My Dad told me that a horse called Owen Anthony was running in a big race in or around the early/mid 60's and that he would divert part of my birthday present to 3d ew on it in a big race (my name is Anthony). Winnings to accrue to me ; losses to be deducted from the (very small) pot for my birthday/Xmas present. My recollection is that it won...anyway I got a goldfish (whom I named Dixie after William Ralph Dean),  a fishbowl, a little castle to go in the bowl ,a small net (for taking Dixie out and cleaning the water) ; and some fish food.  Lord knows what race it won. Did Owen Anthony win a decent race?

I remember Owen Anthony, he won the City and Suburban at Epsom.  I think of him more as a Hunt Cup / Cambridgeshire type, he was placed in those races..
Perhaps the Epsom race is the one that applies to your bet? this was early 70's.

1972

feel certain it would have been in 1966 then. By 1972 I was late teens and punting anyway myself with £ from my saturday morning job. Have you any idea what he won DrG?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_and_Suburban_Handicap

Spot on Sparrow. Thought he'd retired by then.

Owen Anthony won the first race of the 1968 flat season (as a 4yo) - the apprentice race that traditionally used to start the season. He was 10-1 jt fav.

It was Doug Smith's first runner as a trainer. He had previously won on the horse as a jockey.

Looking at this period I always wonder what Lester thought of his decision to split with Murless. If he'd stayed in 67 he'd have won the 100gns, 2000gns, Derby, Eclipse and King George plus many others. One big consolation was getting aboard Sir Ivor.

I remember the early fast 2 yr olds running up sequences before the better ones came out at R Ascot.
Flying By Fast Track Reet Lass Chico Sky Gypsy Green Park Falcon Greengage any more?

I have in the mists of my memory a recall of a 2 year old called Westclox running up a sequence in the 60s. Anyone else rememember that one?

That's the thing I couldn't weigh up smoky as the horse never gets mentioned these days just the three others that we all remember. Can't recall who trained it though.

Sparrow asked the same question 13 yrs ago , not looked if anyone gave an answer.



sparrow
17 Aug 10 19:29
Joined: 20 Jul 02
| Topic/replies: 51,346 | Blogger: sparrow's blog
Anyone remember another 2 year old who set up a large sequence of wins in the 60s called Westclox.

https://community.betfair.com/horse_racing/go/thread/view/94102/25646973/Anyone_remember_these_old_sprinters........&sort_order=ASC?liveView=0

Yes I did hayden in 2010 just the 13 years ago but nobody mentioned the horse at all. So just smoky and I remember Westclox it seems.

A 58 year gap has never bothered you before sparrow 

Well I thought it was a lot more than 4 wins, but now you come to say, it does ring a bell that.  Not in the O'Gorman league after all.

From Russia With Love was another of those fast early fillies that couldn't cope when upped in class in the Queen Mary, the year Visp beat Procession by half a length.. Visp never ran again that year and finished down the field in the 1000G, and later Coronation Stakes..

FRWL later became a 6f filly, and I remember seeing her on black and white t.v. at Newbury in the days when summer interference was commonplace.  Could hardly see the race, just hear Peter O'Sullevan's commentary and not much else.  She finished 2nd I think, not sure of the race, this would be 1966.

You may have noticed that a horse named - DOUBLE JUMP - Won the closing race at Doncaster, today.

For those who wish to reminisce the original DOUBLE JUMP...


The best horse Jeremy Tree trained for Engelhard was Double Jump, the champion two-year-old of 1964.


-and - a 'must read' ...

Obituary: Jeremy Tree

Tuesday 09 March 1993


Jeremy Tree, racehorse trainer - born London 21 December 1925, died 7 March 1993.

JEREMY TREE, the trainer of four English Classic winners, will be remembered as the personification of a racing aristocrat. His relaxed style and personality fitted snugly into the immediate post- war world of racing, when the sport was much more of an intimate hobby for the rich than it is today.

Yet Tree's links with horse racing were distant. His father, Ronald Tree, was a Tory MP during the Thirties and Forties, and did much to foster Anglo-American relations; his mother, Nancy Field, was an heiress of the Marshall Field American department-store fortune and a niece, like the actress Joyce Grenfell, of the MP Nancy Astor.

It was while he was a schoolboy at Eton that Jeremy Tree's interest in racing grew from regular visits to the Astors' thoroughbred studs. He became further drawn to the sport when his uncle Peter Beatty won the 1938 Derby with Bois Roussel, and when Beatty committed suicide in 1949 Tree inherited his bloodstock. At the time he was assistant trainer to Dick Warden, in Newmarket, after serving with the Life Guards for four years and enduring two unstimulating years in the City.

Tree's early attempts to carve a career in racing were scuppered by his father. 'You must be mad,' Tree was told. 'We are in 1947 with a Labour government and there will be no rich people. Nobody will be able to afford racehorses, it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.'

Despite that warning, Tree set up on his own account in Newmarket in 1952 and a year later moved to the Beckhampton stables, near Marlborough, Wiltshire, where two great trainers, Fred Darling and Sir Noel Murless, had previously trained.

From the start, Tree practised as a 'traditional' trainer, strictly following his own maxim: 'Be choosy, if possible, with your owners.' His ability to pick out the best owners easily matched his ability to spot talented horses.
One of the first owners outside the collection of friends he trained for was Monica Sheriffe, a long-time patron best known as the owner of the leading sprinter Sharpo, who won the first of three successive William Hill Sprint Championships in 1980.

Appropriately for a man who descended from Anglo-American families on both sides, Tree counted as his patrons wealthy American owners like the platinum magnate Charles Engelhard, for whom Vincent O'Brien trained the Triple Crown winner Nijinsky.
The best horse Tree trained for Engelhard was Double Jump, the champion two-year-old of 1964.
Another American owner, Jock Whitney, gave Tree his first Classic winner in 1963 when Only For Life was a shock 33-1 winner of the 2,000 Guineas. His next two Classic winners, the Oaks winners Juliette Marny (1975) and Scintillate (1979), were both out of the same dam, Set Free, and were owned and bred by the Morrison family.

In the same year as Scintillate's Oaks, Tree trained his first important winners for the Saudi prince Khalid Abdullah. They were Abeer, in the Queen Mary Stakes at Royal Ascot, and Known Fact, in the Middle Park Stakes, one of Britain's leading two-year-old races.
Mr Abdullah, as he is registered in British racecards, was on the verge of expanding his string, and Tree became his principal trainer.

The following year, the pair won the 2,000 Guineas with Known Fact, but in controversial circumstances as the brilliant French colt Nureyev, who finished first past the post, was disqualified for interference. Ironically, it was the disqualification of another French horse, Sagace, in 1985, which gave Abdullah and Tree victory in another of Europe's biggest races, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, with Rainbow Quest.

Despite being Abdullah's main trainer, Tree was typically forthright enough to express concern about the 'quite alarming', ever burgeoning involvement of wealthy Arab owners. That comment was one of a series which signalled a degree of the disillusionment Tree felt with racing. When he announced his retirement in 1989 he reflected: 'Racing is a good deal less fun than it used to be. It has become huge, rather impersonal and not as friendly.'

The following year Tree suffered a mild stroke and was not at Epsom to see his successor and long-time assistant Roger Charlton saddle Abdullah's Quest for Fame to win the Derby. Four days earlier Charlton had won the French Derby for the same owner with Sanglamore.

'I didn't think I had left him with any top-class horses,' Tree quipped with the same insouciance which spared him grief when a yearling he rejected, Dancing Brave, went on to take the 2,000 Guineas, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes and Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe in 1986 for another of Abdullah's trainers, Guy Harwood.

Since his retirement, Tree had been troubled by ill-health. He continued to live at Beckhampton and had his own office at the racing stables, but little involvement with the day-to-day training of the horses. He rarely went racing.

Jeremy Tree was one of the 'old-guard' trainers who had little interest in the modern-day hustle of the increasingly commercialised sport of racing.

Top class sprinter Double Jump.

Yes blackbarn, I thought afterwards I might have got his distances wrong.