Punchestown misses its most familiar face

By Ian Carnaby

Someone has sent me Thirteen Against The Bank, by Norman Leigh. This came as a very pleasant surprise and almost certainly follows on from my piece the other day about roulette systems and ‘doubling up’. If I knew the identity of the reader I’d sent him a bottle of champagne because such acts of kindness are rare these days. I shall enjoy the book, which concerns a gambling assault on the Casino Municipale in Nice in 1966.

It’s good to hear from readers, even in an anonymous way. Not that there was anything anonymous about a response to a piece I wrote in the Sporting Life a dozen or so years ago about Sunday racing. I happen to think there is far too much racing overall and the addition of Sundays was grossly unfair on stable staff and their families. I still think so. Anyway, this incensed a reader who made the wholly predictable points that some people could only attend on a Sunday (fair enough) and didn’t they race on the continent and around the world on that day? Well, yes, but in France and Ireland, for example, they have the good sense to leave certain weekdays blank. We are the only ones, with our huge surfeit of moderate horses and desperate need to keep the betting office tills ticking over, who race on nearly every day of the year.

The letter was quite vitriolic and included the memorable (to me, anyway) if rhetorical question, “Who IS Ian Carnaby, anyway?”

This was all too much for the late Sir Clement Freud, who rang me the same day to insist I protest in the strongest possible terms to the paper which, he felt, should have demonstrated loyalty by declining to print the letter. He was very correct about this sort of thing, more correct than I, and I believe I disappointed him by staying pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

Even though he was 84, his death surprised me. He just seemed to go on at his own measured pace, dispensing wisdom and the odd bon mot. We met sometimes at the races, most recently at Cheltenham, where he described some dental work that needed doing. He had most of his own teeth and this course of treatment seemed to involve all of them. “Do you know, he suggested two or three visits”, Clement said. “And I said to him, ‘I think it might be advisable to do them all in one go’ I’m not sure that he understood why this might be a good idea”.

He was droll, even dead-pan. Of all his dry one liners, the one I liked most concerned his watch, which he would gaze at appraisingly and say, “My grandfather sold me this watch on his deathbed, you know”.

He once told me, possibly at Punchestown, that he hadn’t spoken to his brother, Lucian, for 30 years, though no explanation was forthcoming. A while back I got a message to Lucian in New York, asking if he’d be prepared to do a piece for a magazine called the Sports Adviser, because he was quite a gambler.

The thing is, people of my generation tend to get back to you - polite but curt, sometimes - even if the answer is no. “I have no interest in this project”, he wrote. That put him a step ahead of the former Southampton midfield player Matt Oakley, who didn’t get back at all when I needed a piece for the Southampton v Leicester matchday programme. I can never think of Lucian Freud without Matt Oakley coming into it. Then again, Albert Finney didn’t want to do it, either. (“I don’t think so, old love, do you?”)

So, another Punchestown comes around but this time there will be no Sir Clement with all the Irish waitresses fussing around him. Probably just as well Lucian doesn’t go, because they’d all end up back in his studio. Just imagine if any other 80-year old asked you to take all your gear off. I wish I could paint.

Punchestown is wonderful and you should go

Punchestown is wonderful and you should go. Peter O’Toole went after finishing Lawrence of Arabia, which took 2 years and three months. He went from 27 to 29 while it was being made and said the contrast in close-ups was quite alarming.

But he wound down at Punchestown, drinking whisky on the plane over and more whisky through the afternoon until his eyes were bloodshot and the last horse he backed actually won, which sobered him to a degree, the way it does. He was even first in the pay-out queue, no doubt remembering his bookie father Captain Pat, who was not above doing a runner when results when badly.

O’Toole could have gone to any Dublin party that night, but chose instead to visit Glendalough, a beautiful, almost deserted spot along a lake between two small mountains in outer Dublin, not far from where the earliest O’Tooles are buried.

Like the actor/director John Huston, Peter O’Toole could be the life and soul, then disappear quite abruptly, as if everything suddenly bored him and it was time to be alone again. Sir Clement was like that, as anyone who has attended one of his dinner parties will agree. But he was such wonderful company when the night was yet young that you didn’t really care. You kind of wanted him to notice you. And, being Sir Clement Freud, he did.