How a wet Sandcastle started a strange tea fund

A FEW weeks after Coleridge's spectacular 50-1 win victory at the opening of the 1992 Flat season (recorded in my earlier blog) I was about to go to cover Fontwell races when a colleague made a suggestion.

Spurred on by his financial success with a bet I had suggested on King Credo at Newbury, Alan said: "Why don't you take some of the tea money with you and put it on something you think might win?"

Other colleagues at the West Sussex Gazette, based in Arundel in those days, agreed. We'd accumulated a healthy surplus from the 1 a week we all contributed to cover milk, coffee, tea and sugar.

"Well, just 5 then, " said a more cautious colleague.

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Off I went on rainy day in April 1992, with the skies looking ominously darker. The first person I saw at the track was a friend of ours, trainer Paul Howling who was then based at Brook.

"Have a few quid on my runner in the seller," he told me. He added: " It should win, but it will be a good price, so better do it each way in case anything goes wrong."

I looked at the racecard. The horse was Sandcastle, an 11-year-old gelding, which had joined Paul's string comparitively recently. His form in the last year had been poor, though he had clocked up 11 wins during his career.

The race was a conditional jockey's selling hurdle handicap with 19 runners and the horse had David Bridgwater on board- a very capable young rider. The owners were a couple from Health Dynamics Ltd.

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Before the race the rain started coming down in torrents but I went along with Paul's advice and put the WSG money on at 2.50 each way. With 16 runners it would pay four places at a quarter the odds. I also had a 5 win for myself.

A handful of the runners were pulled up in the two mile six furlong race and only a few were in serious contention in the final stages of what was becoming a mudbath. Sandcastle plugged on to lead on the run-in, and won by a length and a half.

I'd already done my mental calculations as I joined he ecstatic party to welcome him into the winner's enclosure.

I had a healthy profit of 80 and the tea fund money had gained 50!

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My colleagues were delighted and decided that rather than share out the 50, we would continue with our 'investments'.

We concentrated on local horses and Charles Cyzer's horses were beginning to run on the Flat. We followed the string, and he sent out 27 winners that season, including one from Art Form, three from Master Planner and five for Bold Resolution, and victories from Day of History, Temple Knight and Molly Splash, to name but a few. Derek Shaw's Fascination Waltz was another good winner for us at 12-1 at Windsor.

After a few weeks, Alan said to me: "I don't like having this money stuck in a box in the drawer. It's getting too much. I think we should put it in an account."

So we opened an account with the building society down the road and called it The West Sussex Gazette Tea Fund.

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I was regularly paying in money and on one occasion when we had a particularly good win with an each way double on Derek Shaw's Coleridge , who finished fourth in the Cesarwitch at 66-1 and stable companion Fascination Waltz second at 12-1 in a six furlong handicap race with 24 runners on the same day at the same meeting.

A very nice touch with combined place odds of just over 48-1......

When I paid the money into our building society account, the cashier looked at me in amazement and said in disbelief: "You drink an awful lot of tea in your office!".

Eventually when someone left, the fund was disbanded and shared out. We had made a very healthy profit but above all had great fun doing it.