Getting ready for a party to remember as ‘greatest’ festival marks centenary

As anyone who has been – and thousands make the pilgrimage every year, including hordes from Ireland – will attest, there is nowhere quite like Cheltenham in Festival week; no other meeting can match the quality of racing, the camaraderie of the crowds, the thrill of being part of an annual celebration of National Hunt racing at its finest.

It is so enjoyable even the frustration of the odd downside – like missing a race while queuing to place a bet or buy a pint of Guinness – is quickly forgotten as it presents an opportunity to talk or listen, depending on whether the next man is Irish or not, and learn something new.

Unique is a word much abused by our friends in the marketing world but it could have been coined for the Cheltenham Festival and this year’s renewal, celebrating the centenary of this National Hunt Meeting, promises a stream of races which will find their place in the memory banks of even those whose recall of great horses and races stretch back to the days before Arkle, the horse still revered as ultimate champion.

Yet some of us were brought up on tales of a Gold Cup winner even more famous in his day than the great Arkle.

The Gold Cup itself was first contested as a steeplechase in 1924; a Flat race bearing the name had been run over three miles on Cleeve Hill in 1819 but it was the Cheltenham executive’s decision to introduce their idea of a championship for staying chasers which brought their Festival to national attention and it was Golden Miller who became the national hero.

Owned by Mrs Dorothy Paget, Golden Miller won the Gold Cup for five years in a row between 1932-36 and also captured the Grand National (in 1934) to become the first and so far only horse to have taken the two great steeplechases in the same season. He did for National Hunt racing what Don Bradman did for cricket, Bobby Jones did for golf and Fred Perry did for tennis; he put it on the front pages, leading the Nine o’Clock News on the wireless and at the head of cinema newsreels.

It was Golden Miller who gave the Gold Cup its special cachet, clearly marking it as the supreme test of chasers at the expense of the Grand National.

From then the Gold Cup and the Festival have, with minor blips enforced by nature and world war, grown relentlessly, far beyond the dreams of those who first staged the National Hunt Chase at Market Harborough in 1860. The infant meeting was staged at various venues over the succeeding decades – the renewal at Warwick in 1907 was the first to be described as a festival – but settled at Cheltenham’s Prestbury Park in 1911. Today it is the focus of the entire year for the region, bringing enormous business to hotels, bed and breakfast establishments, watering holes, restaurants and pharmacies for miles around.

The Irish connection began with the success of another great horse from across the water, Cottage Rake, trained by the peerless Vincent O’Brien to win the Gold Cup three years in a row from 1948. The timing of the race – in the middle of March – manages on most years to coincide with St Patrick’s Day which offers another excuse, should they need one, for the ferries and flights from Ireland to be bursting with men, women and priests, pockets bulging with the year’s savings. Cheltenham would not be the same without them. They even plunged on Arkle when the Duchess of Westminster’s pride and joy was sent off at 10-1 on to complete his hat-trick of Gold Cup triumphs in 1966. Since Arkle the Irish have had their share of Gold Cup success as well as victories in virtually every other race on the four-day programme, their heroes varying from not-so-green novices to startlingly good bumpers, from Champion Hurdlers to cross-country specialists with perhaps Dawn Run their only candidate to occupy the same place in national affection as “Himself” thanks to her unique (that word again) success in both the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle.

Yorkshire-trained horses have also enjoyed their moments in the spotlight with Peter Easterby, Michael Dickinson, Jimmy Fitzgerald and Peter Beaumont all claiming Gold Cup success.

Easterby also figures among Yorkshire’s Champion Hurdle winners, sharing with Nicky Henderson the record of having sent out five horses to claim the prize which is the traditional centrepiece of the opening day of the Festival.

Today’s Festival is now firmly established as a focal point of the racing season, a target for all trainers through the dark days of winter, from those who have battalions of equine champions, men like Paul Nicholls and David Pipe, to those, like milk farmer Sirrel Griffiths, who sent out Norton’s Coin to win the Gold Cup at 100-1 in 1990.

But most of all, Cheltenham is about the people who gather to watch the horses and enjoy themselves. There is something about the Festival which puts it on a different plane to the other major meetings in the calendar, the Derby, the Grand National, even the Ebor.

It is racing’s grass roots on holiday and what a party the Centenary Festival promises to be.

From Golden Miller to Dickinson’s famous five, how Yorkshire’s best have climbed Cleeve Hill

Billy Stott: Born in Ripon in 1898, the son of a footman, Billy Stott began his career as a Flat jockey based in Epsom but it was when he moved to live in Cheltenham and began riding over obstacles that his career burgeoned.

He was champion National Hunt rider five times and enjoyed an unforgettable afternoon at the 1933 Festival when he won the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup in successive races.

He piloted Dorothy Paget’s great chaser Golden Miller to the second of the horse’s record five successive wins in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, moments after guiding Insurance to the Champion Hurdle.

Frenchie Nicholson: No one in racing knew Herbert Charles Denton Nicholson by any of his Christian names; the boy born in Maltby, near Rotherham, was forever “Frenchie” after turning up for work at a stable in Epsom following a spell as a young rider in France wearing an overcoat bought from across the Channel.

Nicholson would go on to become a great trainer, but he was no mean rider either, not least round Cheltenham where he numbered a Gold Cup among his 48 successes.

Having won the Champion Hurdle on Victor Norman in 1936, his greatest moment in the saddle came in the 1942 Gold Cup aboard Lord Sefton’s Medoc II, winning by eight lengths.

Peter Beaumont: From his base at Brandsby, deep in North Yorkshire’s prime farming country, Peter Beaumont sent out many winners, some of them taking major steeplechase prizes, but the horse with which he will forever be associated was the great Jodami.

He was truly the horse of a trainer’s – and an owner’s – dreams. Beaumont first set eyes on his future champion when he was in Ireland in 1989 looking for potential recruits. He spotted the 17-hand four-year-old, and Wetherby farmer John Yeadon was the man with the sense to become the import’s owner, naming him after himself and his sons David and Michael.

His big moment came at Cheltenham in 1993.

Beaumont’s charge had everything required of a champion: size, balance, agility, pace, stamina and an astute jockey in the Malton-based Mark Dwyer. On the day they reached perfection and entered Cheltenham’s Hall of Fame.

Michael Dickinson: Dickinson was born to racing, the son of a couple who would first make a name for themselves as trainers in Gisburn before developing what became an academy for National Hunt horses at Dunkeswick, near Harewood.

He first made an impression as a jockey with 378 wins in his career, before working with Vincent O’Brien in Ireland for two years and eventually taking over at Dunkeswick in 1980.

He first enjoyed Gold Cup success with Silver Buck in 1982, but it is the Festival of 1983 which made his a household name as he saddled the first five home in that season’s Gold Cup, a feat which has never been equalled. The ‘Famous Five’ were Bregawn, Captain John, Wayward Lad, Silver Buck and Ashley House and woe betide the Yorkshireman or woman who cannot reel them off whenever discussion turns to the Gold Cup.