blog.indianracing.in

Best-selling British thriller writer and steeplechase jockey, great Dick Francis died in his home in the Cayman Islands on Feb. 14, The Associated Press reported. He was 89.

Dick Francis was unique in reaching the summit of his profession as both jockey and novelist, and became one of the few racing people to transcend the boundaries of the sport.

As a jump jockey he was champion in 1953-54 and rode the most famous and dramatic loser in racing history, the Queen Mother’s Devon Loch, who collapsed only yards from the finish when well clear in the 1956 Grand National.

The Welsh-born former World War II pilot then became a best-selling and award-winning thriller-writer whose 42 novels made him world-famous and gave pleasure to millions of readers.

Richard Stanley Francis was born on October 31, 1920 at his maternal grandparents’ farm, Coedcanlas, near Lawrenny in Pembrokeshire. He was the younger child of Vince and Molly Francis; his elder brother, Doug, became a successful trainer.

Vince Francis had been a minor professional jump jockey before World War I, and after war service in France he became the manager of WJ Smith’s Hunting Stables at Holyport, Berkshire, a very successful business owned by Horace Smith which dealt in hunters, hacks and children’s ponies.

Dick, who had been seriously ill with pneumonia when he was six months old, could ride almost as soon as he could walk, and was soon helping to school the horses which his father managed.

A dejected Dick Francis after the 1956 Grand National

 

Dick’s attendance at school was erratic, as his father regarded equitation as the most important part of his education, and constant practice made him one of the best young horsemen in Britain. The prodigy took part in many gymkhana events and enthusiastically played truant in order to go hunting. In the early 1930s he became a leading rider in the showring.

He formed an ambition to become a jockey at an early age, even though his father was no longer involved in the sport. The latter started his own horse-dealing establishment near Wokingham in 1938 with Francis as his assistant. But business dried up after the outbreak of war and Francis joined the RAF.

Shipped to Egypt in late 1940, he hated his early years and every month sent in a request to be transferred to flying school, and in early 1943,he was sent to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to train as a pilot.

By the time he returned to Britain in early 1944, the Allies had achieved superiority over the Germans in the air, and he saw little action. He spent much of his time on further training courses as well as his duties as a fighter pilot, escorting bombers.

He then joined Bomber Command and flew Wellingtons on diversionary air raids over Europe, drawing attention away from the main attacks, before moving to Coastal Command, escorting surrendered German ships into British ports and helping to train navigators.

In October 1945, just before being demobbed, Dick met Mary Brenchley at a cousin’s wedding in Weston-super-Mare. It was love at first sight.

Mary, nearly four years younger, was born into a non-horsey middle-class family in Surrey and was educated at boarding school and the University of London. During their 20-month engagement she was a schoolmistress and then an assistant stage manager in a theatre, but she gave up formal employment on her marriage.

Dick Francis: worked for leading jump jockey George Owen

  PICTURE: Gerry Cranham  

Meanwhile, Francis returned to his pre-war job as his father’s assistant. He soon became disillusioned with the hunting and showing world, and his old ambition to be a jockey resurfaced.

In March 1946 he won a point-to-point race on Red Poker, and the following month had his first ride under Rules, falling on Louis The Great at Littleton, Cheshire.

Through his brother Doug, he found a job as secretary, assistant and dogsbody to George Owen, a leading jump jockey who had started to farm and train near Chester.

This was a massive stroke of luck, as Owen soon became a successful trainer and was prepared to allow an inexperienced amateur to ride many of his horses. Indeed, he was mentor to three champion jump jockeys, the others being Tim Brookshaw and Stan Mellor.

Francis’s first mount for Owen was Russian Hero in October 1946 and he scored his first two victories under Rules on the same day - on Wrenbury Tiger and Blitz Boy at Bangor in 1947.

The following month he married Mary in London; he had one arm in a sling after a fall. It proved a very long and happy marriage and they had two children - Merrick (born 1950) and Felix (born 1953). Mary had never been to a race meeting before they met, but now accompanied him whenever she could.

During her first pregnancy Mary suffered an attack of polio, and her temporary paralysis forced her to spend three weeks in an iron lung. She slowly recovered, but it left her a lifetime legacy of asthma, bronchitis, muscular weakness and semi-invalidism.

In 1947-48 Francis rode nearly all Owen’s horses, and took part in so many races that in March the stewards of the National Hunt Committee told him to turn professional.

His second big break came soon afterwards, when he was offered a retainer as second jockey to Lord Bicester, a merchant banker and one of the leading owners of jumpers.

Bicester’s first jockey, Martin Molony, was based in Ireland, so Francis rode some of his best horses until the owner’s death in 1956.

In 1948-49 he partnered Roimond into second place in both the King George VI Chase and the Grand National. Substituting for the injured Molony, he was having his first ride in the National on Roimond, a moody customer, who had one of his good days despite his burden of 11st 12lb.

Ironically, the easy winner was Russian Hero, a 66-1 shot on whom he had won twice and whose life he had saved during a severe attack of colic.

The biggest victory of his career came on Finnure in the 1949 King George VI Chase.

Finnure possessed fine finishing speed which also enabled the partnership to win the 1950 Champion Chase at Liverpool.

Silver Fame, who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup under Molony in 1951, had landed the Golden Miller Chase there with Francis the previous year. The partnership also came second in the 1950 King George VI Chase.

Francis also teamed up with trainer Ken Cundell to win the 1949 Welsh Grand National with Fighting Line and 1950 Christmas Hurdle with Coup D’Epee. That was the start of a productive partnership with the Cundell family, especially with Ken’s second cousin Frank Cundell, the trainer of Crudwell.

Crudwell won more races than any other horse in Britain since 1900 and Francis rode him to 15 of his 50 victories, notably the Welsh Grand National in 1956.

Francis had his share of falls and broken bones, but his most painful injuries were shoulder dislocations. An operation on his right shoulder proved so agonising that when, in 1954, his left shoulder became dislocated, he declined to have it repaired.

The first horse he rode for Peter Cazalet was Statecraft, pulled up in the 1953 Cheltenham Gold Cup, and soon afterwards the former champion trainer appointed him as first jockey to his stable.

Dick Francis and Queen Mother

  PICTURE: Hulton Getty Archive  

In 1953-54 Francis therefore rode for Cazalet, Lord Bicester and Frank Cundell, and he fulfilled a dream by becoming champion jockey with 76 wins. It was something of a fluke, because what turned out to be easily the best season of his career was the one in which Fred Winter broke a leg.

The job with Cazalet entailed riding for the Queen Mother. At the time the royal owner was not yet heavily involved in the sport, so although Francis is the jockey most closely identified with her horses, he won only ten races for her four of which were on Devon Loch.

Devon Loch won two handicaps in the autumn of 1955, and his third place in the National Hunt Handicap Chase at Cheltenham put him spot-on for the 1956 Grand National.

Watched by the Queen Mother, the Queen and Princess Margaret, Devon Loch treated the big fences like hurdles. Close up at halfway, he kept outjumping his rivals and went to the front three out, taking the final fence half a length up on E.S.B.

Devon Loch was about ten lengths clear with the race at his mercy when, about 50 yards from the line, he sprawled and fell flat on his belly with his legs spreadeagled. Francis was shot up his neck and then fell back into the saddle, notdismounting until after E.S.B. and Dave Dick had swept by.

Devon Loch collapses when clear of rivals in the 1956 Grand National

Deeply upset, he was given a lift back to the weighing-room in an ambulance as his mount, none the worse, was led from the course.

It was cruel luck for the jockey and owner, but particularly for the trainer; Cazalet’s stable had already suffered Grand National misfortune with Davy Jones and Cromwell. In the royal box afterwards, the connections tried to console each other, and the Queen Mother said: “That’s racing, I suppose.”

Many theories were put forward for Devon Loch’s collapse, the most popular at the time being the ‘ghost jump’ theory. The gelding had been about to pass the wing of the water jump; many thought that he saw it out of the corner of his eye and tried to jump it.

Dismissing this, the jockey suggested that the deafening cheers of the crowd, in anticipation of a royal victory, frightened Devon Loch, and that he fell only because he belonged to the Queen Mother. The horse pricked his ears as an immense shockwave of sound engulfed him, and this may have caused him to react.

In his memoirs Francis wrote: “A post-mortem one day may find the words ‘Devon Loch’ engraved on my heart.”

Ironically, if he had not suffered this stunning blow, he would probably not have been asked to write those memoirs, and he might never have become a novelist. This defeat led to a level of fame and fortune that would never have been his had he won the race.

Novels: Francis published 42 books

 

In the summer of 1956 his mother had tea with a friend who was accompanied by herson, literary agent John Johnson. The latter saw a photograph of Francis on Devon Loch, discovered the family connection, arranged a meeting and commissioned him to write his autobiography.

On January 11, 1957, Francis broke a wrist and was badly kicked in a fall from Prince Stephen over hurdles at Newbury. At the age of 36, and acting on the advice of the Queen Mother’s friend Lord Abergavenny, he announced his retirement later that month. He had won 345 races, the lowest career score for a post-war champion jockey in Britain.

He had no desire to train, and though his education had not equipped him to be a writer, he accepted a job as a columnist for the Sunday Express.

That autobiography, TheSport of Queens, was published in December 1957 by Michael Joseph, who remained his publishers throughout his career.

In the second edition of the book, he wrote that he initially regarded his journalist’s job as “only a stop-gapuntil I decided what to do for the rest of my life.”

But Francis eventually became dissatisfied with his income from journalism and his first novel, Dead Cert, was published in 1962. Its modest success encouraged him to write another, Nerve, published in 1964, followed by two more in 1965.

Thereafter, until well into old age, he delivered one book a year like clockwork to his publishers; from 1962 to 2000 he produced 38 novels and one collection of short stories.

At first his sales were no more than satisfactory, but they gradually increased until his income from royalties enabled him to give up journalism in 1973.

Many of the books contained autobiographical elements, especially Forfeit (1968), in which the narrator is a Sunday newspaper journalist whose wife is a polio victim. In Twice Shy (1981) the two main characters are based on his sons.

Mary did much of the research, often in great depth. For Flying Finish (1966) she learned about light aircraft, eventually becoming a qualified pilot and running her own air-taxi company like the one in Rat Race (1970).

Dick Francis (right) pictured alongside Peter O’Sullevan and Lester Piggott

  PICTURE: Dan Abraham  

Once the couple had hit on a winning formula, they stuck to it. All the novels are crime thrillers (a few are also whodunits) and most are set in the racing world.

All are narrated in the first person by the main character, with a different hero each time except for Sid Halley (four novels) and Kit Fielding (two). But they are all the same character, though their names and circumstances change from book to book.  

The typical Francis novel is moralistic (good always triumphs in the end) with a dose of sex and violence.

Helped by the efforts of John Johnson and the latter’s successor as his agent, Andrew Howson, the novels were soon best-sellers in Britain, and for many years more Francis books were borrowed from British public libraries than those of any other authorexcept Catherine Cookson.

Unlike almost every other mass-market thriller-writer, he produced books that were intelligent enough to make him a favourite with the critics as well as the public.

The most effusive eulogy came from CP Snow, who wrote in the Financial Times in 1973: “I have just read his entire output and discovered that Mr Francis is wonderfully good. He has qualities and gifts which very few novelists begin to possess. In many respects, hisbooks are deeper than so much work which we dignify by the name of Art. One is in the company of a wise and grown-up man.”

Earlier authors had written racing fiction, and some have tried to emulate him in recent years, but none has matched the subtlety and style of his writing. In effect, he was an excellent novelist who happened to write racing thrillers, and he became the subject of academic literary studies.

The level of doping, corruption and other pieces of skulduggery in the novels may have led some readers to believe that racing was entirely crooked, but they made many converts to the sport among the general public.

The plots were often inspired by actual events, but in 1983 life imitated art. Shergar’s abduction had echoes of the plot of Blood Sport (1967), perhaps the best of all the novels, in which three stallions are stolen in the US.

Francis received the top prizes in his field. Whip Hand won the Gold Daggeraward as the best crime novel of the year from the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) in Britain, and Forfeit, Whip Hand and Come To Grief all won the US equivalent, the Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA).

Although lucrative film options were sold on many of the novels, only one feature film has resulted: Dead Cert (1974), based on the first novel starred Judi Dench. It was such a critical and commercial disaster that it has permanently discouraged anyone else following suit.

Nevertheless, in 1979 Yorkshire TV produced The Racing Game, a series of six hour-long episodes by various writers and starring Mike Gwilym as Sid Halley, the first of which was an adaptation of Odds Against.

Dick Francis reached a watershed in his professional and personal lives in 1980-81. Whip Hand won both the top awards for crime novels, and he changed his US publishers from Harper and Row to Putnam, who promotedReflex with a big marketing campaign that was helped when The Racing Game was televised there. For the rest of the century he was a best-seller in the US as well as in Britain and many other countries around the world.

Mary’s ill health, the legacy of her polio, now made it inadvisable for her to spend the winter in England, so they bought an apartment in a luxury condo by the beach near Fort Lauderdale, Florida and became permanent US residents in the mid-1980s, selling their bungalow at Blewbury.

By this time the couple had settled into a regular annual routine. The new novel would be written between January and April, and delivered to the publishers in May. It would be published in the autumn for the Christmas market, with an advance copy going to the Queen Mother, who was a big fan.

This routine was interrupted in 1986 by the publication of Lester: The Official Biography. Francis had been a friend of Lester Piggott since the early 1950s, when they both rode for Ken Cundell and had been working on his authorised life story since 1973.

Piggott retired (for the first time) in 1985 and the biography was published the following March becoming a best-seller.

The couple lived in Florida until the end of 1992, when they moved to Grand Cayman, the largest of the Cayman Islands.

The standard of the novels declined in the 1990s as the formula wore thin, but they were critic-proof; ‘Dick Francis’ had become a brand name, so sales were unaffected.

By this time the books had sold more than 60 million copies in 35 languages.

Francis had always given his wife plenty of credit for helping him with the novels, and they were clearly the product of teamwork by a couple who had a very close professional and personal partnership. He would have liked Mary to be officially named as the joint-author.

However, in a 1999 book DickFrancis: A Racing Life, his former Sunday Express colleague Graham Lord suggested that the actual writing was done by Mary, with her literary academic background, rather than Dick, who had had an inadequate education.
Theunauthorised biography was perceptive in many respects, but its central thesis was unconvincing because Francis was too honourable to take the credit for the books if he had not been entitled to it.

After an idyllically happy marriageof 53 years, Mary died at their home on Grand Cayman in 2000, aged 76.

There followed a gap of six years between books before Francis produced Under Orders in 2006, but the authorship issue resurfaced the following year when his 40th novel, Dead Heat, was published with Felix Francis credited as joint-author.

Felix, academic like his mother, had been a schoolmaster until becoming his parents’ business manager in 1991.

The elder son, Merrick,was an assistant to Ryan Price and Josh Gifford before training on his own account with modest success in Lambourn. He had big-race winners Weavers’ Pin (Northumberland Plate) and Genobra (Britannia Handicap) before giving up as a public trainer in 1992.

Due to circulation problems, Francis had his lower right leg amputated in June 2007.

Dick Francis, with wife Mary, was appointed CBE in 2000  PICTURE: PA  

In addition to his literary awards, he was appointed OBE (1984) and CBE (2000) and received an honourary degree in humane letters from Tufts University in Boston.

Like his fictional heroes, Francis was decent and unassuming, quiet and modest - too self-effacing to shine in interviews.

In the novels, Sid Halley and the other heroes who are ex-jockeys pine for their lost careers, reflecting the author’s own feelings that his decade as a jockey constituted ‘The best years of my life’. For him, being a writer was a poor second best.

In his autobiography he suggested that his epitaph would be ‘The man who didn’t win the National’. He will be remembered much more positively than that.

Courtesy: www.racingpost.com

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed