Gosling: a firm favourite

Dec 24 2008 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

EARLIER this month we reported on the death of New Lanark-born racing legend Tommy Gosling, the man who was jockey to Sir Winston Churchill. Readers asked us for more information about Tommy and here his son, Andrew, who lives in Harrogate, gives a more detailed account of the life of this remarkable man.

TOMMY GOSLING was almost certainly the only man to ride both a Classic winner and score a hat-trick at Highbury stadium!

The Classic winner was Lady Senator, which he rode to victory in the 1961 Irish 1000 Guineas at the Curragh, while his three-goal salvo had come 12 years earlier at the less rarefied level of a Jockeys v Boxers charity match.

However, this was the first football match played under floodlights in Britain and 41,000 turned out to watch the jockeys, captained by Gosling, win 5-3.

Gosling was born in New Lanark in 1926, the fourth of five children.

As a child, he was awarded the King’s Medal for saving a boy in the River Clyde.

He left school at 14 to be apprentice to the Lambourn trainer Colonel Ossie Bell, rode his first winner – at Ascot – in 1944, and the following year was joint champion apprentice with Frankie Durr.

It was also during this time that he won a stable lads’ boxing championship.

By 1947, Tommy was established as a top-flight jockey, winning that year’s Victoria Cup and the Cambridgeshire on Fairy Fulmar.

It was shortly after this that he was touched by international drama when he and five other jockeys were engaged by the Calcutta Turf Club for the winter season.

Soon after their arrival in India, a journey which in those days took up to seven days – with flights via Paris, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Basra and Karachi – political and spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand, better known as ‘Mahatma’, Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948 and Tommy and his fellow jockeys spent six days hiding in the a restaurant while riots raged outside.

Discovery of them would have led to almost certain death.

Around 1950, Tommy began his long association with the horses of Sir Winston Churchill, for which he is best remembered.

These included Vienna and High Hat, but the most famous was the French-bred grey Colonist II, on which he won middle-distance and staying races.

One afternoon at Kempton, Colonist just beat King George VI’s horse, Above Board.

Afterwards, Tommy was invited into the Royal Box where he, the King and Sir Winston Churchill drank champagne together in what was apparently an increasingly raucous afternoon.

Although he never won the Derby, Tommy did finish second in 1954 behind a young Lester Piggott, winning the first of nine races.

Gosling also rode one of the fastest two-year-olds of the 1950s, The Pie King, which was trained by Paddy Prendergast in Ireland.

The Pie King’s victories included Royal Ascot’s Coventry Stakes, where he beat Darius, the following year’s 2000 Guineas winner, by six lengths.

It was also in the mid-1950s that he became stable jockey to Jeremy Tree’s powerful Beckhampton stable, and was successful in the Goodwood Cup on Double Dore and, later, in the Stewards Cup, on Arcandy.

However, it wasn’t always plain sailing. Vertebrae were broken in a fall at Chester, he was brought down in the 1962 Derby pile-up and, most seriously, suffered an almost fatal fall at Leicester which resulted in severe concussion and a blood clot on the brain. Gosling was lucky to survive.

But it was this accident, and a similar one suffered by Scobie Breasley, which forced a change in safety measures, with jockeys eventually required to wear reinforced crash helmets for protection.

Tommy also struggled with his weight and it was this, rather than injury, that forced him to retire after 20 years riding and take up training at Epsom.

The best horses he handled as a trainer included Ardent Dancer (Irish 1000 Guineas), Bonamia (Esher Cup), Excel (Greenham Stakes), Quartette (Vaux Gold Tankard and Yorkshire Cup) and Sol’Argent (winner of 12 races, including the Moet and Chandon Silver Magnum).

Tommy retired from training in 1982 after many of his owners had cut back their racing interests as a result of the late 1970s economic slowdown.

Gosling concentrated on the livery business which he and his wife Val were building up at the time.

Outside of racing, he retained a lifelong interest in football, both as a player – training with Arsenal during the winter to remain fit for riding – and as a keen supporter of Manchester United, where he counted fellow Scots Sir Matt Busby and Denis Law as friends.

He never forgot his roots, however, and presented the Tommy Gosling Trophy to Clydesdale Sports Council in 2006 to be awarded annually in recognition of excellence in equestrian sport.

Gosling married twice, firstly to Gill Leach, daughter of jockey, trainer and racing journalist Jack Leach, and then tied the knot with Valerie Vickery, daughter of the football pools entrepreneur Herbert Vickery.

In 2000, Tommy and Val moved to property in Normandy, France.

Tommy, who died of cancer on November 30, aged 82, is survived by Val and his three sons.