Hallo Dandy, winner of the 1984 Grand National, was put down on Monday at the venerable age of 33, leaving the racing world to remember a horse whose story is an equine morality tale.
Owned by Richard Shaw and trained by Gordon Richards, Hallo Dandy won the 1984 National under Neale Doughty by four lengths from favourite Greasepaint. He ran in the next two Nationals, falling at the first in 1985 and finishing last in 1986 at the age of 12. He was then retired.
Shaw subsequently loaned Hallo Dandy to the Earl of Onslow, a Tory member of the House of Lords who has the distinction of being the only hereditary peer to appear on Have I Got News for You. Onslow rode him to hounds with the Fernie Hunt in Leicestershire, and the horse disappeared from public view, only to emerge unhappily eight years later.
His hunting days behind him, at the age of 20 Hallo Dandy was turned out in a field on Onslow's Surrey estate. By autumn 1994, he was in very poor condition, emaciated, with his hooves cracked and overgrown, ribs pushing out against his blistered skin, and suffering from rain scald. There seemed only one course of action - the bullet.
Enter Carrie Humble, who in 1991 had set up the Thoroughbred Rehabilitation Centre to retrain retired racehorses, ruffling a few official feathers but helped by the support of Peter O'Sullevan, who as a commentator had called Hallo Dandy home at Aintree and had long been concerned about horse welfare issues largely ignored within the sport.
Having heard of the horse's condition, Shaw contacted Humble, who found the horse suffering from what she diplomatically calls "errors in animal husbandry". She agreed to take him in.
Onslow indignantly denied neglect, insisting in a letter to the Horse and Hound magazine that the horse "has been used for publicity in a very slanted way." Slanted or not, the publicity was effective, and Hallo Dandy's "rescue" brought priceless exposure to Humble's TRC.
But in 1994, at the Centre's first home in Cumbria, the immediate priority was to restore Hallo Dandy to health.
"He'd given up the ghost," Humble recalls. "His teeth were awful and he was seriously anaemic, but his vital organs were sound. So we built him up slowly and fed him very carefully, and we never let him get cold. He had the symptoms of cystitis, and colic was to remain an ongoing problem with him, but within three months he was a different horse."
So different that she started riding him around the local lanes and fields, and felt the strength that had powered him to the Grand National winning post. "He was a proper chaser, with terrific bone, and a real privilege to have around. If you ever let him get into fifth gear he'd simply swallow up the ground, and even walking him on a leading rein was a challenge - he'd drag me sideways down the road and leave hoofprints in people's gardens."
The TRC is not a sanctuary, but Humble quickly appreciated the PR value of having a Grand National winner as her flagship resident. She vowed never to rehome him but cherish him for the rest of his life, which remarkably proved to be over a dozen years in her care. His regular public appearances - including at the 1997 bomb-scare Grand National, when a determined Humble ensured that the horsebox containing her hero was the last vehicle away from the course before the place was sealed off - held attention on the TRC's work.
Other rehabilitation operations opened in the wake of Humble's pioneering efforts. Then in 2000, the British Horseracing Board set up the Rehabilitation of Racehorses (now Retraining of Racehorses) scheme, which provides central funding to the approved centres. The scheme now receives 50p from the BHB for every time a horse is entered in a race, and also receives a portion of every license fee paid annually by trainers and jockeys.
Even so, some have characterised this as a face-saving exercise by the sport's establishment, and the individual charities remain heavily reliant on donations and fund-raising activities.
What makes the experience of Hallo Dandy and others like him such an affront to racing followers is that it contradicts the ideal of how an old racehorse's life should be. If a Grand National winner could be brought to such a pass, something had to be done, and it has been.
Hallo Dandy roused the conscience of racing. Simply by staying alive and raising the alarm, he performed a great service to his breed.
