Clive Brittain: ‘Maureen not being here was the catalyst for me to retire’

IT'S A little past five in the morning as the familiar silver Honda pokes its nose out of the driveway and nudges into the sparse Bury Road traffic. The driver cranes his neck and peers north and south into the darkness, one eye on the dawn-breaking headlamps of approaching cars, the other on the pavements, empty apart from a tardy stable lad puffing his way to work on a rickety bicycle.

The two labradors sleeping in the back of the car have settled comfortably into their unfailing routine but the driver is showing signs of mild consternation as he turns onto the tarmac and glances over his shoulder at the gateways that neighbour his own.

"Every morning this goes like clockwork but today we're behind times," says Clive Brittain, about as tetchily as he ever gets. "John Gosden will be out in a minute with 80-odd horses and that can mess things up a little bit. The slightest thing can throw it all out of synch."

An uncharacteristic delay - caused by a haphazard piece of jockey's parking and a blocked-in photographer - means the town's earliest riser has very little leeway over the chasing pack of his colleagues, and the whole point of his inhumanly early rising runs the risk of being blunted.

It's a ritual that has been played out on this stretch of road for the past 42 years, for as long as the 81-year-old has been applying his stable lad's logic and country lad's work ethic to the business of training racehorses.

He works his horses on a Tuesday and Friday to avoid the rush on a Wednesday and Saturday, and he pulls out before the milkman to miss the melee that will soon be forming at the foot of Warren Hill.

That's the way it's always been, and within ten seemingly effortless minutes Brittain has made up for lost time and is contentedly guiding the little Honda up, along and down the grass verges of the training grounds, keeping pace with his first lot, at the canter or the walk, not entirely unaware of the venom directed his way by the motorists seething behind him.

"Now crash!" he chuckles as an angry BMW roars past and disappears over the brow of the hill. Brittain is once again officially first among equals, and he's happy to be so. "John says he's given up trying to beat me," he chuckles again, and the morning moves on as ever.

Except that from the end of this season, the natural rhythm of the mornings on this side of Newmarket will be quietly but irrevocably altered. After four decades of outmanoeuvring the big guns of the Bury Road, the doyen of Headquarters will call time on a career that has seen him land glittering prizes from Japan to the USA, from Royal Ascot to Glorious Goodwood, with Group 1s finding their way back to Carlburg until the very end, despite dwindling numbers and failing health.

Between 1949 and today, Brittain went from being a ten-bob-a-week muck shoveller for Sir Noel Murless to owning a house and yard valued deep into seven-figure territory and a reputation of similar standing. He was the first British-based trainer to annex a Breeders' Cup title - with Pebbles in the 1985 Turf - and the first to land a Japan Cup - with Jupiter Island; the first to install an equine pool in Newmarket; the first to do so many things but the last to crow about it.

The empty bottle of pink champagne on the side in the kitchen reveals the delight with which this lovable figure greets victory or simply embraces the unequal arm-wrestle with Father Time, but lately the celebrations have fallen a little flat and the table in the corner highlights the reason why.

Where once there would have been a slap-up full-English for the benefit of visiting owners, humble hacks and the dogs Hoover and Sweep (named for their ability to clean up the tastiest of leftovers), today there is a void - not a sausage, in fact, just a couple of cups of strong, black coffee and a sense of something missing.

Maureen Brittain, Clive's wife of 58 years, isn't here. In happier times - having eschewed Clive's ungodly 4am wake-up call and emerged at a more civilised hour - she would have been dishing up Musk's sausages for sustenance, perhaps champagne for conviviality, cod liver oil for hubby's rickety joints and good nature for all our benefits, but now she isn't among us at all, struck down by the degenerative cruelty of dementia that has left this most hospitable of souls needing constant care, and her long-term soulmate, ally and sparring partner devoid of a vital thread in the fabric of his existence.

Brittain is a caring man but not an overtly sentimental one, so when he gently gives vent to his emotions the effect is disarmingly moving. He has lost the woman who sustained him through the rigours of a racing lifetime, and now the rewards of the game are conspicuously outweighed by the sadness that accompanies them.

"I'm a wealthy man," he shrugs, "but to have Maureen back as she was, I'd give this lot up and start all over again.

"I don't give the past too much thought, but her illness has taken the wind out of my sails and I find myself thinking back to the immaculate way she did everything. She'd run the house and the business side, we'd have breakfast parties and dinner parties and she had the knack of making everybody feel special.

"Her not being here anymore was the catalyst for me retiring - we were a team and when you've only got half a team, you're not the same. She was the brains of the outfit and being without her is so hard to deal with.

"The rest of it just isn't important - I don't give retirement any thought at all. I'll look after Maureen for as long as I can, forever, and the fact that I won't be training isn't the end of the world."

COMING from a man better known for his ‘funky chicken' antics in the winner's enclosures of all the best racecourses, the poignancy of the moment is painfully doubled. You can't keep a smile off the face of Clive Brittain for long, though, and soon he's sharing happier memories of the tale of one of Newmarket's most enduring and engaging couples.

Like the hideous lengths he went to in order to win her affections after she joined the Murless yard as a secretary following the great trainer's relocation from Beckhampton to Warren Place in 1952.

Brittain had come to Murless as an aspiring apprentice in 1949, weighing in at a gnat's over 5st after a promising career on the pony racing circuit. He'd come from the country town of Calne in Wiltshire ("I was always called ‘Calne' - nobody at the yard ever knew my name"), where he worked hard, received precious little education and helped to break in Welsh mountain ponies for the milk floats, but by the time he first encountered his wife-to-be, he had earned a reputation as a good man with a difficult horse and a mainstay of the yard's football team.

One day, while crammed into a Bedford van with the rest of the XI - plus a sub - he was asked, as the man nearest the passenger door, to get rid of a teammate's cigarette, only to find himself too tightly packed to be able to wind down the window. So he opened the door instead - as you would - and the results were catastrophic, yet strangely rewarding.

"We were going down the hill from the yard, doing 50mph, and the wind just dragged me out," he recalls. "The last thing I remember was the wheels going past my head. I was wearing shin pads but I was going down the road on my elbows and it was like a butcher's shop by the time I stopped. They got me into hospital to tidy me up and I was in there for three days while they picked the lumps of grit out.

"But it was an effective way of attracting Maureen's attention. She came down to see if I was still alive, so when people ask me where I met her, I always say in bed, which was true."

FOR 23 years Brittain occupied a crucial place in the food chain at Warren Place. Having abandoned plans to be a jockey in an age of limited opportunities, he settled into a routine of riding the stellar names that passed regularly through the yard, from Petite Etoile and Crepello to Royal Palace, Connaught and Busted.

When talk of Murless's retirement started doing the rounds, however, his thoughts turned to the previously unthinkable and he began to consider a training career. A timely ante-post bet at 33-1 on Altesse Royale for the 1971 Oaks raised £350 of start-up money and he was on his way.

"I took out a short-term lease on Pegasus Stables," he explains, "which suited me because I was either going to make it with 350 quid or go bust pretty soon." With a bit of cheek and a lot of luck he gathered together 30 horses, bagged 13 winners in his first year, finished second in the Middle Park and the Cambridgeshire and was up and running.

After three years at Pegasus, he was approached by Capt Marcos Lemos to be his private trainer, and when he politely turned down the offer Lemos bought Carlburg, installed Brittain and sent him 40 horses. Their first Classic victory together came with Julio Mariner in the 1978 St Leger, and when the flighty but brilliant filly Pebbles won the 1,000 Guineas in Lemos's blue and white colours in 1984, the unlikely trainer's name was printed indelibly on the Newmarket map.

"Okay, let's rock and roll," goes up the cry to rouse second lot, although in truth it's more of a soft-shoe shuffle these days, thanks to the car accident that wrecked his knees, the troublesome artificial hip and the rigours of old age. With a comfy pair of Crocs on his feet and a walking stick never far from his hand, he has to follow the action from a distance these days, but the uncomplicated equine understanding that has always served him so well is very much intact.

"I'm a simple man," he explains, amid the topiary and the birdsong, playing down the expertise that guided Rizeena to victory in last year's Coronation Stakes. "I'm not clever, so I never try to be. I do what I do and I know I do it well. I get criticised for running horses in the ‘wrong' races by people that can't see what I see. They say I tilt at windmills, but I've won big races with horses that had no right to win them. I have a picture in my head of what every horse can do and it's my job to make that picture reality.

"It's all simple. Horses have got brains and feelings and you've got to know the balance between what's good for them, what hurts them, what frightens them, what makes them sour or reluctant. They're things you can't read in a book because they could never be in a book."

Before too long Brittain had done well enough to be able to buy Carlburg from Lemos, a move that didn't interrupt the flow of influential owners into or unforgettable winners out of the yard. There was Mystiko and Terimon for Lady Beaverbrook, User Friendly for Bill Gredley, Sayyedati for Mohammed Obaida, Crimplene for Sheikh Marwan Al Maktoum and, of course, a steady stream of success for the white and red colours of Brittain's great compadre Saeed Manana.

Pride of place, however, goes to Pebbles, sold for big money to Sheikh Mohammed and still rated the best horse Brittain trained and the one he trained best, although he had to use a potent mixture of animal husbandry and animal cunning to squeeze a series of Group 1 wins from such a combustible filly.

There was the time he and head man Jock Brown bribed the gateman to let her in through the tradesmen's entrance at Aqueduct so she could miss the parade for the Turf ("it would have blown her brain," he grins, "so it was well worth a hundred bucks"); the time he bribed the blacksmith to feign changing a shoe so she could miss the parade for the Eclipse ("Jeremy Tree was very upset - he knew something was going on but he didn't know what it was"); and his Oscar-winning piece de resistance, when he fell theatrically on the Newmarket walkway, causing enough confusion for Philip Robinson to hop over him and make his way straight to the start.

"I got away with it because nobody else had ever thought of doing it," he says, "but I did it all for the horse. Because of what I did she won three races she probably wouldn't have won otherwise."

THESE days, assailed by skin cancer (which has gone away) and bad knees (which haven't), he survives on his unfailing eye and underestimated brain. He had to give up riding out at the age of 74, but with his staff now clad in fluorescent yellow jackets, he follows the morning action without missing a beat.

The only wound that will never heal is the gaping one left by the loss of Maureen to the cruellest of conditions. Her departure hasn't yet interrupted the rhythm of decades, but in his heart Brittain has lost a large part of what made the struggle worthwhile.

"I always had confidence in myself, in what Maureen and I could do as a team," he reflects. "The sun was always shining and when it wasn't I made out it was. I was a lucky man, I had a charmed life, and even when the limbs wore out, the heart stayed in.

"Now, though, half of my time and energy is tied up with things that I didn't have to consider before, and I think the time is right to call it a day.

"I'll still live in the house and somebody else will train at the yard and I don't know if I'll miss it or not. I don't think about it - when you get to 81 and you wake up in the morning, that's a bonus in itself.

"There'll always be something you haven't seen or done, but you get to a certain age and you think what does it matter? The great days I had here with Maureen, that's what really matters."