Barron a Master With Creatures Great and Small

[Wandering Eyes]

The first thing that greets you outside Maunby House Stables is a pair of miniature cannon. Purely decorative, David Barron explains genially. Nonetheless, there is something pleasingly apt about the way they point out at the world beyond this quiet nook of Herriot Country. For here is a trainer long celebrated for the precision of his aim, and for knowing the optimal range of his horses.

Over the years, there have been times when bookmakers’ ramparts have duly been reduced to rubble. But however shrewdly Barron plays his hand, he has always played it perfectly straight. And those patrons who enjoyed going for the odd touch did so with a smile: win, lose or draw. He remembers one of them putting banknotes in a trouser-press overnight, to squeeze more ammunition into his pockets for a hurdle race at Uttoxeter. But Barron’s smile, describing the mountains of cash his owners were able to count in the car home, is barely less wistful when he recalls their reaction when a beaten horse was led in. No recriminations, no inquests.

“Mmm,” one would say. “Makes your mouth go dry, doesn’t it?” And that would never be too hard a problem to solve.

So when you see the name T.D. Barron next to one of the favourites for the Unibet Lincoln H. at Doncaster on Saturday, it is like seeing a lighthouse across a stormy sea. Half a century after he took out a permit to train the odd jumper on farmland near Thirsk, you can still take your bearings from a man whose first breakthrough came in this same, historic overture to the Flat season: Amenable, in 1991.

Barron had won five all-weather races with Amenable that winter and, knowing that he needed a penalty to get into the Lincoln, even risked running him in a claimer—albeit for a tag that would have seemed intimidating to anyone judging the horse from the outside.

The Lincoln is a different race nowadays, and Kynren (Ire) (Clodovil {Ire}) has instead earned his berth with solid performances—without winning—in top handicaps last year. Barron feels that things were never quite ideal, the ground too firm or the distance too far, and won’t run him unless conditions are suitable. Even then, a modern Lincoln will always contain an unknown quantity like Auxerre (Ire) (Iffraaj {GB}), who has hurtled to a rating of 100 in just four starts for Charlie Appleby.

“I remember Billy Nevett [rider of the north’s last Derby winner, Dante] telling me how they used to have 56 line up for the race when it was still run at Lincoln,” Barron recalls. “In those days you could get in with your 7st horse and your 7lbs claimer. Nowadays you need to be rated very nearly 100 to get a run. So the days of setting one up are over. I suppose the only thing you can do is what William Haggas did last year, or John Gosden did in the Cambridgeshire, and have a group horse in a handicap.”

He speaks advisedly, having won the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood and the Ayr Gold Cup in 1996 with the freakishly fast Coastal Bluff, whose dead-heat in the Nunthorpe the following year remains Barron’s solitary Group 1 success to date. Barron had found Coastal Bluff at Doncaster for just 2,700gns: the one and only proper runner by Standaan (Fr).

“I don’t know where his ability came from,” Barron says. “I just liked the horse when I saw him, thought I’d have a bit of a punt, and it came up. I’ve bought a hell of a lot of horses over the years that I liked every bit as much and they’ve been useless. But oh, they didn’t know what I had that year.”

He chuckles happily at the memory. Between going to Goodwood and Ayr, Coastal Bluff put in one of the most celebrated workouts of modern times, down the road at Thirsk racecourse. Barron put senior jockeys on two of his most accomplished sprinters and instructed them just to go as hard as they could. He then told Coastal Bluff’s rider to give them a 10-length start.

“And he came past them with his lugs up!” recalls Barron. “Then the other two went to the Portland [H., at Doncaster]. And one won it up the stands rail, and the other was first up the far side. So what did I have in hand at Ayr? Forget the 9st 10lbs. They couldn’t beat him.”

Barron is adamant that Coastal Bluff was never the same again, Nunthorpe or no Nunthorpe. Poignantly, in fact, the most prestigious success of his training career turned into a traumatic, rather bitter experience. For Coastal Bluff would surely have won outright at York but for the bit snapping, something that has never happened to any other horse in Barron’s care, on or off the track, in all these years. As a result the horse finished up loose on the Knavesmire, and by the time they had managed to get Kevin Darley weighed-in the winner’s enclosure had emptied.

Coincidentally, the horse who shared the dead-heat was ridden by Alex Greaves, who thereby became the first female rider to win a Group 1 in Europe. And it had been Barron who first got Greaves started as an apprentice, recognising her allowance as a priceless head-start round the all-weather circuits. (Priceless, in particular, when it came to the betting market’s lack of enlightenment regarding female riders.)

That was a typical instance of Barron’s independent cast of mind. He has always ploughed his own furrow. His gallop, unlike so many these days, is perfectly flat. (It actually follows a section of the dismantled branch line to Bedale.) And his horses are by no means ridden out daily. Never having worked for anyone else, Barron simply found his own way, by trial and error, to a system that suited his horses and facilities.

“The main ingredient with a racehorse is ability,” he says with a shrug. “If he has ability, we can all muddle by. I don’t care how good your facilities are, if he’s no damned good, he’s no good. But if you get a horse that can run, then hopefully you have facilities where you’re not going to break him, but you can get him fit.”

It was that same instinct, for working an angle of his own, that prompted Barron for many years to dredge the closing books of Keeneland for yearlings.

“We only packed that in when the exchange rate went against us,” he says. “For a time you were talking maybe $4,000 to get them home, when you were getting $2 for £1. We had some tremendous times there. Every time you went over, you knew you weren’t going to draw a blank. And we’d only arrive when all the proper buyers were leaving. I bought Dim Sums the last hour on the last day, with only me and the cowboys left.”

Dim Sums (Repriced) reeled off four wins as a juvenile, including the valuable Redcar Two-Year-Old Trophy. But sometimes Barron almost feels a victim of that kind of success: by turning up so many bargains, he has found himself pigeonholed as a trainer of cheap horses.

“But if we had to wait until we get orders, I’d never buy any horses,” he admits. “So you just get on and buy some, and hope to sell one or two. That’s been hard work, this time. But if you do come up with a couple of good ones, it will put the job right. That’s why, when we buy a horse, we always try to think: ‘Could I sell him again? Can I ship him to Hong Kong, or the States?’ So we don’t put up with too many faults, conformation-wise. If he has a bent leg when you buy him, he’ll have a bent leg when you’re trying to sell him. And if you didn’t see it first time round, believe you me, you will when you’re trying to sell.”

Barron’s reputation as a trainer of sprinters is equally self-fulfilling, in that he has no choice but to concentrate on the sharper type. Every now and then, however, he gets to demonstrate his versatility with a horse like Sirvino (GB) (Vettori {GB}). A 3,000-guinea yearling, he completed a five-timer in the John Smith’s Cup at York in 2009, the handicapper computing his improvement at 36lbs.

“Starting his 4-year-old career, oh, he had a lot in hand,” Barron reflects. “But we had to wait for him. And I worked out a long time ago that I’m not going to win a Derby. We can’t afford the pedigrees. You can look at an individual, and think: ‘That’ll gallop.’ A horse can be quick regardless of his pedigree. You just get the fluke that can wing it. And buying on spec, of course, you need horses that can tell you quick what you’ve got. But that’s changed as well, to an extent. Too many people out there now can see a nice horse.”

Having rather meandered into his vocation, from farming, Barron has unquestionably been helped by a stockman’s eye—one evidently inherited by daughter and assistant Nicola. (Son Tim meanwhile manages the farm.) It was Nicola, for instance, who found Kynren as a 25,000gns Book II yearling.

“Yes, the first time that horse walked in the yard was the first time I’d seen him,” Barron says. “Nic’s been beside me at the sales since long before she left school and now does the biggest part of the work, pedigree-wise. I suppose we’ve always been involved with livestock, and I think that helps you understand what you’re looking at. Because you can either do that or you can’t. You can’t learn it from a book.

“She knows what I like, and what I’ll put up with. We never speak to each other when we go round looking at horses, don’t stand and have a conference when we’ve pulled one out. We just look, walk away, get on with the next one. By the time you go back through them, you know full well you’re going to be on the same wavelength.”

Someday Nicola will take over the reins. But all the old acuity still glints in her father’s eyes. Last year was a slower one, but then the juveniles weren’t as sharp as usual. There were a few bigger animals Barron decided to wrap up by midsummer, and these are evidently showing the benefits now.

“Some would say I’ve been around too long, probably,” Barron says wryly. “The business probably would benefit if someone younger was up front. You get to the point where you think, ‘Well, if they haven’t been with me up to now, the chances are they’re not going to come at all.’ But I’m enjoying the job still. I feed them every morning myself, feed them every night myself. I walk around first thing when no-one’s around, and everything’s quiet. And if there’s a problem, you don’t even need to go in the box to see it. And I still get a buzz. Especially this time of year. I like having the new ones around, the youngsters. And I suppose I’ve got a fairly thick skin on me by now. So I can put up with quite a lot.”

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