Peter Wegmann

Article by Chris Pitt

On Saturday, January 23, 1965, the Daily Express printed a picture Swiss-born Peter Wegmann, who trained at Rushton Spencer, near Macclesfield, being towed along on skis as his wife took out hurdler Signal Guide for a spin in the snow. Wegmann not only trained the horses, he rode most of them himself, which was far more common in those days than now.

The photo caption stated that he had three declared runners at Warwick that day – King Fulmar, Wellmade (both in the 1.45), and Hard a Lee (3.45). All three finished unplaced.

He rode King Fulmar in the selling hurdle at Uttoxeter on Easter Monday 1965. He gave up soon afterwards and from then on all trace was lost. That is, until his name reappeared 30 years later as a one-horse permit holder in the 1995 edition of Horses in Training. The following year he saddled a horse in the Grand National. Curiosity was beginning to get the better of me. Where had he been all that time? It was time to find out so I arranged to meet him.

Peter Wegmann was born in 1937 at Winterthur, situated between Zurich and Schaffhausen, the most northerly Swiss town, near the German border. He grew up and went to school in Schaffhausen and then served an apprenticeship there in the brick works.

During his national service, when a corporal in the Swiss army, he became seriously ill with glandular fever. He was advised to cease any energetic sports, which, given that his main interests had been bodybuilding, weightlifting and boxing, came as a blow to the 21-year-old.

Shortly after recovering from his illness, the opportunity arose to come to England for practical training in a steelworks. He recalls: “Everybody seemed to be riding horses here. I’d never ridden before but I thought horse riding was not very energetic, at least as a passenger at the riding school. I started to go there but I couldn’t afford lessons because I only earned a fiver a week and that was hardly enough to live on, so I asked if I could help out at the stables in return for lessons.”

Further military service back home was spent at the cavalry barracks, where he had riding lessons every day. He then worked for a horse dealer in Switzerland before returning to England to study at Stoke College.

Seeking a horse of his own to ride, he found one that belonged to a local vet on the outskirts of Hanley. Peter and the vet’s family soon became firm friends. “We became so friendly that, after college, I used to go and help him in the surgery. I learned a lot with regard to attending to animals, especially horses.

“While I was still at college I broke in horses for a farmer who was very keen on horse racing. On Saturday afternoons, at a certain time, we stopped working with the horses and went inside to have a cup of tea and watch the races. He knew Colin Laidler, who trained at Prees Heath, near Whitchurch. I went there and rode out. While with Colin, I shared a room with Jimmy Morrissey, the stable jockey. I admired him because horses always went nicely for him. I learned a lot from Jimmy, particularly how to be calm with horses.

“At Uttoxeter one day, Colin introduced me to (the well-known amateur rider) Bill Tellwright, who owned Sneyd Brickworks. He invited me to dinner, showed me his horses and asked me to ride out there.”

Tellwright not only fixed Peter up with his first point-to-point rides, he installed him as technical director of his brickworks company. He also helped him to buy his first property, a 32-acre smallholding at Rushton Spencer, near Macclesfield. From there Peter bought his first racehorse, Hard a Lee, for £150 – which was a fortune to him at the time. He applied for, and was granted, a permit to train, and took out an amateur rider’s licence. He got a second horse, called Fair Thread.

He had his first ride under NH Rules on Fair Thread in the televised White Lodge Hurdle at Haydock on January 11, 1964. He recalls Fred Winter, who also rode in the race, patting him on the back and wishing him luck. Winter was then in his last season as a jockey and was Peter’s hero, so the great champion’s encouragement meant a lot to the fledgling amateur. Alas, there was no fairytale beginning, for Fair Thread was pulled up.

The following season (1964/65) Peter applied to become a licensed trainer. In order to obtain the licence he had to become a professional jockey, as the rules stated that you could not be an amateur rider and a licensed trainer. So he turned professional.

His spell as a trainer and professional jump jockey lasted just that one season and brought no winners. His final runner (and last ride) was Signal Guide at Uttoxeter on June 7, 1965. “I realised that it was difficult to make ends meet with horse racing,” he acknowledges. “I’d given up my job at the brickworks and tried to concentrate 100 per cent on training the horses but I didn’t have the contacts to the right people. I had owners who never paid the bills. It finished up with me having to sell some of the horses to recover the money. If I’d carried on I’d have finished up in debt, and I didn’t want to do that, so very reluctantly I had to give it up. I put the smallholding up for sale and went back to Switzerland.”

There he got a job as a planning engineer with a company that specialised in building kilns and dryers. Home was a former monk’s cottage in part of an old monastery near Frauenfeld racecourse, home of the Swiss Derby. “We had to cook on a wooden stove. We had no warm water and the toilet was in the cloister. It was during the winter; water froze in its jug in the bedroom, it was that cold. That’s how we lived for six months.

“I didn’t like the job so when I saw an advert that the General Electric Company were looking for a chief ceramic engineer, I applied, got the job and came back to England with my wife and we rented a flat near Tunbridge Wells, then a house near Maidstone. Then in 1970, after three and a half years working for GEC, I was made redundant. I decided that was a good time to start my own business because I’d made quite a lot of contacts in the brick industry. I got six small agencies covering the whole field. I worked day and night, slept in the back of the car instead of staying in hotels, and gradually started to earn money. After about eight years, some of the bigger companies wanted me to be their agent.

“I was very busy. I used to drive 70,000 miles a year. Then came the building recession and, suddenly, from doing 70,000 miles a year, I was sitting in my office with nothing to do. So I decided to go to Doncaster sales and buy a horse. I bought an unnamed four-year-old. Around that time, my friend John Henry Stockford died. We used to go out on my boat, all over the place. He called me Captain Bates, from ‘The Onedin Line’, and I called him Captain Stockford. The horse was so forceful and powerful, I named him Captain Stockford.

“I didn’t have a permit at the time, so I went to Tony Forbes at Uttoxeter and asked if he wanted to train him on the understanding that I could come and ride out regularly. Then I started to ride his other horses.”

At the time he was based just outside Stoke-on-Trent but was looking for a place with more land, as it only had three and a half acres. In 1994 he saw the 110-acre Maisemore Park, just outside the village of Maisemore, some three miles north-west of Gloucester, advertised in ‘Country Life’. He bought the property, part of which is used twice a year as a point-to-point course by the Ledbury and North Ledbury hunts.

Having moved to Maisemore and obtained his permit, early in 1996 he purchased the useful chaser Far Senior, previously trained by Kim Bailey, to run in that year’s Grand National. “He was the sort of horse who looked after himself,” says Peter. “He jumped twenty-one fences with Tim Eley and then pulled up. He knew when he’d done his best. When he came back, he did not have the slightest scratch on him. He was placed a couple of times afterwards and then he turned quite moody. I more or less gave him away to a local girl who wanted to do a bit of point-to-pointing.”

Captain Stockford became Peter’s first winner when landing a Hereford novices’ handicap chase in the hands of Steve Wynne on December 20, 1996. “That was my biggest thrill when Captain Stockford won. I had so much faith in him and he performed the way I knew he could perform. Most of the jockeys were scared of him because he pulled so hard, but Steve wasn’t scared and rode him the way I asked him to. He had broken down before he won and I’d had him fired. I rode him round the roads for a year.

Aged 67, he applied for a licence to ride in amateur races. Having passed the one-day seminar in Newmarket and passed the reaction test, Jockey Club doctor Michael Turner told him that he could see no reason for turning him down on age grounds, as he was as fit as any. But then he considered the risks. “I thought if I had a fall, it needn’t be my mistake. If I ride with amateurs, that’s not an ideal situation, so I did nothing.”

Though still fully involved with his company, Peter Wegmann Ceramic Engineering Limited, continued training until 2008.