Fanshawe Maintains Archer's Great Legacy

With some 80 racehorse trainers in Newmarket responsible for up to 3,000 Thoroughbreds between them, one might think that these handlers of HQ would fit a certain stereotype. In fact, training licences aside, a more disparate group of people would be hard to find. 
    There's Sir Michael Stoute, whose whistling and humming can often be heard before he is spotted, and who is routinely shadowed on the Heath during the summer months by the giant West Indian former fast bowler Michael Holding. Then there's Don Cantillon, who cycles alongside his string with his dog Chip in tow and oversees a small but deceptively powerful stable of jumpers, star of which at the moment is his brave one-eyed homebred mare As I Am (Ire). 
    The immaculately attired coffee-and-cream string could only really belong to stylish ex-pat Italian Luca Cumani, who lines up his troops alongside the Town Canter and asks them to stand quietly as others pass by–a habit formed from watching horses trained on the track in America. 
    A PhD in biochemistry wasn't enough to lure Dr. Jon Scargill to a life of academia over the hard graft of being a hands-on horseman, and he left Cambridge University to settle in nearby Newmarket, while my husband, John Berry, is unmistakable for all the wrong reasons. In summer, he rides out in shorts and wellington boots, a look I've attempted to talk him out of through years of marriage, but exhortations have fallen on deaf ears. 
    Another of the town's more idiosyncratic trainers is James Fanshawe. While many are pigeon-holed for being good with, say, fillies, sprinters or jumpers, Fanshawe's great gift is that he has trained top-notchers across codes and divisions. Just last season, he and his wife Jacko waved goodbye to their stable star, the dual G1-winning sprinter Society Rock, but Pegasus Stables during Fanshawe's tenure has also housed another top sprinter, the July Cup winner Frizzante (GB), as well as the outstanding mare Soviet Song (Ire), Group 1-winning stayers Arctic Owl (GB) and Invermark (GB) and two champion hurdlers, Royal Gait (GB) and Hors La Loi III (Fr). 
    To the trainer, it's a matter of spotting potential early in a horse and gently nurturing that ability. “I really love a progressive horse and I love to be able to give a horse a chance to improve and gain in confidence,” Fanshawe explains. “Sometimes you get it so right and it all falls into place and other times you get it completely wrong. But if you overface a horse they never get over it. I try to do everything gradually and luckily I've got some patient owners who stick with me and let me do that. Not everyone is in a position to do so.” 
    His point was proved perfectly last season by the tall and rangy Seal Of Approval (GB), now five, whose lanky frame in her yearling days saw the subsequent 
G1 winner bought back as a yearling by her breeder Tim Vestey for 10,000gns. The stream of decent horses to have emanated from the stable since he started training in 1990 is testament not only to Fanshawe's skills in this regard, but, he believes, the legacy of the care that went into the building of the yard by Fred Archer. 
    “For me the important thing is having stabling that can get you out of a hole quickly if your horses get sick–so they need to be well designed and well ventilated,” he explains. “The Victorians really knew how to build stables–their ventilation was superb because if their horses were sick they couldn't work or get to work, it wasn't just about racehorses.” 
    Fanshawe's tall, willowy, slightly stooped frame is not dissimilar to that of Archer, the pre-eminent jockey of his era, whose constant battle with his weight coupled with overwhelming sadness at the loss of his young wife during childbirth led to his suicide in 1886 at the age of 29. 
    Just four years earlier he had built his home Falmouth House and a yard from which he had hoped to train when his riding days were over. Originally known as Falmouth Lodge, in Archer's day the stable was used to house carriage horses and hacks, the jockey's training dream left unfulfilled by his premature and tragic demise. Over the intervening century, trainers came and went, the yard was renamed Pegasus Stables, and in the last 25 years it has been lovingly restored to its former glory by the Fanshawes. 
    “I was still working for Sir Michael Stoute when I first came to Pegasus at the end of 1988,” recalls Fanshawe. “Michael had some horses here at the time and then we took on the lease but I didn't start training until 1990. 
“Right from the start, even though we leased the yard initially, from the moment we came in I always treated it as if we owned it.” 
    Currently consisting of 56 boxes, work is underway on a new 17-box semi-circular yard, with painstaking attention to detail of which the original Victorian builders would have approved. 
    “A lot of work needed doing when we first moved in and we're always trying to do something to improve it,” Fanshawe explained. “We rebuilt the newer stables in the style of the original yard some years ago. I'm always trying to stick to Fred's original designs and that's why we're building the new boxes in a semi-circle.” 
    With the modern-day tendency towards unimaginative functional architecture, it is no mean feat, but Fanshawe, a down-to-earth horseman not usually given to fanciful notions, has an extra imperative in his quest to maintain his historic home. 
    “I always have a feeling that Fred's about,” he says simply. 
    Newmarket legend has it that Archer's ghost roams the Heath aboard his favourite grey hack but the trainer's relationship with the stable's founder is on different terms. 
    “It's not a tangible ghost-like feeling but I just feel he's looking over the place,” he adds. 
    “That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned because I love history and I love the history of Fred–his journey from Cheltenham, being indentured to Mat Dawson and then making enough money to build this place. To have achieved what he did by the time he was 29 was amazing.” 
    Falmouth House was demolished in the late 1960s, prompting the drawing up of the Newmarket Charter, which protects the historic yards and houses of the town from development for anything other than racing use. Fortunately, Falmouth Lodge, in its guise as Pegasus Stables, is also fiercely guarded by the Fanshawes, as is Archer's memory. 
    Jacko Fanshawe runs a syndicate called the Fred Archer Racing Partnership, which currently has two horses in training, including an Equiano half-brother to another of the yard's good sprinters, Deacon Blues (GB). The colt is named The Tin Man, which was Archer's nickname in his days as a jockey, while the Fanshawes' 17-year-old son Tom bears the middle name of Frederick. 
    “Fred Archer is one of the finest names in the history of racing and the fact that he built this place is special,” says Fanshawe. “It's his legacy, really, and that's what I'm trying to maintain through spending money on the upkeep of this place to bring it back to the way it was. My other aim is always try to fill the boxes with horses good enough for Fred to have wanted to ride. I hope he'd be proud of what we're doing.” 
    It's hard to imagine that the man who all but gave his life to racing and is responsible for one of Newmarket's most beautiful stables would feel anything other than pride that it is still serving the purpose for which it was built, and in a conspicuously successful fashion.