Oldest living Gold Cup winner Stan Hayhurst: ‘I was proud to win it for the north’

At the end of a long, wet winter, meeting Stan Hayhurst – the oldest living person to have ridden a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner – at Hexham, where he rode his first winner in 1950, is like a ray of golden sunshine.

On Tuesday it will be 100 years since Red Splash won the inaugural Gold Cup, a rare weight-for-age race back then which was initially considered less important than the National Hunt Chase and less an end goal in itself than a trial for the Grand National.

The race, its profile raised by the exploits of five time 1930s winner Golden Miller, was already well established by the time the 25-year-old Hayhurst, fresh out of National Service, won the 1958 race on the mare Kirsten.

Time and the passing of 66 years means that both horse and jockey, who is still revered in northern jump racing circles, have been underestimated by racing’s modern audience; maybe when Cheltenham knocked down the bar named after her to make way for a new grandstand, it should have been replaced.

In 1958 Kirsten, runner-up in 1957 and a last fence faller when set third in 1959, beat Polar Flight by half a length in a field which included three previous winners: Gay Donald, Limber Hill and Linwell, as well as future winner Mandarin.

She is one of only four mares to have won the race and carried level weights with the geldings; the 5lb mares’ allowance was only brought in shortly before Dawn Run’s Gold Cup in 1984.

On a couple of meetings a week in the north, a two-month close season in the summer, two years out for National Service and sharing the rides for Northumberland-based Major Verley Bewicke with George Milburn, Hayhurst rode 300 winners. Who knows how many that would be in modern money?

Apart from the Gold Cup, he also rode Kirsten to win the 1959 Hennessy Gold Cup, when it was run at Cheltenham, and the only running of the Imperial Leather, a valuable race run at Manchester.

In Oxo’s Grand National in 1959, when Aintree’s fences were like upright walls, she carried top weight but fell after colliding in mid-air with Mainstown at Becher’s Brook second time. She was cantering, six lengths behind the winner.

“George Milburn [who rode her when she was runner-up and Hayhurst was on National Service] always thought she’d have won in 1957 if Linwell hadn’t jumped past her in the air at the second last,” he says. “But, you know mares!”

Given that for half his career he rode in a cork helmet without a chin-strap, Hayhurst, now 90, is sharp as a tack. The only recording of the race is a crackly 78rpm record of Peter O’Sullevan’s commentary and without the prompt of any video footage the race is even a bit hazy for him.

“It’s strange,” he says. “I don’t remember any particular time of the race apart from knowing at the last I was ahead and to keep pushing. I jumped the last on the first circuit upsides Fred on Gay Donald. Going to the top of the hill, there wasn’t a fence there in those days, so about three out I went on down the hill.

“The thing about Kirsten was that she was a real mare. You couldn’t hit or slap because she’d curl up and if you gave her a kick in the belly at a fence she would throw herself at it. She was a fantastic jumper but you’d come to the last, urging her on, you had to sit tight. That’s why she fell a year later, she over-jumped.

“The one thing I did feel proud about – I was proud for the north. Jimmy Power had won on Limber Hill for Billy Dutton two years earlier but we didn’t win many good races. There was a north-south divide. We didn’t see many of them like now when they think nothing of coming from Exeter to Perth. Terry Biddlecome was one of the first ones to start coming north. We met the southern boys at Leicester, Haydock, Doncaster and Liverpool and that was about it.

“I rode for [Kirsten’s owner] Harry Moore before I went in the army, George took over when I was away and when I came back Harry insisted I ride his horses. After she was second in 1957 Harry said ‘That’s it. Stan’s back on.’ You need a bit of luck through life.

“I rode her in King George and couldn’t leg them whatsoever. She finished third to Mandarin. We also took her to Sandown for the Whitbread Gold Cup. By the morning of the race she had come in season. It was the last race of the season so we let her run. It was hopeless, she was cuddling up to everything, she just about ran Much Obliged out of the race! She didn’t want to know anything about the race.”

In a 22-year career, the vast majority spent with Bewicke until the trainer moved south in 1967, he broke a collarbone six times, his jaw and his wrist. His Adam’s apple was also displaced – meaning he could only eat chocolate for a week and his nose still runs permanently as a result – by a “clumsy sod” called In Haste. Hayhurst has two other historic claims to fame as a jockey: he is one of the dwindling few who rode against Arkle and was one of the first casualties of the mayhem at the 23rd fence in Foinavon’s 1967 Grand National.

“I was riding Border Ring in a novice chase at Cheltenham, Arkle’s first start over fences,” he remembers. “Going down the backside, Bill Rees was constantly jumping right on one of Peter Cazalet’s. Going to the fence after water Pat Taaffe [on Arkle] and I were upsides, and he said ‘Jaysus, I’m going to get out of this.’ He kicked him in the belly and in five strides he was 10 lengths in front. Afterwards I said ‘What won that?’ but I needn’t have asked!

“The National wasn’t my race. I rode Castle Falls in 1967 and was the first to stop when Popham Down ran loose across the fence. Castle Falls got stuck on top of the fence. Francis Short came along on one of the Irish horses and hit him up the backside, knocked him over and he was lying under the fence on the landing side.

“I was like a sprinter. I was conscious of the number of horses behind me and I said to myself ‘get the hell out of here.’ I ducked under the rails and couldn’t believe nothing was coming over. Then, eventually, Terry Biddlecombe came over on Greek Scholar and shouted ‘come on lads, there’s only one gone on.’ So everyone remounted and eventually I got round.”

After racing he ran a livery yard, a paper shop in Consett, was a racecourse judge from 1974 to 1982 and was a steward until he was 74. He still watches racing on television every day and while many replays of the Gold Cup will be shown over the next few days, with no known version of the 1958 race, Hayhurst’s greatest moment on Kirsten will not be one of them.

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