A memoir of Munsaab’s last win in a UK horse race
It is one of the joys of modern technology that one is able to start a short story these days by directing the reader to an internet video link. I intend to do that here so that you can, as I have just done, refresh your memory of that startling day at Cartmel Racetrack on M ay 27th 2017 when Munsaab – the horse that loved the mud – won his last ever UK horse race.
No need for me to describe the ‘teeming rain’ and the ‘perfectly horrid conditions’ the race was run in. The pictures and the commentators do that so much better than I can. And they can also correct that impression that my memory was left with of the race. Namely that Munsaab came from miles off the pace to win once the rain got seriously heavy – cloudburst quality to be precise. In fact he was always up with the pace in second or third place and only gave the impression of coming from miles back because there was a power outage at the delightfully named ‘caravan corner’ on Cartmel Racecourse where an extra camera is placed in order to cover that part of the track which can never be seen by the naked eye – hidden as it is behind trees and parked caravans. Just as that camera went down on this day, Munsaab was looking in trouble as you’ll see when you follow the link below and his jockey, Henry Brooke, was starting to work mega hard to counter the third coming past looking to be going much better than Munsaab. Munsaab looked beat. The commentator apologises for the power outage and states that when we see them again, the horses will be coming into the home straight. Lo and behold, Munsaab is in the lead. He battles hard to stave off the attentions of those around him and wins heroically enough. But not at all as I remember it with him trailing in last after the final fence and then speeding through the slush like Red Rum on Southport beach whilst all the other horses came to a standstill as the wall of water fell around and into them.
And wall of water it was. Not unusual in life around modern day Cartmel following the Storm Desmond floods of 2015 and the various other ones of that period which saw me driving through a mini tsunami wave one night coming up G range Fell Road and saw my Audi A6 all but swept off the Windermere Road another fateful night. It was a minor miracle I didn’t end up down the embankment and marooned on Lindale Bowling Green which was itself an extra Lake District mere at the time (only one lake in the Lake District. Most of them are meres!). Flood waters bubbling up from underground storm drains is a regular sight these days round here.
And you’ll gather from that perhaps that I was not in Cartmel on the day of Munsaab’s last ever win. Actually I was living down in Redditch caring for my father in the latter stages of his Parkinson’s disease. So I saw the race live on the same internet feed you are about to watch if you follow this link:
https://www.racinqtv.com/videos/watch/horse racinq repIavs/12451-unsworth-s-yard-brewe rv-intermediate-handicap-chase
Good stuff wasn’t it? And if you were following BOZmail at the time you backed it seeing as how I knew how much Munsaab relied on the weather to win his races. Like the racecourse, I had prior warning of the severity of the forecast weather that day (‘Monsoon like’ was how the BBC put it) and I used that prior knowledge to gain us a few spondos whilst the racecourse authorities used it to put some special measures in place for the attending crowd given that the day’s meeting was planned for the Spring Bank Holiday as a special Family Picnic Day. Come have a picnic in a Monsoon! Special experience unique to new Climate Change Cartmel!
What I learned afterwards constitutes the main part of this story/memoir of a day I did not attend but on which my imagination has run riot ever since! I have imagined Munsaab imitating Pegasus flying through floods not with wings on his back but a couple of oars instead! M unsaab rows his way to his final racecourse victory up the now flood bound Cartmel run in! Meets Noah in his Ark half way up and whinnies at a Hippopotamus!
Except that that replay footage also reminded me that the deluge during the Munsaab race was not the worst of the weather that day. The cloudburst that you see was only five or so minutes long that first time and had stopped pretty much as the race completed and never started again for another hour during which time another race was deemed fit to be run. Won by Wisty with no sign of the constant whinnying that I hadn’t known about either on the day that affected Play The Ace during the Munsaab race causing James Bowen to pull his horse up to save him the distress of running in that kind of scary adverse weather.
The really serious persistent deluge started after the 3-55 race that Wisty won and continued for at least another hour during which time the racecourse put out some announcements over the tannoy to the effect that the final two races might be delayed whilst they waited for the rain to stop again (it never did!) and that people might now like to make use of the plastic ‘pacamac’ style raincoats that the authorities had dished out to those that wanted them as they entered the course at the start of the afternoon – knowing what the forecast rain was going to be like as they did. If you look back at the internet link again, you’ll see little rows of people on the rails wearing their pacamacs already. What that video doesn’t show is what I heard about later when I arrived back up in Cartmel which has had my imagination reeling ever since.
The main gist is that the rain got so bad from then on that the rest of the racing was reluctantly abandoned but not before the authorities had waited a good hour in the hope that things would improve. During that time was seen levels of water in Cartmel not dissimilar to that of Storm Desmond weekend when the village was marooned for over a week. I was part of the rescue effort in that spell seeing things that have never left me like the whirlpool of abandoned automobiles spinning round the Sedbergh traffic island (under the Kendal bypass bridge) in a vortex a good twelve feet deep at its peak. I assisted the AA in the following few days recovering vehicles that had been flung over half a mile downstream toward Morecambe Bay from the middle of fields six feet deep in flood water. And in Cartmel village itself, a steel garden table had been swept into the main brook that runs sedately (normally) through the village centre and the circular table made a perfect fit under the main bridge acting as a bizarre bathplug where it wedged causing the raging torrent of water to have to go up and over the bridge prevented as it was from going its normal route under. That source flooded the Michelin star restaurant and the entire rest of the village. The Paddocks around Cartmel’s Medieval Priory (the reason why there is a racecourse in Cartmel as the Monks fleeing Henry the eighth amused themselves by holding donkey races on what is now the racecourse) became a Moat for the first time in living memory.
Back to the racecourse and that hour before racing was abandoned when many people got so drenched that it started to become urgent that they get out of their soaked clothing and resided in the pacamacs now being dished out by rescue workers to those that hadn’t already got them. There hadn’t been time for most people to get back to their cars before the drenching got them. It was that bad. Like being dipped in a well somebody described to me. Instant total soaking. No way for cars to leave the scene either now. Roads off the course were all raging torrents. A tannoy message came over that all those now caught with drenched clothing could come to the grandstand building and collect a pacamac if they didn’t already have one and they were advised to change clothing into the dry pacamac immediately for the good of their own health and safety. Those already wearing their pacamacs were ok of course. Their clothing underneath was still dry. They could stay as they were.
It dawned on somebody at some point that you could see the clothing of those already in their pacamacs clearly under because the pacamacs were transparent. See Through!
Nobody told those getting out of their drenched clothing that this was the case and before you knew where you were you had hundreds of racegoers all wandering round in the now slightly relenting rain wearing see through pacamacs and nothing else! Carrying their wet clothes in their arms many of them! Young and old, men and women all wandering around dazed seeing each other in some sort of dystopian Peter Sellers Pink Panther film. You know the one where he gets stuck investigating in a nudist colony and they won’t let him in whilst he is wearing clothes himself.
The accounts of what happened next do vary. The version I like is the one where most people decided to have a good laugh about it. You know, the way the British do when they have been through communal adversity together. We laughed during the Storm Desmond rescue as we pulled the guy out of six feet of water at a dip in the Lyth Valley Road as he tried to push his stricken Transit Van out to safety. We could only see the top of his bald head and he wasn’t coming voluntarily. He didn’t want to see his van sail away and was urging us to help him push. We pointed out the waterfall happening to his left about to make the six feet of water ten and wrenched him back to safety thereby preventing a drowning. We found his van the following day nearly a mile from that point! Boy did we laugh!
The racegoers formed a circle in front of the grandstand prompted by the skiffle band that always play live ragtime music at Cartmel meetings and, holding hands, they started singing Christmas carols. Good King Wenceslas last looked out and all of that. Their all being visually as naked as the baby Jesus was the joke I’m told. Wrapped in plastic pacamac swaddling! Don’t know about you but I find that hilarious. One version of the story has Lord Hugh Cavendish himself – famed owner of the Racecourse and direct cousin of Her Majesty the Queen – in a pacamac and nothing else dancing in the middle of the circle with his Morris dancers pole in his hand (make of that what you will!). Believable if you saw him singing along with Cliff Richard’s rendition of ’The Young Ones’ that started at the Racecourse Live Pop concerts the year before. Or if you’ve had cause to taxi strange men and women in white costumes to the middle of Holker woods in the dead of night as I have. After the 2016 Referendum result when his Lordship had cause to celebrate following his campaign in favour of Brexit to the tune of 60 feet posters all over the Crown Estate land urging the locals to vote Leave. 350 million quid extra we could give to the NHS. You remember all that? From a direct member of the Royal Family who are of course honour bound in their political neutrality. Not a political matter argued Hugh. The man has no shame.
I rather like the image of him stark naked in the centre of a Whoville like Xmas Chorus encouraging the community singing. That’s an image from Doctor Seuss’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas – the anti the commercialisation of Xmas story where the spirit of community is more important than the presents you give and receive.
Can’t argue with that. Nor with the revised memory of Munsaab’s last win on a racecourse. The first day perhaps when the real seriousness of climate change hit home. When the weather caused the abandonment of racing. And the Christmas spirit came to Cartmel seven months early!
Seasonal greetings and best wishes to one and all. BOZ
.
Gary Boswell
.
Back to the racecourse and that hour before racing was abandoned when many people got so drenched that it started to become urgent that they get out of their soaked clothing and resided in the pacamacs now being dished out by rescue workers to those that hadn’t already got them. There hadn’t been time for most people to get back to their cars before the drenching got them. It was that bad. Like being dipped in a well somebody described to me. Instant total soaking. No way for cars to leave the scene either now. Roads off the course were all raging torrents. A tannoy message came over that all those now caught with drenched clothing could come to the grandstand building and collect a pacamac if they didn’t already have one and they were advised to change clothing into the dry pacamac immediately for the good of their own health and safety. Those already wearing their pacamacs were ok of course. Their clothing underneath was still dry. They could stay as they were.
It dawned on somebody at some point that you could see the clothing of those already in their pacamacs clearly under because the pacamacs were transparent. See Through!
Nobody told those getting out of their drenched clothing that this was the case and before you knew where you were you had hundreds of racegoers all wandering round in the now slightly relenting rain wearing see through pacamacs and nothing else! Carrying their wet clothes in their arms many of them! Young and old, men and women all wandering around dazed seeing each other in some sort of dystopian Peter Sellers Pink Panther film. You know the one where he gets stuck investigating in a nudist colony and they won’t let him in whilst he is wearing clothes himself.
The accounts of what happened next do vary. The version I like is the one where most people decided to have a good laugh about it. You know, the way the British do when they have been through communal adversity together. We laughed during the Storm Desmond rescue as we pulled the guy out of six feet of water at a dip in the Lyth Valley Road as he tried to push his stricken Transit Van out to safety. We could only see the top of his bald head and he wasn’t coming voluntarily. He didn’t want to see his van sail away and was urging us to help him push. We pointed out the waterfall happening to his left about to make the six feet of water ten and wrenched him back to safety thereby preventing a drowning. We found his van the following day nearly a mile from that point! Boy did we laugh!
The racegoers formed a circle in front of the grandstand prompted by the skiffle band that always play live ragtime music at Cartmel meetings and, holding hands, they started singing Christmas carols. Good King Wenceslas last looked out and all of that. Their all being visually as naked as the baby Jesus was the joke I’m told. Wrapped in plastic pacamac swaddling! Don’t know about you but I find that hilarious. One version of the story has Lord Hugh Cavendish himself – famed owner of the Racecourse and direct cousin of Her Majesty the Queen – in a pacamac and nothing else dancing in the middle of the circle with his Morris dancers pole in his hand (make of that what you will!). Believable if you saw him singing along with Cliff Richard’s rendition of ’The Young Ones’ that started at the Racecourse Live Pop concerts the year before. Or if you’ve had cause to taxi strange men and women in white costumes to the middle of Holker woods in the dead of night as I have. After the 2016 Referendum result when his Lordship had cause to celebrate following his campaign in favour of Brexit to the tune of 60 feet posters all over the Crown Estate land urging the locals to vote Leave. 350 million quid extra we could give to the NHS. You remember all that? From a direct member of the Royal Family who are of course honour bound in their political neutrality. Not a political matter argued Hugh. The man has no shame.
I rather like the image of him stark naked in the centre of a Whoville like Xmas Chorus encouraging the community singing. That’s an image from Doctor Seuss’s THE GRINCH WHO STOLE XMAS – the anti the commercialisation of Xmas story where the spirit of community is more important than the presents you give and receive.
Can’t argue with that. Nor with the revised memory of Munsaab’s last win on a racecourse. The first day perhaps when the real seriousness of climate change hit home. When the weather caused the abandonment of racing. And the Christmas spirit came to Cartmel seven months early!
Seasonal greetings and best wishes to one and all. BOZ
.
Gary Boswell
.
Gary Boswell has published the BOZmail daily since January 12th 2010 as a private subscription email for readers who share his interest in making a living from betting on sports events. He blends in regular ‘creative’ writing (and occasional photography) as a doffed cap to 25 years previously spent as a poetry animateur in the UK, Canada & Europe. School visits a speciality. Then David Cameron got elected and he needed to find a new job! THE WAY IT RAINS ROUND HERE was his December 2021 Xmas offering doffing the cap once more to his old namesake. He of Christmas Caro/ fame.
.