Michael Corke

Article by Chris Pitt

Michael Corke made the perfect start – twice – and yet his career as a jockey is long forgotten. The reason he kindles this writer’s memory is that he won the first race of the season in one of my earliest years of following the sport of horseracing.

Born in Ludlow in 1941, Michael’s career had begun a few years before my interest started. He was apprenticed to Tom Yates at Letcombe Bassett and made the perfect start by winning on his first mount in public, a two-year-old filly named Corn Beam in a Newbury nursery on October 25, 1957, beating five-times champion jockey Doug Smith by a length in the process to land a 20/1 shock victory. That was his sole success of the year and he rode only one the following year, another two-year-old filly, called Now What, at Bath on July 5, 1958.

Five long years passed before he next entered the winner’s enclosure. Again he made the perfect start, winning the opening race of the 1963 Flat season, the Apprentices’ Handicap at Lincoln on Monday, March 25, 1963 on Ron Mason’s four-year-old filly, Nicona.

Always lying handy, she led one furlong out and won comfortably by a length and a half from Abbots Royal, the mount of the previous year’s champion apprentice Bruce Raymond.

That was back in the days when the start of the Flat was a big thing; when the trade papers and the racing pages of the dailies contained banner headlines proclaiming ‘They’re off!”, and the winner of the first race of the season – traditionally for apprentices – was humorously referred to as being “leading jockey for half an hour”.

Three days later, Michael rode Nicona in the Liverpool Spring Cup, finishing unplaced, and teamed up with her again at York in May and also when finishing fourth in an apprentices’ handicap at Lanark in July.

He never rode another winner, although he came close on a couple of occasions in August 1963, being beaten a head on

Mona Louise in Brighton apprentice race, and finishing a half-length second on Nicona at Wolverhampton.

It was almost certainly rising weight that put paid to his career. By 1961 he weighed 8st, which was comparatively heavy for an apprentice in those days, when bottom weights in handicaps were only required to carry 6st 7lb or 7st 0lb. When he rode Roy Whiston’s two-year-old filly Sister Of Billie at Wolverhampton on August 7, 1961, he was forced to put up 9lb overweight to ride at 8st 5lb.

A front page picture in the Sporting Life on Tuesday, March 26, 1963, with a caption proclaiming him as being “champion jockey for about 23 minutes” was about the most publicity Michael Corke ever got as a jockey. He soon faded from the scene.

The last sighting of his name in the form book is on the Friday of Royal Ascot in 1966. But he wasn’t plying his trade at the royal meeting with all its pomp and pageantry. No, this was at a far lower level, the annual Laytown Strand fixture on June 17, held on the beach some 30 miles north of Dublin, where he finished fourth of seven runners on a three-year-old filly named Epigene, carrying 9st 4lb, in a five-furlong handicap.