Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

50 Robinson and Clark also enjoyed huge racing success in England; although competition was fiercer and victories less frequent before the Great War, Lionel’s brother, W.S, states that the pair ‘were amongst the most successful owners and their winnings were substantial’. Their horses were initially trained by Sam Darling at Beckhampton but were moved to Newmarket in 1904 and entrusted to J.E. Brewer, another Australian. When the stud at Old Buckenham was constructed, William Clark was listed as a co-owner. Many good winners were produced by the stud; perhaps the best was Prince Galahad, who was considered a potential winner of a classic. Having won the 1919 Dewhurst Stakes, the top race for two-year- olds, he was a strong fancy for the following year’s 2,000 Guineas before he ‘went wrong’. He had beaten Tetratema, the horse that went on to win the Guineas, in a trial run on level terms. Another profitable horse was Stefan the Great, which was co-owned with a Joseph E Widner; however, he was not sired until 1916 and Lionel was unable to enjoy the success at stud which led to him being champion broodmare sire in 1939. Around 15 mares of the ‘best type’ were kept at Old Buckenham Hall. To give some idea of the money involved in running a successful stud, the owners paid £10,000 for the mare Pamfleta and her filly foal by The Tetrarch, a famous stallion who fathered many winning horses and who was Champion Sire in 1919. They later sold the foal, Idumea, for 5100 guineas, also netting 6000 guineas for Reine Des Peches and 5000 guineas for Petrea. Whilst prize money was relatively small in those days, significant numbers of beer-tokens could be made through betting and Lionel and Clark were, unsurprisingly, major gamblers. To give one example, they entered their horse Demure for the Cesarewitch in 1907, and by placing bets for themselves and for their friends back in Australia, they forced its odds to be cut from 100-1 down to 5-2 in the ante-post betting. Luckily for all concerned (except the bookies), Demure pulled off a narrow win. In later years, Robinson contributed articles to The Times on both racing and breeding matters and, according to the Eastern Evening News commenting on his demise, although he was a ‘generous patron of cricket ... his chief hobby [was] the conduct of a good breeding stud’. The idea that Lionel was a man of the turf first and a cricket enthusiast second was also proposed by his brother, W.S., who stated that ‘Old Buckenham was ... a famous cricketing centre ... [but] was even better known for the racehorses bred on its two thousand acres’. It is entirely possible that it was the interest of Robinson and Clark in horse racing that induced the former to buy the estate at Old Buckenham, for it was handily placed to do business with the stud and training facilities at nearby Newmarket. As Clark seemed to have been little interested in cricket, Robinson had to ‘fly solo’ when he turned to that game and, as he had already spent so much rebuilding the Hall at Old Buckenham, he was committed to using that as a base, even though it was remote from the centres of high quality cricket. 41 41 Michael Robinson concurs with the viewpoint that horse breeding rather than cricket was the most important activity that took place at Old Buckenham and it was this that led to Lionel’s chosen location. See www.bloodlines.net/ TB/Bios2/TheTetrarch.htm Putting Old Buckenham on the cricketing map