Bryan Ball 

Article by Chris Pitt

Allow me, if you will, to crave your momentary indulgence. I want to tell you of the day I first went racing – Tuesday, June 12, 1962, the second day of Birmingham’s Whitsun Meeting.

I remember catching a ‘races special’ bus outside Birmingham’s Hall of Memory with my dad. We encountered a traffic jam on the way to the Bromford Bridge course and so missed the first race. When we got there we went into the five bob cheap enclosure on the inside of the track. Not for us the 25 shillings Tatts or the 35 shillings Club. We could never have afforded such luxuries.

The second race on the card, the Erdington Selling Handicap, was the first I ever saw ‘live’. It was an indifferent quartet that lined up for the seven furlong contest but it could have been the Derby as far as I was concerned. The four runners finished strung out like they were in a three-mile chase, the winner being Miss Murray, ridden by 55-year-old Davy Jones. A search of the form book reveals that none of the four horses was ever so much as placed again.

The third race was won by Jim Joel’s Spring Wheat, the mount of Eph Smith, finishing four lengths clear of his brother Doug on the Queen’s Step On It. Eph also won the next race on Commander In Chief, who went on to win the following year’s Cambridgeshire.

The fifth race, the Charlecote Handicap, was run over a marathon trip of 2 miles 5 furlongs, victory going to the 11/4 favourite Determination, ridden by 7lb claimer Bunny Hicks for his boss, Lewes trainer Tom Masson. Willie Snaith won the last, the Watling Street Two-Year-Old Plate, on a horse named Ernie, trained by Tom Waugh at Newmarket.

After the racing had finished, my dad took me round to the unsaddling enclosure so that I could catch the jockeys as they left the weighing room. I was eagerly hoping to get the autographs of Doug and Eph Smith, Greville Starkey, Duncan Keith and Willie Snaith, who’d all ridden in the last, but we got there too late and they’d all gone home.

I must have looked pretty glum standing there clutching my brand new autograph book and nobody left to sign it. Then suddenly I spotted a jockey, the tell-tale whip protruding from his bag. I rushed over and confronted him with an excited “Can I have your autograph please?” He looked a bit taken aback but he duly signed. The signature read: ‘G. B. Ball’.

I had to admit I’d never heard of him. The name didn’t trip off the tongue in the same breath as Smith, Starkey, Keith or Snaith. A scan through the race card revealed that he’d finished unplaced on The Tortoise, who’d seemingly run at a speed befitting his name, in the fifth race. So who was this G. B. Ball?

Subsequent investigation many years later showed that George Bryan Ball, who appears to have been known as Bryan rather than George, had held a Flat jockey’s licence between 1958 and 1962, partnering just one winner during that time.

That winner came on Johns Court, owned and trained by Eric Cousins at Tarporley, in the Garswood Handicap over seven furlongs at Haydock Park on May 14, 1960. Weighing just 7 stone, he’d ridden as a freelance before joining David Thom’s Newmarket yard in 1962.

Thom trained The Tortoise. Bryan Ball rode him three more times that year, finishing fifth in the Summer Handicap at Newmarket’s July Meeting, unplaced in Sandown’s Crockford Handicap in September, and finally when finishing a creditable ninth of 25 in the 1962 Cesarewitch on October 6. He also had a ride in that year’s Cambridgeshire on Thom’s filly Livin’ Doll, finishing towards the rear of the 46-runner field.

Those two rides in the ‘Autumn Double’ races appear to have been his last in Britain, as he subsequently left to ride in Scandinavia.

Wherever he is now, hopefully still alive, whatever he’s doing, he may still remember that day at Birmingham. After all, I doubt whether he got asked for his autograph very often.

That first autograph book was soon filled with signatures of far better-known jockeys, such as Gordon Richards, Edward Hide, Joe Sime, Greville Starkey, Brian Taylor, Des Cullen, Bruce Raymond, Frankie Durr, Peter Robinson, Norman Stirk and Keith Temple-Nidd, along with the autographs of various celebrities including Adam Faith, Sid James, Hughie Greene, pretty much the full cast of ‘The Archers’ and, although I how don’t recall how, when or why, the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang. Does anyone else remember them?

Unless he reads this, Bryan Ball will never know that his was the first of hundreds of jockeys’ signatures I collected over the years, nor indeed that the young kid whose book he signed at Birmingham that day would go on to write three books of his own (so far), including, appropriately, one chronicling the history of Birmingham’s Bromford Bridge racecourse.