On the morning of Wednesday August 18, 1948, the people of Britain had more pressing matters on their minds than the outcome of the opening race at Haydock Park that afternoon. This was the Age of Austerity, with the country still firmly in the grip of post-war rationing (although bread restrictions had ended three weeks earlier), and most of those queuing at the food shops that morning whiled away the time whistling the latest songs like I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover or by discussing the two great sporting events of the moment. The London Olympics - Emil Zatopek, Fanny Blankers-Koen and all - had closed the previous Saturday, the very day on which Don Bradman, needing only four runs for a Test career average of 100, had walked out at The Oval for his final international innings and been dismissed for a duck, succumbing second ball to an Eric Hollies Despite that aberration, shortly before noon on the Wednesday, Bradman had led 'The Invincibles' off the pitch, having demolished England to win the series 4-0.
Even as one sporting legend was leaving the stage, another was stepping out of the wings, in the unlikely guise of a pudgy-faced 12-year-old schoolboy perched in the passenger seat of his father's horsebox as it bumped through the drizzle into Haydock Park. Lester Piggott, only child of Lambourn trainer and former top jump jockey Keith Piggott, was riding a bay three-year-old filly named The Chase in the afternoon's first race, the Wigan Lane Selling Handicap, £294 to the winning owner, over 1m on soft going.
Earlier that year, Lester had been formally apprenticed to his father - declared weight 5st 4lb - and this was his seventh ride in public. He regularly rode The Chase in her work at home - "She was pretty ordinary, really," he remembers, "nice and quiet" - and his racecourse debut had come aboard her in an apprentice race at Salisbury in April. They finished unplaced, and he then rode her at Bath (his first ride against senior jockeys), Kempton and Worcester without reaching the frame.
Looking back over the span of six decades, Lester recollects the bizarre prelude to the Haydock race. "Ginger Dennistoun, who trained not far from my father, had a horse in the race named Prompt Corner, whom my father had trained until Ginger claimed him out of a seller at Leicester early that season," he says. "When Ginger saw that The Chase and Prompt Corner were in the same race, he suggested we work them together at the Haydock weights. There'd be no point in both going up, he reckoned.
"So we had a gallop at Lambourn. I rode The Chase and Harry Wragg's brother Sam rode Prompt Corner, who won by about a length. Ginger said to my father, 'You won't bother to go now, will you?' "But then my father pointed out that they hadn't taken account of the 7lb I'd be able to claim at Haydock. So both went up after all - in the same horsebox - and I went with them."
In those pre-M6 days the drive from Lambourn to Lancashire was interminable, and Keith Piggott and his son travelled up the day before and stayed overnight near the course. In Wednesday morning's Sporting Life betting forecast, Prompt Corner was a 100-8 chance, with The Chase among the 20-1 outsiders. As the Piggott’s were having breakfast, Dennistoun arrived with the news that Lester's cousin Bill Rickaby, intended rider of Prompt Corner, had been prevented from flying up by bad weather.
"Ginger was a very volatile man," recalls Lester, "and he stood there throwing his arms in the air and saying he couldn't decide what to do. He must have been planning a touch, even though it appeared Prompt Corner would struggle to beat The Chase at the weights, and he was really upset that Bill wouldn't make it." Dennistoun scurried off to the racecourse to book a replacement jockey and found veteran Davy Jones, who rode under both codes and had won the 1945 Cheltenham Gold Cup on Red Rower. There were other well-known jockeys in the race. Billy Nevett had won three runnings of the wartime Derby at Newmarket and a few weeks before Haydock had landed the Oaks on Masaka, while three-time champion apprentice Joe Sime was one of the most popular jockeys on the northern circuit and 3lb claimer Frankie Durr had shared the apprentice championship in 1945.
Lester takes up the story: "Apparently Ginger had scrubbed his original plan when Bill couldn't make it, but then told Davy Jones that Prompt Corner should be trying his best after all. "He then changed his mind yet again when he couldn't get his money on, and told Davy to go easy." In the Haydock weighing room, the schoolboy changed into owner Betty Lavington's silks - white, purple and white striped sleeves, quartered cap - and weighed out at 6st 9lb, The Chase's allotted 7st 2lb less Lester's 7lb allowance.
The race itself was described in the Sporting Life: "Scottish Flight was slowly away, and Cameo Star made the early running from Dulcet Call, Planchard, Poseidonius and The Chase. There was no change in this order until the straight was reached, where Cameo Star weakened and The Chase, Prompt Corner, Miss Orient and Miss Annabel became prominent. "Two furlongs out The Chase assumed command and galloped on in resolute style to win by one and a half lengths from Prompt Corner, with Miss Annabel half a length farther away third." The Chase was returned at 10-1, fifth market choice in a field of 12, with Prompt Corner and Miss Annabel both 100-8.
But one significant detail missed by the Life is now supplied by the winning jockey. "As we went past Prompt Corner, Davy Jones was urging me on, yelling, 'Go on! Go on!' at me," and Lester adds with that wry smile, "I suppose you could draw your own conclusions from that.”Sadly, Jones himself cannot provide illumination as he died in 1991. But in a television interview with Julian Wilson in 1983 he remembered with a chuckle: "I wasn't fancied. Lester might say I wasn't trying, but I wasn't fancied - which is different!"
But a winner is a winner whatever the opposition is up to, and after dismounting, Lester lugged his saddle and bulging weight-cloth back to the scales as the auctioneer prepared to sell the winner, and The Chase was duly bought by a B Whitehouse for 330 guineas. The filly's new trainer was Ronald Blake at Malpas, Cheshire so she had a much shorter post-race journey than the Piggott’s, who rattled the 200-odd miles without their horse back to Lambourn.
No fussing over Lester's achievement: quick supper, then bed. But the following morning he woke to find himself famous. He was front-page news in the Sporting Chronicle, which described how "a slip of a boy in white and purple silks streaked past the post in the 2.15 race at Haydock Park yesterday to become the youngest winning jockey in the last 20 years of British racing history" - that is, since 11-year-old Ian Martin had ridden a Yarmouth winner in September 1928. The Chronicle printed a photo of the youngster puffing out his cheeks as he pushed The Chase home, and you can see why Peter O'Sullevan was soon to describe him as having the countenance of 'a wilful Cherub'.
Sporting Life readers learned of "the first riding success of a very young rider with a very great name" and of how The Chase had been "stylishly handled", but the true impact of Lester's win was to be found beyond the sporting press.
The Daily Express ran a front-page story with a photo of our hero reading a comic, and full marks to the anonymous reporter who managed to get the first-ever - and characteristically spare - Lester Piggott post-race quote, which ran: "It was terrific. I rode the last five furlongs hard and managed to pull ahead." The Express also quoted Lester's mother Iris, who had learned of the family triumph when Lavington phoned her from Haydock: "Don't make a fuss of the boy. He's done nothing special. He wants to be a jockey, but he's in the middle of his school days, and he'll have to be back with his books at Miss Westlake's private school when the summer holiday is over. "He has been riding since he was four and is pretty good, though not a patch on his father." Keith Piggott's own verdict was a measured: "There is no reason why he should not be a good jockey."
The Daily Mirror front page on Thursday morning was dominated by a portentous editorial about the four-power summit taking place in Moscow - "The only road to peace is understanding instead of fear" - but it still had room for prominent coverage of Lester's win. Beside an advert for Lifebuoy soap - "It isn't enough to Look Clean - Free your pores of your work-weary self!" - it ran a report putting Mrs Piggott centre stage, under the headline "Don't make my son a hero, she says".
Nor was the story ignored higher up Fleet Street's social scale. It merited two paragraphs in the Daily Telegraph, although naturally further down the page than a report of how Mrs Richarda Morrow-Tait, 24, had the previous day landed in Marseilles after the first leg of her flight around the world in her Percival Proctor having set off from Croydon that morning.
The publicity continued with a Picture Post feature, and the October 1948 issue of Racing Review magazine printed more pictures of the Boy Wonder at home. By then, Lester was back at his small private school in Lambourn. "There weren't many opportunities to ride in races except in the holidays," he says, "but if I'd been to the races I'd be allowed to make up the lost school hours in the evening." In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that over a year passed before his second winner - Forest Glade, also owned by Lavington, at Newbury on August 20, 1949 - and it was not until he left school at the age of 15 that he was able to devote himself full-time to his calling.
As for The Chase, Lester rode her once for her new trainer, unplaced in a Worcester seller at the end of August 1948. The Haydock seller was the only race she ever won, but as the forerunner of Petite Etoile, Sir Ivor, Nijinsky, Alleged, Sagaro etc she has her place in the annals, and is one of the few horses to be immortalised in bronze on a British racecourse. For Haydock Park, site of Lester's first winner in Britain, was also the site of his last, on the Jack Berry trained Palacegate Jack on October 5, 1994, 46 years and 4,492 domestic winners after The Chase. Willie Newton's bronze 'Start To Finish', depicting 58-year-old Lester on Palacegate Jack pulling clear of 12-year-old Lester on The Chase, was unveiled on the course in September 2006 to celebrate this happy symmetry.
That humble selling plate on a rainy day at Haydock Park proved one of the defining moments of racing history, but before we get too carried away with celebrating its Diamond Jubilee, allow the Long Fellow to offer his own perspective... "It was just the start of the job, really, wasn't it? That's all."
