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It doesn’t take you long in his yard atop a Cotswold ridge near Chipping Norton to figure out why. Old Etonians are either powerful charmers or arrogant shits; there is rarely anything in-between. Charlie, who looks like a young royal stretched to six feet several inches, is blessed with a capacity for instant friendliness that would serve him well had he chosen politics rather than training. As I arrived, he was supervising the schooling over fences of a bunch of exuberant young bumpers, and this army officer’s son has that air of organised authority without which you will never run a successful stable. There were no ‘ums’ in his answers. There was plenty of mud on his boots and there is no evidence of silver spoons. Money was short in the early days and the pictures of winners in his timber office are frayed-edge cuttings rather than elegant objects in wooden frames.
There is no room for anything but grafters in a yard in which he exults in the quality of his team, head lad Alan Roche, travelling head lad Paddy Brennan (both experienced signings from Jonjo O’Neill’s yard) and second head lad Albert Ennis, formerly a trainer himself. ‘You need a key crew to get bigger,’ he says, and that is the point about the Longsdon operation: at a time when racing yards are shrinking across the country Charlie is putting on the numbers significantly. Last season he had 44 horses and won 46 races with them, this year he has 60 horses. ‘Winners,’ he says simply; ‘they are your best advertisement,’ and the yard had passed last year’s winner total even before New Year’s Day.
It hasn’t always been easy. The day of his first runner, Charlie was in bed, air-lifted to hospital after being dragged 300 yards by a horse with his foot caught in a stirrup. Although he trained ten winners that first year he lost three horses to accidents. Most tragically, four of those first-season victories were gained by Kerstino Two. The horse had an entry for the Grand National, then one day at the top of the gallops, with Charlie riding, he split a pastern, went down and was gone.
Charlie Longsdon had a solid preparation. He was assistant trainer to Kim Bailey when Bailey was moving yards. Then he spent five years with Nicky Henderson in Lambourn performing not just assistant trainer duties but head lad duties, too, under the eye of the incomparable Corky Browne. ‘I learned a lot about legs,’ he says. When Charlie started, one or two horses were Henderson rejects, whose owners were giving them one last chance. That is the way of it for new trainers. But this is a trainer who no longer needs the parenthetic ‘ex-Henderson assistant’ attached to his name. His own achievements speak for him. The handicap marks of his horses have risen to a level where he no longer has the ammunition to run in midweek races for the lesser lights, so making winners harder to come by: ‘It’s great, though, to have horses with real potential.’
He has two £60,000 to £70,000 horses but mostly the inmates at Hull Farm are much cheaper. Unable to afford expensive horses by the likes of Flemensfirth and Presenting, he has had to find his own less fashionable sires. He has a good uphill gallop at Chipping Norton and we watched some useful prospects on an easy morning. Hard to tell too much from that but I liked the look of Hazy Tom. In the yard I admired the tough little chestnut Strongbow’s Legend, a staying chaser who ran a cracking race last Saturday to finish third at Warwick. Magnifique Etoile will make a nice novice chaser next year and Ostland, who was second in the German Derby, should win soon.
The Longsdon horses seem well backed when they run, so is this a gambling yard? Far from it, it seems. Charlie was regularly in the betting shop when he was playing first-team rugby at Oxford Brookes but he doesn’t bet now. ‘I’m not brave enough. Our horses are backed in because they look well and go to the races with every chance.’
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