Fulke Walwyn first grabbed the headlines when, as an amateur rider, he won the 1936 Grand National on Reynoldstown.
With two fences to go it was the 100-1 outsider Davy Jones who looked a certain winner before his reins broke. Walwyn was having problems of his own after losing his whip at Valentine’s on the first lap and then an iron on the
final circuit. Conceding 23 pounds to the rank outsider, Reynoldstown had to make up 12 lengths on the leader in the closing stages.
With great perseverence and strength from the saddle Reynoldstown was able to triumph at Aintree. A year later his Wrexham-born jockey turned professional. It proved to be a painful transition. A broken arm kept him out for a season and a further fall at Ludlow in 1938 brought his riding career, and almost his life, to an end.
He was unconscious for a month, had to have a metal plate fitted into his head and was told that another fall could prove fatal. He heeded medical advice and took out a trainers licence in 1939.
Over the next 51 years he turned from novice trainer into a legend of the turf, training 2,188 winners and capturing every important jumping race title in the calendar, some of them up to half-a-dozen times.
He was leading trainer for the first time in 1946 and topped the polls on four more occasions. He trained the winners of four Cheltenham Gold Cups, two Champion Hurdles, five King George VI Chases, seven Whitbread Gold Cups, seven Hennessy Gold Cups and a Grand National, in 1964 with Team Spirit. He trained 40 winners at the Cheltenham Festival between 1946 and 1986, a record which stood until 2012.
In 1964, 28 years on from his own success over Aintree, he guided Team Spirit to victory in the Grand National. He carried on training big race winners, more than 2000 in all, until 1990 and died, at the age of 80, a year later.
These days the memories of Fulke Walwyn are kept alive at Cheltenahm every year following the renaming of a race after him at the festival, The Fulke Walwyn Challenge Cup Chase, and he will long be remembered as one of the
greatest national hunt trainers of all-time.
Fulke Walwyn – born in Wrexham on 8 November, 1910; died on 18 February, 1991
