Dick Francis, who died on Sunday aged 89, was a unique figure — a champion steeplechase jockey who, without any previous apparent literary bent, became an international best-selling writer, the author of 42 crime novels, selling more than 60 million copies in 35 languages. Right from the start, with Dead Cert in 1962, the Dick Francis thriller showed a mastery of lean, witty genre prose reminiscent — sometimes to the point of comic parody — of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It was an American style that many clever people in England had attempted to reproduce without much success, and it was a wonder how a barely educated former jump jockey was able to do the trick with such effortless ease. People said his highly educated wife wrote the books for him. It was a mystery that was never satisfactorily solved.
The most dramatic incident in his racing career was also a mystery. In the Grand National at Aintree in 1956, his mount Devon Loch, Queen Mother Elizabeth’s horse trained by Peter Cazalet, had jumped all
the fences and, well ahead, only 45m from the finish, without another horse near him, suddenly collapsed and was unable to continue.
Some said the horse had attempted to jump an imaginary fence; another theory, put up years later by Bill Braddon, Cazalet’s head lad, was that the girth was too tight and the horse suddenly let loose an enormous fart. Braddon said he had tightened the girth just before the off, “one notch up and another for luck,” without realizing that Cazalet had already done it in the saddling enclosure.
There was no question of Francis, like a crooked jockey out of one of his own books, having pulled the horse. It had been his great dream since he was a lad of eight in 1928 and listened to the Grand National on the radio as Tipperary Tim won at 100-1, to be a steeplechase jockey and win that ultimate prize. Ironically, Devon Loch’s melodramatic collapse in front of a roaring crowd cheering him to the finish has ensured Francis a place in the history of the race he would not have had if he had been merely another winner.
Francis was champion jockey in the 1953 to 1954 season. He rode the queen’s horses for Cazalet, the royal trainer, from 1953 until 1957. Some said he always rode like an amateur, and failed to have a really strong finish. He had indeed started as an amateur, going professional in 1948, but he was a masterful rider and a perfect size for a jump jockey, 1.72m and 63.5kg. Only the great Fred Winter was a better chase jockey.
In 1957 the queen mother sacked him. The Marquess of Abergavenny, racing administrator and friend of the queen mother, summoned Francis to his flat near Hyde Park and told him it was time to stop racing. He suggested that Francis had suffered too many injuries in falls — he had dislocated his shoulder so many times that he had to be permanently strapped for the rest of his life — and should quit while he was ahead. Francis was shattered by this oblique dismissal by the queen mother, for whom he had a rather old-fashioned reverence.
He asked what he was to do for a living. The marquess said something always turned up. Francis had wept when Devon Loch fell and he wept again, walking away through Hyde Park. “I nearly flung myself into the Serpentine, I was so depressed,” he said, years later.
RSS