Tracking good form for a half century

Racing: Tony Sweeney looks back on a career as a racing correspondent that spans 50 years and reflects on the beginnings of the success story that is Irish horse racing

A fortnight ago I stood on the top step in the press box at the Curragh and watched North Light, the odds-on favourite for the Irish Derby, being over-turned by Grey Swallow, trained by Dermot Weld whose stables at Rosewell Lodge are to be found on the racecourse side of the Curragh plain.

Fifty years earlier, covering my first Irish Derby as a working journalist, I had seen another odds-on chance, Tale Of Two Cities, losing out.

Victory here went to Michael Hurley's 50 to 1 outsider Zarathustra, trained barely a mile down the road at another of the historic Curragh Lodges, one that takes its name from Joseph Osborne, the great Victorian writer on racing and breeding.

Change, what change might be a first reaction; had I not lived through the transformation which in the years spanned by Zarathustra through to Grey Swallow overtook the sport that is my passion, the perennial freelance job that is my joy?

Standing side by side in my library are two volumes, the first an early 15th century manuscript Book Of Hours, then the international Christian prayer book, the other a late 15th century hymn book printed on movable type that represented Europe's great revolution in the manner of putting words on paper, a process that would survive well into my lifetime and only then be superseded by the arrival of the computer.

Five hundred years before Henry Ford cottoned on to the idea of assembly-line production the monks, descendents of the great individual scribes who had produced the Books of Kells, Lindisfarne, etc., were using the same work procedure to produce these Books of Hours, each one working on his own speciality in calligraphy or decoration before passing it on to another member of the scriptorium.

The arrival of Johannes Gutenberg's press was violently opposed by those whose means of livelihood was being usurped but then they had no more success in stopping the march of this new technology than their 20th century counterparts in the print unions.

Such matters were not even dreamed of, though, when Arthur Morris recruited Michael O'Hehir, Tom Forrest and myself to provide the Sporting Press, the Clonmel specialist greyhound paper, with an Irish and English horse-racing service.

My thoughts of using my history degree as an entrée into the Department of External Affairs were put away for good.

Over the Derby weekend I was much saddened to learn of the death of Douglas Gageby as this renders 1954 all the more poignant.

In September of that year I was contracted to write a column for the start-up Evening Press.

Douglas had been appointed editor and with Jack Smith, a former Reuters war correspondent as news editor, the pair presided over a uniquely motivated news room that came closest to living up to the image of a 1940s Hollywood movie.

With multiple editions "hold that front page" was a reality and reporters like John Healy, Jim Flanagan, Jim Downey, and Dominic Coyle were legendary, it being the habit for them to vie with one another at the crack of dawn as to who could come up with the best idea for a story or a feature.

However one dark winter night Jack Smith and his wife drove into the Liffey at unprotected Sir John Rogerson's Quay.

Both were drowned and something of the magic went out of Burgh Quay.

By that time my brief with Irish Press Newspapers had become enlarged to take in the preparation of the Irish race cards.

No matter which newspaper group one worked for those were the days of scissors and paste as you cut up the entries from the Irish Field, pasted them down, wrote in three form figures, conjured up a probable jockey on the basis of very limited assistance from trainers allied to recourse to the Spring Chronicle Racing Up To Date to see who had ridden it last time out.

Any advance preparation was well-nigh impossible as the entries were made three weeks earlier and thus the betting forecast was cast in a matter of minutes not hours.

The first major step along the road to the programmes that you get today was a sequel to the death of the The Irish Times racing correspondent Michael Byrne.

Amongst his responsibilities had been returning starting prices for the betting offices. There was no rush to take over such a thankless job and so it fell to Christy Glennon and Noel Reid who established Irish Racing Services - now a subsidiary of this paper - and apart from the betting also undertook the production of a properly researched set of jockeys.

After the death of my father, my mother and I came back to grandfather Parkinson's Maddenstown Lodge during the war.

By then the stable's glory days were past history, the Senator having secured his 24th and last leading race winning title in 1939.

I was in time, though, to witness the seeds of a whole new Irish racing scene being planted with Joe McGrath's brainwave of a racing board that would generate a serious improvement in prize money and racecourse facilities parallelled with the emergence of Tom Dreaper, Vincent O'Brien and Paddy Prendergast, three trainers of genius.

In the early- to mid-1940s you would not have bet odds yourself on any of the trio achieving iconic status.

The north Co Dublin-based Dreaper was already in middle age and a farmer who loved what he did when the death of Gwyn Evans in a car crash resulted in J V Rank's chasers being sent across to Kilsallaghan to be trained.

The address of Vincent O'Brien's first stables - Clashganiff House, Churchtown, Mallow - conveyed an exaggerated notion of his inheritance.

Finally, the Curragh-located Paddy Prendergast was to be observed mounted on a bicycle, not a hack, as he set out to borrow feedstuffs for his original two-horse stable.

All three exploded into action, Prince Regent (1942) giving Dreaper his first of 10 Irish Grand Nationals, Drybob and Good Days (1944) crediting O'Brien with an autumn double in his first full season, while Port Blanc (1946) was the first of the brilliantly fast juveniles that Prendergast would unleash on England.

By the time I took up my pen to chronicle their doings each of them had ensured that Irish racing as seen through the eyes of the greater world outside had assumed a new stature on which their successors have continued to build.

And what does the future hold in store for me? Now there's one prediction to which the formbook holds no clues.

Fifty years on, though, I will still be targeting a 50 per cent strike rate from my "two against the field" while, in association with Guy St John Williams, I will seek to leave in the possession of Horse Racing Ireland an archive of the Irish thoroughbred to be located in its new headquarters on the edge of the Curragh.

My ambition that this will stand up a claim I have made in many an after-dinner speech to a non-racing audience, namely that over the last 250 years no human activity, sporting or otherwise, could hope to match horse racing for the completeness of its record, be it pedigree or performance.