Charlton Ensures Beckhampton Legacy

by Emma Berry 
Every racehorse trainer should have a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ close at hand. 

There are few professions that require such singularity of mind and where results are judged so keenly–and often harshly–on a daily basis. Kipling’s oft-quoted line ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same’ could have been written for Roger Charlton this season. After the euphoria of bringing Al Kazeem (GB) (Dubawi {Ire}) back to his very best to claim a fourth Group 1 triumph in last month’s Tattersalls Gold Cup–and the first since the horse’s short-lived stud career–comes not disaster, thankfully, but the incredible disappointment of an injury to Al Kazeem’s sesamoid that threatens his continuation as a racehorse. 

The morning that the extent of his injury is revealed to Charlton happens to coincide with the TDN visit. Many trainers would, understandably, have asked the pesky journalist to leave the room while discussing the situation in depth with his vet over the telephone, but not this one, who accepts the vet’s verdict with the equanimity with which he subsequently greeted Time Test’s scintillating win in the Tercentenary S. at Royal Ascot. Triumph, disaster, triumph. 

The positives don’t always outweigh the negatives in a trainer’s life, but if they do so this year for Charlton then they are not misplaced. As he reflects on his quarter of a century with a training licence he is unnecessarily hard on himself. Admittedly, his career started on an extraordinary high, with success in the 1990 G1 Epsom Derby and G1 Prix du Jockey Club as his attention-grabbing opening act. 

“Quest For Fame and Sanglamore were freaks of circumstance really. It can only be fate,” he said with customary modesty. “If you include [Irish Derby runner-up] Deploy, they were all rated within a couple pounds of each other. We had 60 horses, probably 30 of which were 3-year-olds and about 15 of those were colts, so what are the odds of three horses in 15 being the three best mile-and-a-half colts in Europe, or at least in England?” 

The Juddmonte-bred trio ensured that Charlton made the best possible start when succeeding Jeremy Tree at the idyllic Wiltshire training establishment of Beckhampton, where he had been assistant for 12 years. Even 25 years later he’s still embarrassed to revel in that success. He said, “I felt a bit of a fraud. Everyone is trying to win the Derby and I felt sorry for Barry Hills, who was second with Blue Stag. He was probably the only other horse in the race that genuinely stayed a mile and a half.” 

“Really, how could it get any better after winning a race like that?” Charlton continued. “How are you going to do it again? As we know, I haven’t done it again and I haven’t even got close. But one does really appreciate having that tick in the box on the CV. If I achieve nothing else, at least I’ve achieved that.” 

In his office, Charlton proffers a typed sheet of English Classic winners trained at Beckhampton stretching back to 1839, as if to provide evidence of his woeful under-achievement. Yes, his name appears just once among the 39 entries, but horses such as Cityscape (GB) (Selkirk), his half-brother Bated Breath (GB) (Dansili {GB}), Thistle Bird (GB) (Selkirk), Patavellian (Ire) (Machiavellian), Avonbridge (GB) (Averti {Ire}), Tamarisk (Ire) (Green Desert), Tante Rose (Ire) (Barathea {Ire}), Sea Of Heartbreak (Ire) (Rock Of Gibraltar {Ire}), Striking Ambition (GB) (Makbul {GB}) and Blue Monday (GB) (Darshaan {GB}) offer an abundance of conflicting testimony. Whether it’s colts or fillies, sprinters or middle-distance runners, Charlton has continued to produce racehorses to a level that amplifies his talent as he goes quietly about his work on his peaceful 700 acres of rolling downland. 

As the seventh incumbent at Beckhampton since it switched from being a coaching inn to a training stable in the 1850s, Charlton is all too aware of the importance of maintaining such an historic yard. 

“The wonderful estates such as Manton, Kingsclere, here at Beckhampton, as well as the training centers of Lambourn and Newmarket have such history, but that can be lost quite easily as we all have fairly short memories,” he admitted. 
Beckhampton’s wide variety of turf gallops, which in early summer are surrounded by swaying red fescue grass and dotted with buttercups, have cushioned the hoofbeats of a history book full of champions. Included on the roll of honor are four-time Classic winner Formosa, King George VI’s wayward but brilliant Sun Chariot, her fellow Triple Crown winner Galtee More and, more recently, Rainbow Quest (Blushing Groom {Fr}) and Danehill (Danzig). The last two named were of course great colorbearers for Khalid Abdullah, whose Juddmonte breeding operation is now synonymous with excellence throughout the racing world. However, it was at Beckhampton–and through Charlton’s former boss Jeremy Tree–that the seeds for the Saudi prince’s enduring turf legacy were sown. The first of his yearlings arrived at the stable in 1978 and Native Charmer became the first winner in the now distinctive green, white and pink silks the following May. Charlton continued, “My predecessors did a lot better than me. Fred Darling and Noel Murless were having runners in Classics every single year–and winning them pretty frequently–and thank God I had Quest For Fame, but I haven’t won a Guineas or an Oaks. This was a very famous place and I’m conscious of trying to promote the name Beckhampton because of its history and its beautiful gallops.” 

Racing’s heritage is undeniably important, but equally so in the competitive modern-day training ranks is the ability to move with the times and reach a wider audience. Perhaps prompted by his son and assistant, Harry, the 65-year-old Charlton is one of the few of his generation of what might be considered the last of the ‘gentleman trainers’ to embrace social media. He issues regular updates on his horses via his website and on Twitter and is rewarded for his candor with more than 20,000 followers. 

Beckhampton’s patrons are still largely owner-breeders, with Juddmonte retaining its links with the stable throughout Charlton’s tenure along with The Queen, Lady Rothschild and Anthony Oppenheimer among others. The trainer’s greatest strike-rate for Group 1 winners per horse trained, however, must come through his association with Welsh breeder John Deer, who, before the glory days of Al Kazeem, saw his colors carried to glory by the top-class sprinting half-brothers Patavellian and Avonbridge, each of whom won the G1 Prix de l’Abbaye. 

It is perhaps no surprise, though, that it is Al Kazeem whose photo hangs in pride of place above the trainer’s desk, though oddly it portrays him being narrowly beaten by Noble Mission (GB) in last year’s Champion S. 

“To produce a career best-equaling performance on very heavy ground only 13 days after running in the Arc was certainly, as far as I was concerned, justification to think that he’d got back to his best,” explained Charlton. 

In many ways, with Al Kazeem’s return to Beckhampton on the discovery of his sub-fertility at the Royal Studs, his trainer had nothing left to prove. Together they had already won three Group 1 races in the glorious summer of 2013. However, in an age where comment is expressed so freely and publicly on umpteen online forums, for Al Kazeem to return to the races as a shadow of his former self would have been hard to bear, for the stable and for his many fans. 

As the record now shows, any such fears were unfounded. The eight starts of his ‘second’ racing career have to date garnered three more group victories, including, crucially, his most recent success at the highest level when winning the Tattersalls Gold Cup for the second time. Only time will tell if that will be the last we see of him on the racecourse. 

“If Al Kazeem is to retire, and we have to consider that’s a possibility, then what a great way to go out,” said Charlton. “He got great publicity and to have won so nicely made me hugely proud of him. People have been so kind. I’ve hardly stopped shaking people’s hands.” 

It can’t have been easy to channel the energies of a 6-year-old stallion returning from a series of liaisons with some of Europe’s most blue-blooded mares, but Charlton insists that Al Kazeem was a willing ally when it came to returning to his old job. He said, “I didn’t know what to expect when he came back here and we put the saddle on. I thought he might be standing on his back legs and shouting but he just looked around and it was as if he’d never been away. It was the gradual process of getting the stallion condition off him and returning him to a racing shape that was the hardest work. But if you have a horse who is eager to please and willing to go out and point his toe and enjoy his work then it’s just a question of keeping on putting the work in, and over a period of time you’re going to get there.” 

Charlton added, “If at any stage he’d been reluctant, unhappy or moving badly we simply wouldn’t have continued, but every step of the way he was just helping me rather than me helping him. I guess the rest is history.” 

That final assurance bodes well for the horse when it comes to deciding whether or not he will be able to recover well enough from his injury to continue racing. Eventually he will return to his birthplace at John Deer’s Oakgrove Stud in Chepstow to resume covering the odd mare in the hope that he can add to the select number of his first-crop offspring currently on the ground. 

Whatever sadness is felt at Beckhampton when Al Kazeem leaves for the final time, the overwhelming emotion will surely be gratitude that the team was granted a second chance in extraordinary circumstances. The trainer admitted, “From the stable’s point of view, to get a horse back who looked like he was lost forever was a huge boost. The replacing of those horses is pretty damned difficult.” 

As one door potentially closes, however, another has been thrust open by Time Test (GB) (Dubawi {Ire}), whose explosive performance at Ascot was one of the highlights of the Royal meeting. Like Al Kazeem he is by Dubawi and, as a son of Juddmonte’s Group 1 winner Passage Of Time (GB) (Dansili {GB}), he is understandably already being talked about as a future addition to the Banstead Manor Stud stallion division, though he will have his work cut out to emulate his paternal half-brother. 

Nevertheless, Charlton–never one to get carried away on the shoulders of hype–has already said of Time Test, “We should take this horse very seriously.” 

The same can certainly be said of his trainer.