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Gerry Scott on winning Grand National 60 years ago just 10 days after breaking collar bone
Exclusive interview: These days the oldest surving winner of the race he is held together by 19 screws having broken 30 bones
On Saturday week, Gerry Scott, 82, had been due to lead the jockeys down the weighing-room steps and into the paddock for this year’s Grand National. The oldest surviving winning jockey of the great race had been invited to be the racecourse’s guest of honour – an agreeable touch that went west last week when the Jockey Club cancelled the race.
Today is the 60th anniversary of Scott’s victory on Merryman II, the white faced nine-year-old who, after Sheila’s Cottage (1948) and Teal (1952), completed Middleham trainer Captain Neville Crump’s trio of National winners.
The 1960 National was the last where the fences were built like upright walls – a sloping apron of spruce was added to each in 1961.
It was also the first year the race was covered live by BBC television and, I dare say, the cameraman hanging on for dear life on top of a Humber Hawk being driven like a getaway car round the inside of the course would not pass the BBC’s health and safety rules these days.
Perhaps the most heroic aspect of the then 22-year-old Scott’s ride was that he had broken his collarbone in two places at Doncaster 10 days before the race – it would never be allowed these days. Back then, it was normal. Two years later, he would go on to inspire Springbok to win in a stirring finish to the Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup at Newbury – with a broken wrist which was still in plaster.
Scott was born in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, on the North Yorkshire coast. His parents had both ridden in point-to-points. They ran a riding school, but his first “pony” was a pet bullock, which the four-year-old Scott would lead to a wall to enable him to jump on.
He left school at 15, having decided he wanted to be a jump jockey. In his own mind, however, he wanted to ride only over hurdles.
“I was very timid,” recalls the self-effacing Scott, “and had a terrible inferiority complex and big fear of failure.
“Even after I’d stopped riding, if the ‘Guv’nor’ [Crump] rang, I’d blush on the end of the phone. I was afraid even of thinking about riding over fences, although I soon realised I preferred fences to hurdles.”
His starting wage as an apprentice to Crump was five shillings a week (£13 a year) and, until he was carried out unconscious on a stretcher 18 years later, he “did [mucked out and fed] his two” horses every day, even going back to the yard after local meetings at Catterick and Wetherby.
“The Guv’nor was the most loyal man I ever knew,” he explains. “He’d blow you sky high in the yard, on the moor or at the races, but that was it, he would never mention it again.
“In those days, the winters were hard and there’d often be snow on the ground but he rode out two lots a day, none of this sitting in a heated car watching his horses from afar, and was pedantic about time. But if you rode a horse for him he’d instinctively know about it before you told him.”
Scott’s two biggest problems as a jockey were his weight, which ballooned to 12st 5lb in the summer, and injuries. These days, he is held together by 19 screws, pins and plates having broken 30 bones – “mainly legs [seven times] but not counting fingers [on the basis that they were too small and broke too often to bother with]”.
Even Scott, though, would concede that breaking his collarbone in two places – the middle section dropping out of line with either end – counted as a genuine injury, and that was just what he suffered at Doncaster 10 days before the National. He was driven straight to the osteopath in Richmond that night to have it manipulated back into place, with his driver roped in to pull his shoulder in one direction while the osteopath pushed.
On hearing the bone-crunching click, it was, ironically, the driver and not Scott who crumpled to the floor and passed out.
“It was a very worrying week,” says Scott. “On the Wednesday before the race I went to ride out. It was hopeless. It was agony. I even told the head lad it was no good. But the Guv’nor said: ‘Look, Gerry, come to Aintree on Friday, ride in two hurdle races.’ Money was tight and I said I’d do it – as much as anything for the riding fee of seven guineas.
“The first was a horrible horse who pulled and bored at you, but the other was a gentleman, so my plan was to ride him for the fee and then say ‘no’ to the Guv’nor about the National. But before I did, he said: ‘Gerry, I want to be fair to the owner, to the public (the horse was favourite) and you. I want you to go before three doctors.”
The first pushed and prodded, asked the jockey when he had done it and was satisfied Scott could ride. The second, an orthopaedic surgeon, did not touch him but merely asked him when it happened?
“He said ‘impossible’,” recalls Scott, as if it were yesterday. “And the third doctor, the one in charge, turned to the Guv’nor and said, ‘well, Neville, there you are, you’ve got it 2-1’. And I had no idea whether he had voted in favour or against me.
“That’s how close it was. The most amazing part was that when I pulled up having won the race, the first person to come running up the track to congratulate me was the orthopaedic surgeon.”
It was Scott’s second ride in the National. He had fallen at Becher’s the previous year on Surprise Packet having been well placed, but it had given him a taste of Aintree. Surprise Packet was a horse that took a while to warm up, but Merryman II always had to be held back. So, after surviving a near miss at Valentine’s, the jockey knew, when he and Merryman reached Becher’s for a second time in good shape, that victory was in sight.
“On the second circuit, I was nearly getting to the front too soon,” says Scott. “At every fence, he was gaining a couple of lengths and, at Becher’s, I only had two in front of me. At Valentine’s, I was upsides in front and, when Stan Mellor went for his whip on Badanloch, I knew that, though there was a long way to go, we were probably all right as long as he kept jumping.
“The Guv’nor wanted to know, when I was so far clear, why I gave him a smack going past the water jump, but the only thing I thought about up that run-in was Devon Loch [the Queen Mother’s horse, ridden by Dick Francis, which had done the splits 100 yards from winning the race four years earlier].
“I was heavily strapped from my neck to my waist, but I never felt the collarbone in the race, even when his nose was on the floor at Valentine’s. I think in a race like the National there are more things to think about than whether or not your collarbone is sore.
“I loved the thrill of riding round Aintree. It was a great challenge and if you got round it was terrific. In those days, the bookmakers would give you a price about a horse getting round. One or two modern jockeys have said ‘well, in your day, you needed an old hunter who could jump’ and I always replied ‘you got one thing right … they needed to jump’.
“But, at the time, Merryman’s was the ninth-fastest National and, between 1960 and when Red Rum set the then fastest time in 1973, only one horse won in a quicker time.”
Merryman ran in two more Nationals, finishing second the following year and 13th in 1962, but Scott missed both rides through injury.
His own riding career came to an end in 1971, when a horse reared over backwards on the road with him at exercise in Middleham and left him in a coma for 10 days after which he spent a year learning to walk and talk again.
After recuperating, he spent a year teaching at the first apprentice school just outside Epsom before he became the first former professional jockey to be employed by the Jockey Club as a starter.
The racing press said that there had been pressure on racing’s rulers to employ a former jockey, but that “it would never last”. Against such dire predictions, he was a starter for the next 30 years, among others setting them off for the 1996 Grand National and Yorkshire’s own Classic, the St Leger.
When asked which was easier, he replies that it was quite simple. “A jockey has one horse to control, the starter has 40 horses to control.”
Reflecting on all the changes to the race, he says that it has changed from a horsemen’s race in his day to a jockeys’ race now.
“But it is still the greatest race in the world,” he points out.
Let us hope that in 12 months’ time, Scott finally gets to lead the jockeys down the weighing room steps on the 61st anniversary of Merryman’s Grand National.