Cavanman's Diary: When Caughoo ruled the world

Paul Fitzpatrick

Rule The World. He couldn’t have been better named. He came up through the middle like a streak of light, as Shane MacGowan sang (“Priests and maidens, drunk as pagans... Sins forgiven and celebrations”) and made my month.
It’s not often you get one up on the bookies but the fun, of course, is in the thrill of the chase, not the actual catch. And 50/1 was a handsome price in any man’s language, even if the horse MacGowan sang about, Bottle of Smoke, was only “twenty-f**kin’-five-to-one, me gambling days are done”.
It’s not the longest price winner of a National, though - not by a long way. Next year, we’ll be hearing plenty about the 1947 race, when a horse with a Cavan name, and connections, was the toast of Aintree when coming home for all the money at double those odds. I’m talking, of course, about Caughoo, an eight-year-old named after the townland outside Ballinagh. It’s a story worthy of a movie in itself.
It started with the McDowells, a family in the townland, one of whom moved to Dublin in the late 19th century and established himself as a jeweller. The family became prosperous and were based around the Howth, Sutton and Malahide areas. One of the McDowells, Herbert, was a vet who dabbled with horses and he bought a two-year-old for 50 guineas at the Ballsbridge sales in 1941. He named the horse Caughoo, after his family’s ancestral home. It was Herbert’s first foray into training racehorses. He must have wondered why he’d bothered. The horse was small and unsociable, frowning upon all bar its groom. Even the McDowells themselves weren’t welcome in Caughoo’s stable.
Initially, the purchase was a disaster. Caughoo’s record on the flat produced more ‘duck eggs’ than the old yard five miles outside Cavan town. At first, he didn’t appear to have much aptitude over the obstacles either. In all, the horse would run four times on the flat in 1942, generally over a mile and a half, finally getting his nose in front in a maiden hurdle race at Limerick.
As a four-year-old, Caughoo ran ten times, winning just once and the following year, back on the flat, it fell in a race in the Phoenix Park. Herbie didn’t give up, though, training Caughoo on the beaches in Fingal.
A breakthrough arrived in May of 1946 when, at 8/1, he surprisingly romped to victory in the Ulster Grand National at Downpatrick. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece and in the end, he sold the horse to his brother, Jack, the jeweller, who chose the colours of Suttonians RFC – the royal blue and white of Cavan, with a dash of green - for his silks. He figured that he had a stayer and decided, in 1947, to go for the Aintree National.

Bullish

On the B&I boat over to Liverpool, famous racing photographer Billy Merriman bumped into a bullish McDowell. “Have a bet on my one,” said the man carrying the hopes of Cavan, “he’s going to win the National. And join me for a glass of champagne afterwards.”
One hundred thousand punters had assembled at Aintree, which was covered by a carpet of fog. The big race had attracted a record entry of fifty-seven, with Caughoo friendless in the betting market.
Meanwhile, in Inch, Co Clare, a farmer called John Mungovan was waking up with a strange sensation. The night before, he’d had a dream – Caughoo would win. He approached one bookmaker for a bet of £20 but it was refused. He tried a couple more, and eventually got one. Then, he found a wireless and sat tight.
The horse took off under Eddie Dempsey at a price of 100/1, a no-hoper. Dempsey held him up off the pace, though, and when the chasing pack behind the fancied Lough Conn began to fade, his mount grew stronger.
Lough Conn’s jockey Danny McCann, amazingly a next-door of Dempsey’s in The Ward, took his off the bridle but found no more.
On the second circuit, Caughoo caught him, and passed him with three fences to go. He pinged the last two and came home 20 lengths clear, a stretch that was further than the distance between McCann and Dempsey’s homes. The crowd were stunned into silence. McDowell had been vindicated and his unfancied horse had just won the greatest race in the world.

World Record

On the boat home, McDowell asked those behind the bar counter what they thought the stock was worth. McDowell specified that nobody was to be allowed to buy a drink and gave the barman a cheque for £200, telling him to keep the change. It entered the Guinness Book of Records as the largest round ever bought.

Back in Dublin, at the North Wall, bands turned out to greet the winners and they were paraded down O’Connell St. In Ashbourne, Dempsey threw a party and at midnight, the pubs in the area ran out of drink. He deserved one – the trip to Liverpool was his first time in England, and he hadn’t ridden a winner in three years.
Critics tried to discredit the victory, claiming Caughoo did not complete the entire course but had instead hidden, concealed by the fog, while the others completed one circuit, before emerging for the run-in. It was nonsense, but the story persisted until disproven with the discovery of new footage 50 years later.
Back here, the Cavan Drama Festival was in full swing and the win in the National, by a runner routinely described as “a Cavan horse”, added to the sense of revelry. The McDowells were toasted throughout the county, and this paper carried the news on the front page, revealing that Caughoo had, for a short time, grazed in the townland after which he was named. “It is a tribute to the McDowell family that in naming the horse,” the Celt said, “they didn’t forget the townland where the old homestead remains. The family have always kept in close touch with their native county...”

Oh, and John Mungovan got paid too. The 83-year-old Clareman won £3,000 in all, and donated one third of it to the Bishop of Killaloe “to send to the Holy Father for the relief of distress in Europe”. There was a sting in the tail. Caughoo would never again scale the heights of the wondrous win at Aintree and in 1955, Danny McCann and Eddie Dempsey fell out. Drink was taken and McCann asserted that Dempsey hadn’t completed the whole course, costing him £2,000.McCann beat his friend up at the side of the road and was later imprisoned for four months.

Sad denouement

Three decades later, there was yet another morbid twist when Caughoo, or at least his head, returned to Aintree. A colourful former mayor of Drogheda called Frank Godfrey had bought the horse’s head from a taxidermist in Dublin, with whom it had been left in 1961 and never collected. The man who sold it, for £50, used to dust off the head each year, open two bottles of stout and watch the Grand National.
In 1987, Godfrey and some friends brought the head with them to Aintree, where some policemen had to be convinced it wasn’t a bomb. The head is buried in Dublin, but the amazing story, with its sad denouement, lives on.