up – horses who dash at their feed or just pick at it are telling two very different stories and Fulke was very particular.

“Dave Dick used to say ‘I don’t think Fulke ever sacked a lad’ but he did once. The chap came back the next morning and stayed for 20 years. After we’d had a big win there was always a party at the Malt Shovel and they were really good lads who minded about their horses.”

But it was Mrs Walwyn who also did a great deal of the looking after, and the respect and affection in which those who worked for Fulke hold her now is something remarkable. Last year, on the Sunday before Cheltenham, there was a gathering at Oaksey House of the Friends of Saxon House organised, among others, by such Walwyn stalwarts as Simon Christian, Darkie Deacon, Stuart Shilston and Kevin Mooney.

She says: “They came from far and wide, all the jockeys who had ridden for Fulke and all the lads. We were nearly 100 and it was the most tremendous occasion and they are all dying to do it again.

“Willie and Susan Robinson were there and Willie is remarkable. He’s 80 this year but looks no more than 60. As well as being a brilliant horseman he is one of the most outstanding human beings you could meet. I promise you since Fulke died in 1991 he has rung me every week for a chat.”

At 85, Walwyn is one of the last links to key figures of previous generations who left indelible fingerprints on the sport. She says: “George Todd was a great friend and we’d often take the jumpers over to Manton on a Sunday. George was not a man to be taken lightly and people were frightened of him because he could be very fierce, but if he liked you then you were all right.

“He had endless patience with his horses and was an extraordinary man, and he trained those long-distance horses like a magician.”

Mandarin (left) takes the water jump before going on to win the 1962 Grand Steeplechase de Paris

The temperamental, wilful and largely nocturnal Dorothy Paget sent Fulke all her Flat horses at one stage, and Walwyn’s memories of a richly difficult individual are marbled through with no small degree of sympathy. She says: “I think she was maligned by the press. When she was young she rode well and was quite thin, but something changed and she just got fatter and fatter.

“She only came here once, arriving at 11 at night and wanting to see everything – we still had lads out in the yard at one in the morning. She finally went upstairs and then came down to dinner at two and spotted a whole pressed tongue on the table and ate the lot of it and sat in the dining room until four o’clock.

“She eventually left in a convoy of Rolls-Royces and told Fulke she really enjoyed her visit and would come back soon, but she never returned.

“She loved a fiddle and her betting was in unbelievable sums. She arrived – late as always – at Salisbury one afternoon and went mad when she discovered Fulke had withdrawn her two-year-old because the ground was too firm. She started betting purely because she was in a rage and lost £100,000 in that single afternoon.

“She was terribly shy and gauche and lived by night. She has become something of a figure of fun but actually hers was a sad life.”

And while Walwyn has had a marvellous life that continues greatly to enrich that of others, it has not been without its bleaker times. She has been a widow for 23 years and, most grim of all, lost her daughter Jane to cancer when still in her forties in 2007. A week later, in some gratuitous twist of cruelty, her house was burgled and a lifetime of family treasures and priceless racing memorabilia erased at a stroke.

Not that you would ever hear even a hint of a moan from Walwyn – she simply is not the type. She is very close to her granddaughter, Isabel, and rightly proud of her recent scholarship to Marlborough, where she will indeed be given a fine education, although it will never compare to the matchless one received from her grandmother.

Isabel is the lucky one, as are all the countless others whose lives have been enlivened and made less ordinary by this singular, eminently likeable and very remarkable woman.

Walwyn on . . .

Mill House I promise you, without any shadow of doubt, that the day Arkle beat Mill House in the Gold Cup was the biggest shock of Fulke’s career. He thought Mill House was unbeatable, but he just didn’t have the speed of Arkle.

I have seen that Gold Cup film a million times and the striking thing is the way Arkle picked Mill House up so easily. Poor old Mill House, he had one last great hurrah when he won the Whitbread, which was a remarkable performance, and made up for some of the things that had happened.

But it was the greatest disappointment of Fulke’s career – he thought he had the horse of the century, but he hadn’t.

Mandarin We had trained his half-brother but when Mandarin arrived he was small, angular and plain. Fulke said: “He’s not a racehorse at all, we must have the wrong horse.”

And he would not jump a hurdle and was really awkward, yet when he went chasing he won by 20 lengths at Ludlow and never looked back. He wasn’t brilliant as such but he simply would not give up trying and Fulke adored him. But he was ferocious and an absolute fiend to saddle – he used to hit his lad Mush Foster, who I still see, all over the box and was an absolute terror.

The day he won the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris, my god we had a struggle to get a saddle on him. Fred Winter looked like death that morning as he’d been up wasting all the night before to ride Beaver II for Ryan Price later in the afternoon.

You could tell early in the race that something had gone wrong because Fred looked peculiar. Usually Mandarin would pull like a train but that day he just dropped back in with others.

When we realised Fred had neither bit not bridle it looked impossible, but the French jockeys were very good and more than once they helped keep him in and Dave Dick said: “He’ll still win!”

But it was incredibly close and watching the finish was agony. Nobody knew who had won and when the result was announced a huge roar went up. It was utterly remarkable because he had broken down on both front legs.

After Mandarin retired, Fulke tried to have him as a hack but he soon gave that up, much though he adored him. When he had grown quite old we were agonising a bit about what to do with him when one morning, after first lot, he cantered out and just dropped down dead, which is as it should be and saved from making an impossible decision.