No jinx for this former jump jockey as he safely delivers a priceless Flat foal

Good Morning Bloodstock is Martin Stevens' daily morning email and presented online as a sample. 

Here, Martin speaks to John James about the rescue of a very important newcomer at Brookside Stud.

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I can’t do right for doing wrong around this time of year, when the Flat and National Hunt seasons overlap, as each discipline’s diehard fans demand I write about the breeding angles on their favoured side of the sport. 

Today’s email should please both camps, at least, as the subject is a former jump jockey who became a Newmarket stud owner and welcomed the birth of an extremely special Flat-bred foal in recent weeks.

John James, given the nickname Jinks by his first boss Ryan Price after a run of rotten luck, oversaw the arrival of a Kingman filly out of multiple Group 1 heroine Esoterique at his Brookside Stud in Chippenham on the Saturday before last.

The newborn’s significance will not be lost on regular readers, as it was only a few weeks ago that I spoke to Nick Bell, who manages her owner Baron Edouard de Rothschild’s Haras de Meautry in Normandy, after the death of Esoterique’s remarkably productive dam Dievotchka at the grand old age of 34.

He explained that there were very few descendants of Dievotchka in the Haras de Meautry broodmare band, and that Esoterique had long suffered from problems with her ovaries, producing only two foals – both colts – since she retired six years ago.

It is pretty momentous, then, that Dievotchka’s legacy now looks to have been secured at Haras de Meautry, although it was touch and go that the filly survived, according to Jinks.  

“She’s very, very lucky to be here,” he says. “I saw on the camera that Esoterique was going into labour, and so I pulled my boots on and went straight down to the foaling box.

Esoterique: top-class racemare produced a Kingman filly foalCredit: Mark Cranham

“When I got there, I saw the foal just poking its nose out; I could only see the nostrils up to the eyes. You get that sometimes, but you want their two feet to be situated just under the chin so just to be safe it’s always worth having a feel to make sure they’re there.

“I put my arm in and couldn’t feel them, and then went in further but they still weren’t there, so I knew we had a problem. I rang Jan Pynn from the Newmarket Equine Hospital, who does a lot of our work, and told her to get here quickly, and Liam MacGillivray, a partner at the NEH, for backup. I was trying to keep the mare up so that she didn’t get down and start pushing, and thankfully in a few minutes I had three cars turn up at the stud.”

After a lot of high-pressure but painstaking pushing and pulling, along with some soothing of the mare, her foal was safely delivered.  

“The whole episode was over in ten minutes but it felt more like an hour,” says Jinks. “Liam is six-foot-six or something, and has similarly long arms, so he did a lot of the messy work, while I was holding the foal’s head up. He got one leg out, which also needed keeping out of the way, then after a lot of work the second came, and once the shoulders were clear the foal slid out onto the straw.

“I just prayed the foal had survived the experience, and thankfully it soon started whickering to its dam. I straight away picked up the tail and saw that, thank god, it was a filly. I’d hate to have gone through all that and for it to have been another colt.

“It was a good outcome, and the result of a great team effort of everyone being on the ball. Liam said that in another ten minutes it could have been a very different result.”

Happy to report that the nine-day-old foal – one of three brilliantly bred fillies born to mares entrusted by Baron Edouard to Brookside Stud this year, along with a daughter of Sea The Stars and the Listed-winning Le Havre mare Victorine, and a daughter of Almanzor and the well related Fee D’Amour – is doing well.  

Some breeders say that day-old foals look the business but, to be honest, every horse is like a deflated balloon at that point, they need a week to take shape,” continues Jinks.

Dievotchka: Haras de Meautry's blue hen died aged 34 earlier this yearCredit: Haras de Meautry

“If you wanted to criticise, you might say she’s a bit upright at the front at the moment, but that will balance out. She’s been in a loose school with a straw bed, just to get her walking and receiving some physio to the legs, without giving her the chance to gallop around willy-nilly and do something stupid to herself.”

Let’s hope all goes smoothly with the progress of Esoterique’s filly foal by Kingman, and that she has the chance to emulate her dam’s magnificent racing career – highlighted by three Group 1 victories including a defeat of Territories in the Prix Jacques le Marois – before extending the distaff line for Haras de Meautry.  

If that were to happen, she would be the latest in a long line of horses whose early lives have been overseen by Jinks and his team with little fanfare, from Ile De Nisky and Michelozzo, who were broken in at Brookside Stud before the focus of the business was switched to boarding mares, to sales graduate Euro Charline.

Jinks purchased the stud following a successful career in the saddle – eventually, anyway. He received his education in horsemanship from the formidable Ryan Price after getting the train down to Findon as a callow 15-year-old, having never travelled further than Liverpool from his home in nearby St Helens up until then.

He was never put up on a horse by his mentor, as he was at the back of a long queue for rides behind the likes of Fred Winter, Josh Gifford and Paul Kelleway, and was affectionately called a jinx by 'the Captain' after suffering bad luck with several horses he looked after – including Anglo, who won the Grand National after leaving the yard, and Honey End, who finished second to Foinavon in an infamous renewal of the Aintree spectacular.

The legendary Fred Winter Credit: George Selwyn

Jinks took out a jockeys’ licence in the late 1960s and later teamed up with Lincolnshire trainer Jim Leigh but the jinx endured, as it took him more than 70 rides to break his duck. However, that first winner, Moon Saint at Doncaster in November 1972, started a steady flow that saw him finish second only to Jonjo O’Neill and ahead of a certain John Francome in the junior jump jockeys’ table by strike-rate half a century ago this weekend.

 “I rode three trebles in the week leading up to Easter and shot to the top of the table with two weeks of the season to go,” recalls Jinks. “Then one day I went to Ludlow for a single ride in a novice chase and got brought down at the second fence, breaking my collar bone, which put me out for the rest of the season.

“A week later Jonjo got back in front, but he broke his collarbone soon after too, so we both went down to London for the ceremony with our arms in slings, him as the winner, me as the runner-up. I’ve only been to Ludlow that one time. I often wonder how different my life might have been if I never took that ride.” 

Fifty years ago Jinks would not only have been celebrating one of his finest hours as a jockey, but also packing his suitcase for his holidays, as the Whitbread Gold Cup meeting at Sandown signalled the end of the jumps season and the start of a six-week hiatus from racing over obstacles in Britain.

“Back then you’d get plenty of time to recharge the batteries and be with your family, before going again at Market Rasen or Newton Abbot in the middle of June,” he reflects. “It was a lot healthier for everyone involved.

“Also, today the champion only gets to enjoy the feeling for a day or two, as the next jumps season starts again immediately. But times change. It’s like staffing: some of the stories you hear coming out of the town about the prices being paid to lads or lasses to ride just one horse are hair-raising. It’s harder and harder to attract people to work in racing.

”Another change in the culture of jump racing that is exercising the mind of Jinks is riding styles.  

“All these jockeys banging their arses up and down off the saddle, who’s teaching them to ride like that? I’d drag them off my horse if I saw them doing it to mine!” he exclaims.

Josh Gifford (right): "He’s like Joe Mercer riding on the Flat at the time"

“Look back at Josh Gifford riding all those Schweppes Hurdle winners – he’s like Joe Mercer riding on the Flat at the time, with his head down, body balanced and pulling his stick through smoothly without flapping the reins everywhere.”

Don’t go thinking Jinks is fully signed up to the great ranks of grumpy old men, though. He found a reason to be cheerful in the results from the season finale at Sandown on Saturday.

“Kitty’s Light is a fine ambassador for Nathaniel and we bred a very nice four-year-old filly by the sire who’s been named Penny Sweets and is in training with Gordon Elliott,” he says.  

“She’s a very big filly, she was nearly 17 hands when we sold her last year at three, so she might need time but hopefully she’ll eventually produce a few nice updates for her dam, Parthenos, who’s in foal to Stradivarius.”

Running a successful boarding and breeding business, safely delivering the precious Kingman-Esoterique foal and having homebreds in the right homes, it seems safe to say the jinx is over for a horseman who has scaled the heights of both codes, one way or another.

What do you think?

Share your thoughts with other Good Morning Bloodstock readers by emailing gmb@racingpost.com

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