Caughoo romps home - 70 years later

Caroline Kavanagh

It’s a horse’s head like no other! It’s Caughoo, 100-1 outsider winner of the Aintree Grand National back in 1947. Tomorrow, on the 70th anniversary of his legendary – and often, controversial – win, Caughoo’s head will make his way back to Caughoo townland in County Cavan in the company of his present owner, Cllr Frank Godfrey, colourful former mayor of Drogheda.

The racehorse was named after the homeplace of former owner, JJ/Jack and trainer, Herbert McDowell.

And it is indeed a prize – back in the 1980s a chance visit to a Dublin-based taxidermist to get a roadkill fox stuffed, led Frank to come face-to-face with Caughoo, who had been preserved and stuffed, but left behind in the taxidermists for decades following various bereavements.

Controversy has followed Caughoo, not least because his Aintree win was on a desperately foggy day when visibility was at an all-time low, and Lough Conn’s jockey claimed that Caughoo only ran one lap of the circuit, that his jockey Eddie Dempsey hid him behind a fence in the mist and re-emerged to take the lead and win the race by 20 lengths.

Eddie was later beaten up by that other jockey after the race (the other jockey serving 4 months in jail for this attack)! This theory, however, was later disproved thanks to photographic evidence clearly showing Caughoo jumping Becher's Brook on two separate occasions.

At their first visit to Aintreet, the unknown horse and virtually unknown jockey won the race against the odds, netting the owners a tidy £10,000! Bookies won almost£1million on a double of Jockey Treble and Caughoo.

There are also plans to bring Caughoo’s head back to North Dublin where he was something of a local hero, trained on Portmarnock Strand, and body is reputedly buried in Sutton.

* Meanwhile, check out Paul Fitzpatrick's Cavanman's Diary written last year on 'When Caughoo ruled the world', which includes video footage of the controversial race.

http://www.anglocelt.ie/news/roundup/articles/2016/04/14/4118048-cavanmans-diary-when-caughoo-ruled-the-world/