The fact that it’s a small world has long been proven. That Ireland is a tiny part of it, where everyone has some connection with everyone else, is well known too. The latest example concerns James Kilfeather, a Sligo rate collector from circa 1916, who was mentioned here the other day (An Irishman’s Diary, February 9th) in connection with attempts to prove that a Finglas man Charlie Brennan was the face in a famously-filmed rescue scene from that year’s Battle of the Somme.
It turns out that not only was James Kilfeather Charlie's brother-in-law, as we said (hence a contemporaneous Sligo Champion report in which he identified him on screen when the documentary first reached cinemas), he was also the grandfather of my former reporting colleague Frank Kilfeather, now retired.
That makes Charlie a granduncle of Frank’s, although the latter had never realised his relative was a suspected war hero until now. On the other hand, Frank has been able to answer another question we raised in passing. He confirms that the rate-collecting James Kilfeather and a Sligo bookmaker of the same name, who features in our archives as one of the plaintiffs in a 1926 court case, were both his granddad.
He had changed careers by then, and so was among a number of bookies who noticed a suspicious level of losses to postal clients in Longford, on bets placed by telegram, always mere minutes before the start of races.
Hogan’s Last Stand – Frank McNally on the strange disappearance of a former Free State general
Frank McNally on the links between Ireland and John Ruskin, who was born 200 years ago today
Checkmate Charlie? – Frank McNally on another breakthrough in one of the first World War’s enduring mysteries
The rites (and wrongs) of spring – Frank McNally on Lupercalia
On closer inspection, it emerged that their genius in picking winners had more to do with a friendly postmistress, who was backdating times on the telegrams.
Kilfeather snr survived that attempted “sting” to pass on the bookmaking business to two of his sons. Another occupational hazard of the era, meanwhile, was a horse called Mr Jinks, which must have been especially hard on Sligo bookies.
Bred in Ireland, it was trained and raced mostly in England, where punters may have assumed it to be named after the Mr Jinks in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.
On the contrary, the horse was a backhanded tribute to John Jinks, an opposition TD from Sligo, who had been mysteriously absent during a 1927 Dáil vote of confidence, thereby saving the government.
For two years afterwards, the four-legged Jinks won a string of big races and attracted many votes of confidence from punters.
He even started the 1929 Epsom Derby as favourite, although he didn’t win that.
But the bookmaking Kilfeathers survived Mr Jinks too. It was in another Mister they finally met their Nemesis. Frank thinks the firm went out of business in 1958, when a Kildare horse called Mr What won the English Grand National.
As he puts it: “Every human being in Ireland had the bloody nag, so the business went belly up”. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that everyone in Ireland had it. In my years of covering the Cheltenham racing festival, I was frequently depressed by the success of Irish horses that had been backed at long odds, for months beforehand, by entire villages, towns, and counties, where dogs in the street knew it would win, and yet somehow the rumour had never reached me.
But certainly, the intimacy of Ireland, combined with the unique appeal of the Aintree National for once-a-year gamblers, could be ruinous for a local bookmaker who didn’t “lay off” potential losses in time.
Anyway, although far from favourite, Mr What ran like a sure thing that day, revelling in the soft ground. He and the rest of the field were in different parishes by the time he reached the last fence, where he almost fell, but recovered to win by 30 lengths.
Apart from being long enough to bankrupt bookmakers, Mr What’s official starting price has a resonance now that it lacked then. In the words of the greatest Christmas song ever, the horse “came in eighteen to one”.
Which I have always thought to be one of those lyrics wherein the demands of poetry, or ease of singing, trumped realism.
Eighteen to one is an unusual price, even in big fields, where outsiders’ odds more often jump from 16 to 20, with no interim stages. In fact, as far as I can see from Aintree records, in a race going back to 1839, there had never previously been an 18-1 winner, and only one more since then: Team Spirit, six years later.
I wonder if those who “got on” the lucky one in 1958 included the parents of a then three-month-old baby called Shane MacGowan?