Johnny Roe’s greatest victory on British soil was somewhat overshadowed. It was the first day of the Guineas Festival in May 1975 and stable lads, who earned less than £30 a week, were on strike.
Flying pickets had been bussed in, the Morning Star had refused to print the day’s race cards and about 200 stable lads staged a sit-in on the track.
Willie Carson turned to the crowd and yelled: “If you want to see horse racing get rid of this lot!” They took his advice, ran over and started hitting the stable lads with their binoculars and whatever else they had to hand.
Having pushed them off the track on to open land near the starting stalls, the crowd laid into them. The next day Carson was given a dressing-down by the chief constable of Cambridgeshire police, who said that he should have arrested him for “inciting a riot”.
One man, however, had remained typically unruffled. When the 1,000 Guineas finally got under way, Johnny Roe rode the perfect race for a wholly unexpected victory. Roe had been a 14-1 shot on Nocturnal Spree. “She was an easy filly to ride,” Roe said of the horse, which was trained by Stuart Murless and ran only four races in an injury- blighted career. Roe came through in the final strides to take victory.
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He rode and trained more than 2,500 winners in his career, but the 1,000 Guineas was, perhaps, his finest moment. “It was a great thrill and it came at a time where I could really appreciate it,” he said. That night the stable lads stole a bulldozer and dug potholes on the track. Their strike was settled a few months later.
By the time of his 1,000 Guineas win Roe had already claimed the Irish Flat title nine times between 1963 and 1974. He was born in 1938 into a farming family in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, and started as an apprentice jockey in south Dublin at Séamus McGrath’s Glencairn Stables, which is now a housing estate called the Gallops.
His career did not get properly under way until McGrath advised him to spend some time in what is now Zimbabwe with a friend of his who had stables there. It took three years there to establish himself as a jockey. “He’d go anywhere, do anything — he was a grafter,” said the trainer John Oxx Jr.
He returned to Ireland in 1963 as second jockey to Vincent O’Brien and rode for leading trainers including John Oxx Sr and Dermot Weld. He rode two Royal Ascot winners for Weld in 1974, Highest Trump and Red Alert.
“I’d describe him as a very strong, forceful, hands-and-heels rider,” said Weld. “He wasn’t a whip jockey — I always said that if Johnny reached for his whip then you knew that you were beaten. He rode four winners for me one day at Leopardstown when he never once felt for his stick.” For Roe, racing was all about hard work. “He was a self-made jockey,” Weld said. “He wasn’t a natural, but he was a sympathetic rider and very dedicated — the professionals’ professional. That’s why he was nine times champion.”
“He wasn’t a natural, but he was a sympathetic rider and very dedicated
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In 1962 he married Helen Jerrard. She survives him with their two sons, Michael, who works in the animal health sector of the pharmaceutical industry, and Brian, who works in IT. They also had a daughter, Jackie, who died at the age of 25.
Roe left Ireland again in the late 1970s, riding in Hong Kong and the US before retiring in 1980. He moved to Macau where he became a trainer for five years. As the financial climate worsened there he became a bloodstock agent, initially in the Far East, then back home in Ireland, buying and selling horses around the world.
Roe, who loved playing cards, especially poker, was popular with his fellow jockeys. According to one racing journalist: “He wasn’t a man who courted a headline. He went about business in his usual understated way.”
His son Michael said: “My father was known for his gentle touch and his softness, but in other ways he was the toughest man I knew. It was his tenacity that made him a champion jockey — and that was the way he approached everything he did.”
Johnny Roe, jockey, was born on March 26, 1938. He died of a lung infection on April 23, 2017, aged 79