Father enjoyed his first years there immensely and rode in and won many races, but as time went by it became clear that as long as he stayed there, he had no hope of ever being more than the stable jockey second string to the brilliant Tich Mason, who rode regularly for Lort Phillips, and was the leading jockey of his day.
The events of 1914 ended the stalemate and sent Father to France. He was by then secretly engaged to Mother, but her father disapproved of the match, and finally gave his consent to it only when Father agreed not to return to racing. They were married in 1915, on one of Father’s rare leaves at home.
Brought up on tales of my father’s and grandfather’s prowess, and with their blood in my small veins, it was no wonder that I got it firmly into my head in early childhood that I was going to be a jockey too. The sense that my future was already determined underlay everything I did from the day I rode the donkey backwards. I did not yearn to start racing, or even think about it a great deal, but to everyone who asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I answered, ‘A jockey.’
For a long while it seemed possible that I was going to be small enough for flat racing. Mother and Father’s feelings were mixed: they realised that successful flat race jockeys make a good income, but they disliked the idea of me being an apprentice, and they wanted a normal-sized son.
A friend of Father’s, Herbert Rich, who was interested in breeding and hunting, and had horses in training, kept urging Father to send me to Stanley Wootton’s stable at Epsom. Stanley Wootton, a great friend of his, was then supreme in turning apprentices into first-class jockeys.
Bert Rich often surveyed my small person, and one day turned to Father and said, ‘Give him gin lad, give him gin. That’ll keep him from growing.’
Mother gave me milk, however, and like Alice in Wonderland I suddenly started to grow at an enormous rate, shooting up into a long and stringy shape quite unsuited and much too heavy for flat racing. No one was unduly disturbed by my mushroom performance, for steeplechasing had really been my aim all along: just as well, for I grew eighteen inches in less than four years before I slowed down to a more reasonable rate.
After I left school I became a sort of extension of Father. When he wanted to be in two places at once, or riding two horses at once, I was his other self. I went on riding and training the horses in W. J. Smith’s yard with the nagsmen as I had done since I was seven, and hunted and showed dozens and dozens of them. In the winter we hunted with the Garth always two and sometimes four days a week, and on Fridays we went out with the Berks and Bucks Farmer’s Staghounds.
Many of the people who bought hunters from the stables lived too far away for a horse to be boxed to them in the morning in time for the meet, so when they were wanting to buy another horse and wished to see how it would perform in the field, it had to be taken over the day before.
‘I’ll send my boy over with the horse,’ Father used to tell them.
1 always enjoyed those journeys. Father sent me off in a horse-box, sitting beside the driver, with a groom, and perhaps two horses for the buyer to choose from, and it never occurred to me at all that anyone would think that at fifteen I was rather young for the job.
When we arrived at our host’s house I used to show the horse to its prospective owner, and the next morning rode it with the hounds. If there were two horses, I rode one and the buyer the other, and we exchanged horses during the day so that he could see both of the horses in action, and find out which of them gave him the best ride. If one of the horses was suitable I left it with him, and went home again with the other.
In that way I hunted many days with the Bicester, Whaddon Chase, Pytcheley, Cottesmore, Duke of Beaufort’s, Belvoir, Atherstone, and Meynell packs, and many others as well. Of them all the Meynell was my favourite, not because the country was the best for hunting, but because the fields were small and the fences round them large; and while we enjoyed ourselves jumping them the foxes were welcome to live a little longer.
About a year after I had left school I asked Father to help me get a job as a junior assistant and general factotum in a steeplechasing stable, so that I could start to ride as an amateur jockey. Mother disapproved of my ambitions, and Father was not enthusiastic, but he agreed to do his best. He took me with him to see Gwynne Evans, who was then training at Druid’s Lodge for Mr J. V. Rank, and whom Father knew well from the days when they were boys together in South Wales.
The day we spent there made me keener than ever to race, and quite sure that nothing would ever change my mind about it. Gwynne Evans said he would take me, but not for a year.
‘You are still a bit too young,’ he said. ‘Come when you are seventeen.’
Disappointed though I was at the delay, his promise that I could go with him in a year was like a light at the end of a tunnel. A year seemed a very long time to me when I was sixteen, and I thought as I drove home beside Father in a silent mixture of gloom and delight that it would never pass.
In a way, it never did.
For more than six months everything I planned seemed to have a temporary quality, for all the time I was thinking to myself, ‘This time next year…’ I lived in and for that distant time, and Father and Mother were getting used to the idea of my going. Then one day they broke to me the news that Gwynne Evans was dead. He had been killed in a car crash.
After a month or two Father wrote to Ivor Anthony, whom he had also known as a boy and fellow jockey, asking him if he needed a very junior assistant. Ivor Anthony, trainer of two Grand National winners, wrote back encouragingly, but said he had no vacancy at that moment as he already had two assistants. He hinted, however, that Evan Williams, who was then riding for him as an amateur, would soon be turning professional, and when that happened he would consider adding me to his stable.
With this much vaguer prospect and more timeless wait I had to be as content as I could, for although Father wrote to one or two more friends the answer was always the same. ‘He is still too young.’ ‘He is only sixteen, there’s plenty of time.’
It seemed unreasonable to me then that my age in years should matter so much. I felt mentally grown up, and I was physically growing too. I did not think that at seventeen, eighteen or nineteen I would have changed a great deal, and I urgently felt that plenty of time was just what I had not got.
It was at about this time that Father and Mother decided to leave Smith’s and start a similar business of their own. For years they had been talking of having their own stables, but had never taken the plunge into uncertainty. It is no small thing for a man to take and risk all the family’s capital for the sake of personal independence, when he is in an interesting and safe job. The snag about this particular job was, however, that it was not well paid, and Mother eventually began to search seriously for a suitable house for us to move to. She found the ideal place in Embrook House, near Wokingham, a large pleasant Victorian house with a good stable yard of about twenty-five boxes.
We made the move early in 1938, and from then on it was impossible for me to leave and go racing, even if anyone would have had me. I worked harder than I had ever done before, doing in earnest what for ten years had been a pleasant pastime, and helping Father in whatever way I could to make a success of his new business.
The stables at Embrook were small compared with Smith’s at Holyport, but they prospered steadily just the same. Mother was the backbone and mainstay of the whole undertaking. She ran the large house and gave us all encouragement, and took in and saw to the welfare of a succession of pupils learning stable management.
Ever since I could remember Mother had a deep interest in antique furniture, and all the male members of her family suffered from it now and then.
‘Dick,’ she called out of the window one day. ‘Come in and help your father with this chest.’
I went in, and found Father struggling to lift one end of an enormous chest of drawers which had for months been an undisturbed part of the hall furniture. After half an hour’s strenuous
effort we managed between us to get the chest upstairs into the new space Mother had planned for it. While we mopped our brows and flexed our cracking muscles, Mother looked at the chest from all angles.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t look right there at all. It’ll have to go down into the hall again.’
This sort of thing happened often. My father, brother, uncles and I all became expert furniture removers.
Mother’s hobby was attending auction sales in remote farmhouses. She had a theory that treasures were likely to be found where they had grown old with a house, and that the farmers who owned them might not realise their quality. She had an eye as sharp as any antique dealer, and from time to time I came into the house to find her fondly regarding some painted monstrosity which I might well have chopped up for firewood.
‘Eighteenth century,’ she would say with approval, or ‘Satinwood under all that paint.’ Away would go the object to be stripped, and back would come a beautiful and delicate table or chair or writing desk. She could probably tell from running her hand down the legs of a piece of furniture as much about its worth as Father could from doing the same to a horse, for she often showed me how new legs and backs had been joined to antique fronts and tops, and remarked that the underpinnings must be in good shape, whether it is a chair or a horse one wishes to sit on.
The size and number of the rooms at Embrook House were a delight and challenge to her, and she gradually filled them with her discovered treasures. Her discernment was well known in ‘the trade,’ and one London store asked her to go every week and arrange their window display of antiques. She would have loved to have accepted, but her variable health could not be guaranteed to be always good on Mondays.
We settled down so comfortably and quickly at Embrook that after a year or so my mind was straying again towards racing. I could not now leave Father for National Hunt steeplechasing, but there was still the possibility of point-to-points. The trouble was that Father’s horses stayed such a short time in the yard that I could not qualify them for point-to-points by hunting them eight times, even if Father had agreed to my risking their valuable necks in races, so I had to trust to an invitation from friends. Quite understandably, they did not ask me when they could get someone who had done it before.
To my joy, however, in the autumn of 1938, Oliver Dixon, a horse dealer of renown and a family friend, asked me to ride all his horses in point-to-points in the following spring. I hunted his horses during the winter, but as the time drew near for the first point-to-point, Oliver Dixon died.
Deeply disappointed, I was again an onlooker at the races, with such envy and longing to be taking part myself, that they held no pleasure for me.
Then came the war.
Slowly as it started, hunting as slowly declined, and the next year’s point-to-point races were cancelled. Father’s business began to dwindle, for with the future uncertain fewer people wanted to buy horses, and there was gradually less and less for me to do at home.
Early in 1940 I told my father and mother that I was just off to join the cavalry. But the cavalry, I was downhearted to discover, did not want me. It seemed that to get into the cavalry I should have to wait until my age group was called up, and then trust to luck.
I went home and wrote to two friends in the Scots Greys at Edinburgh begging their help, and a few days later returned to the recruiting office armed with letters of introduction and a request that I should be despatched to Edinburgh by the next train, breeched and spurred for action.
The recruiting officer was aggressively unimpressed. No strings, his cold glance said, were going to be pulled while he was there to prevent it. Declining his invitation to sign on as an assistant cook in the infantry, I went out into the street, defeated and depressed.
I stood outside the door of the recruiting centre, aimlessly looking up at the pale sunshine in the early spring sky, and on an impulse turned round and went in again for a third attempt. I tried a different man at a different table, but he had the same bored, unfriendly eyes.
‘I want to fly,’ I said.
‘Air-gunner,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.
‘No,’ I said, ‘a pilot.’
‘Air-gunner or ground staff,’ he replied, ‘we’re not taking anything else.’
‘Pilot.’ I was firm.
He looked at me more coldly then ever. Then he said, ‘You can sign on for a trade, and then re-muster for flying when you are in.’
It was my first experience of the easy callous lying of the forces, and I did not recognise it. I believed him, and I signed on as an airframe fitter.
When I tried to re-muster I was laughed at for being so simple.
‘An airframe fitter you signed on as,’ they said, ‘and an airframe fitter you’ll stay.’ And with rage in his heart, an airframe fitter was what 922385 A.C.2 Francis R. became.
Regularly every month I sent in an application to be transferred to flying school: and regularly every month I got no reply. I learned how to clean, grease, take apart, put together, and mend every inch of an aeroplane except the engine itself, and I loathed it.
After a year I was called in for an interview. It was strongly pointed out to me that as I had already received one sort of training it was a waste of the country’s time and money to give me another. I protested bitterly that I had never wanted and had tried to avoid the first training, but to no avail. I was sent back to airframes.
After a while I went on a ten week voyage via the mid-Atlantic to Egypt, and spent two years or so chasing backwards and forwards in the desert. When the army was advancing we moved up behind it on to airfields which had been bombed by our air force and blown up by the retreating Italians, and we got used to living in ruins and making workshops in the rubble. When the army was retreating we fell back to the now repaired and efficient airfields behind us, but as we were bombed by night and day we spent a good deal of our time in slit trenches, still unable to enjoy the comfort of the newly-built huts. After the enemy had bombed the airfield for a few days and we had blown up what we could not take, we hurried eastwards again, leaving everything very much as we had found it on our advance.
In both directions we patched and mended the torn bodies of the planes as they landed, getting them back into the air again as soon as we could. I acquired the sleeve propeller of an L.A.C. and a lifelong distaste for sand. And every month I sent in my application to fly.
Every six months I was given an interview, but it was only a formality: airframe fitters, it seemed, were scarcer than pilots.
At every interview I was asked what my hobbies were, as there was a space on the interviewer’s papers for this vital information. I tried each time to think of some really impressive hobby which would convince the board of my air-mindedness, but bird-watching, kite-flying, and stargazing had not moved them. Eventually, and with nothing to lose, I fell back on the truth.
A rather peppery Squadron Leader consulted his notes.
‘Well—er—er—Francis. What are your hobbies?’
‘Huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’, sir,’ I said.
The Squadron Leader exploded. ‘Get out of here at once,’ he said. ‘I’ll have none of your bloody cheek.’
And that was that.
Whenever we got a few days leave from our desert life the lights of Cairo attracted us like moths, and although on longer leaves I hitch-hiked to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, to Beirut and Damascus, most of my holidays were spent beside the Nile.
Here one day, when several of us went to inspect the Pyramids, we saw a line of mangy-looking camels holding their supercilious noses in the air. It appeared that they were for hire, rather like donkeys on the sands at Bognor, complete with a dirty burnous’d Arab to help intrepid customers to mount, and to run along beside the camel for the first few yards, shouting advice to both animal and rider in a totally unintelligible local tongue.
We paid our piastres and took our choice, and started off over the burning sands of Egypt. A
s a form of transport a camel is very uncomfortable indeed. It rocks and sways, pitches and dips, and its trotting action on the way back was nearly my undoing, for the Ship of the Desert was rapidly making me seasick, and it would be better to draw a yashmak over the whole proceeding.
The battle of El Alamein was won, and we made our way for the third time across the Libyan desert. The Germans had blown up everything even more thoroughly than the Italians and the R.A.F. had, and the airfields could barely be distinguished from the rest of the desolate country except for the enormous bomb craters and the concentrations of ruined buildings, trucks and aircraft to be found there. As before we made our home in the rubble, but in good spirits because we were going in the right direction again.
When the end of the North African campaign was in sight, and my thirty-seventh application form was on its way to the waste-paper basket, the C.O. sent for me.
‘Francis,’ he said, ‘Group H.Q. say they are tired of seeing your name every month. They give in. You’re to report to Suez for transport to Rhodesia.’
At last, when I had almost given up hope, I was going to learn the one and only thing I still did not know about an aeroplane: how to fly it. I left the drab and dirty desert with barely a backward glance.
Flying was everything I had imagined it to be, and from the moment I climbed into the open cockpit of a Tiger Moth behind the instructor I began to enjoy life again. The lightness of our little craft as it lifted off the ground, and the rushing air round my head seemed to slough off the years of grime and drudgery, and ten flying hours later, when I went up on my first solo, I felt exhilarated and whole. In solo flying, once I had passed the stage of worrying all the time I was in the air whether I would get safely down, I found again what Service life denies, the blessed peace of being alone.