It’s really quite difficult to pin your favourite racehorse down to just one when you’ve watched the sport of horse racing for nigh on 40 years, but that esteemed accolade for me has to go to the Yorkshire sprint handicapper, Chaplins Club.
Trained by the late David Chapman (Ruth Carr’s grandfather for those of you born this side of the millennium), in North Yorkshire, Chaplins Club was a prolific winner in the 1980’s.
As tough as they come, Chaplins Club clocked up a total of 24 victories, including winning nine handicaps in a season twice, in both 1985 and 1988.
To a 13-year-old boy, brought up on a diet of watching my father and grandfather betting on Chapman’s other horses such as Soba and Glencroft, Chaplins Club was an absolute hero of a horse to me and he raced with such regularity too, unlike many horses today.
1991 Japanese Whispers H'Cap - Chaplins Club #chaplinsclub pic.twitter.com/1vkSAUU4gt
— History of Horse Racing (@roar1968) March 27, 2022
In fact, in 1988 alone, Chaplins Club ran a total 27 times and enjoyed a particularly fruitful summer. In a 19-day period between July and August, he won seven races, including the Tote Sprint Trophy Handicap at Ayr.
During that amazing winning spell Chaplins Club recorded two victories in the space of 24 hours TWICE, at Redcar and Doncaster on July 26th and 27th, then did the same at Ayr and Pontefract on August 2nd and 3rd.
If that wasn’t enough, he also recorded back-to-back victories at Haydock Park, my local track on September 30th and October 1st. What a hero!
1988 was quite some season and I vividly recall being allowed to put some minimal each-way bets on Chaplins Club out of my pocket money each time he ran, placed with either my Dad or Granddad.
Those are always great memories to have from your informative years and probably one of the main triggers as to why I got involved in horse racing.
Chaplins Club was owned by Peter Savill, who later went on to be the Chairman of the British Horseracing Board (BHA) and was ridden for almost all of his racing career by the Yorkshire ace – Kevin Darley.
It was more than fitting that Chaplins Club won on his 160th and final start, as a twelve-year-old, in a seven furlong selling handicap, at Redcar in 1992.
Rated just 45, but still ridden by Darley, he rallied under pressure to lead close home and won by three-quarters of length at odds of 12/1 in the betting.
Chaplins Club came to the end of his career in the July of 1992 and in the September of that year I went off to University.
David Chapman’s horse had filled my teenage years with lots of euphoric highs and nothing could ever trump those special moments when the newscaster would read out his name as being the winner of his race on those hourly racing bulletins broadcast by BBC Radio 2.
That is what we poor punters had to do before the days of being able to place horse race bets online.
Ahhh, I can still hear it now. Spoken in beautiful Queen’s English “And the result of the 3.45 at Pontefract is... first, Chaplins Club 33/1”. Get in!
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
FIRST PUBLISHED: 5th July 2022
