Article by Chris Pitt
Eighteen-year-old apprentice Willie Currie came within touching distance of bringing off a 25/1 shock victory in one of the season’s most valuable and competitive handicaps at Goodwood on Friday, July 29, 1966.
Willie was born in Glasgow on December 28, 1947, the son of a butcher’s shop manager. Apprenticed to Eddie Reavey at Orchard Stables, East Hendred, near Wantage, Willie started race riding in 1965 but had no winners from eight rides.
He gained his first success on And Again in the Son-In-Law Handicap at Newmarket’s Rowley Mile course on May 21, 1966. He rode his second four weeks later, on Filigree Lace in a Doncaster apprentice’s race on June 24, following up at Catterick on July 20.
Nine days later, Willie teamed up with Eddie Reavey’s filly Swift Harmony in the £10,000 News of the World Stakes, a prestigious handicap for three-year-olds on the last day of the Glorious Goodwood meeting (Goodwood was then a four-day meeting rather than five). Always prominent in the 19-runner field, Willie took full advantage of his mount’s light weight of 7st 3lb by kicking on into a clear ‘catch me if you can’ lead with half a mile to run. It was only in the last 150 yards that Staff Ingham’s colt Le Cordonnier, the mount of Geoff Lewis, drew alongside and gradually forged ahead to score by half a length.
The following day, Willie gained a small measure of compensation when riding And Again to victory in a two-mile handicap at Warwick. Four days later, Wednesday, August 3, he rode a double at Bath on a pair of Eddie Reavey-trained two-year-olds named Chimer and Euclea). These were his fifth and sixth winners so far that season from about 40 rides. It appeared that Currie was becoming hot stuff.
He rode just one more winner that year, Eddie Reavey’s two-year-old selling plater Drake’s Cloak at Wolverhampton on September 10.
Willie seemed to have a winning way with two-year-olds, for began the 1967 season by making all to win the Beckhampton Maiden Stakes at Newbury on Golden Parthia, the 11/2 favourite in a field of 29. He then won on Bakhout at Wolverhampton and Dagenham Piper at Warwick, on Brian Swift’s filly Dollface at Alexandra Park, and landed a pair of nurseries on Harry Hannon’s grey gelding Row Barge, all of them two-year-olds.
The following season began where the previous one had left off, with a couple of early season two-year-old winners, Eddie Reavey’s Princess Pooh at Doncaster on April 13, and Harry Hannon’s Right Rosa at Warwick two days later. However, strange as it may seem, he was to ride just one more winner, another Eddie Reavey-trained juvenile, a filly named Politeness, who made a winning racecourse debut in a Windsor seller on September 9, 1968.
Perhaps it was the weight did for Willie Currie’s career as a jockey. By 1968 he weighed 7st 10lb, while the form book does not list his weight for his sole season as a fully-fledged jockey in 1970, during which he did not ride a winner from limited opportunities.
