In March 2012, Brindisi Breeze won the Albert Bartlett Novice Hurdle, a first training success at the Cheltenham Festival for Lucinda Russell and Peter Scudamore. For the wider world, it was an introduction to the winning jockey, Campbell Gillies. Appallingly, both horse and jockey had died by midsummer.
Peter Scudamore: He had a spaniel-like charm, Campbell. We love spaniels because they’re always puppies. He had that charm that almost made him a surrogate son to us. You could never really get cross with Campbell. He was never infuriating. He knew his boundaries with his humour, it was just joy of life. He’d ride out in little short, pink wellingtons. Why? I never found out.
Lesley Gillies: He was quite quirky, really. It’s wrong to say he didn’t care what people thought but he was so self-assured, it was like people would have to accept him the way he was. We always thought he was a bit unusual. He always had very unusual hobbies and interests when he was growing up. Him and I were really close because he had that quirkiness about him, I always felt he needed that bit more of my attention than the other two [children]. They seemed quite sorted. Campbell always seemed to be looking for something else.
But that something else was surely not being a jockey. He grew up in a horsey family and had riding lessons but didn’t warm to it and was “terrified” of the pointers and ex-racehorses kept by his grandad in Hawick. “The last thing anybody would have expected of Campbell would have been this,” says Lesley, gesturing at a print of her son and Brindisi Breeze bounding over the last at Cheltenham. What finally switched him on to riding was his sister’s bad experience with an ex-racer, Breydon, who became unmanageable for Rita. When a more experienced rider tried to sort him out, Breydon reared over and broke her pelvis.
Lesley: He was a horrible horse. I didn’t know what to do with him. And one day, out of the blue, Campbell said he was going to have a go. Rita and I walked with him, till we got a mile out, and then Breydon decided he was going back to the yard, just turned round and started galloping. We were like: “Oh my God, Campbell is going to be lying in a heap somewhere.” We ran back to the yard, Campbell’s sat on him, like: “Is that the best you’ve got?” He was maybe 13.
Four short years later, Campbell started working for Lucinda and Peter, despite an inauspicious introduction.
Lucinda: He came to his interview and managed to fall off about the easiest horse in the yard.
Peter: The first time he ever rode for us, she said: ‘That’s it. I’m never putting him up again!’
But Campbell found his place at the stable and, four years later, became the regular rider for one of the best horses ever housed there.
Peter: I thought Brindisi was small and, when he went up the gallops, he was slow. We ran him in the worst bumper I could find, at Musselburgh, and he got beat. I thought: “Oh Christ.” We got a message from the vendor: he jumps well. So we schooled him and ran him at Kelso. He was ever so lucky to win. Campbell rode and the one that would have won made an awful mistake at the last and he won by a neck. I found a terrible race at Newcastle and he won. So we went to Haydock. Nothing sums up Campbell better than this. I’m taking myself terribly seriously and it’s this good race, they’re all going to go fast and Brindisi’s a frontrunner. I went into the weighing room beforehand to have a serious, fatherly chat. “How should we ride this horse, Campbell? They’re all going to take you on. What do you think?”
He said to me: “Don’t be worried. He’ll win. He could have gone round again at Newcastle.” And that was his thing in life, he had a self-belief.
Lesley: He was nervous about that race, more so than for Cheltenham. Peter Buchanan was stable jockey and I suppose Campbell knew that if he didn’t win that trial, Peter would get the ride. But he won.
Brindisi Breeze was unbeaten over hurdles when he lined up at the Festival, presenting a familiar puzzle to punters: how seriously to take this horse from up north who’s been winning by wide margins on bad ground against opposition of unknown quality? He had his backers but Boston Bob was a predictably hot favourite at odds of 6-5, representing the formidable combination of trainer Willie Mullins and jockey Ruby Walsh.
Peter: I didn’t think he’d win. The owner couldn’t see him getting beat, which is obviously mad. You’re taking on Mullins, he had the favourite, it was one of the bankers. I think that was the extra joy of it because I didn’t really expect to win and it hits you, such a monumental achievement, to us. I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I’ve had enough praise. It was just a private moment of our own satisfaction.
Ruby was challenging at the last, stayed on up the run-in, but he couldn’t get there. To me, that’s the heart of both of them, little lions. Brindisi wouldn’t be passed that day.
Lesley: It was one of the best days of my life. It was the happiest I’ve seen him. There’s a really nice photograph Aidan Coleman took, when Campbell was in the back of Aidan’s car. He’s on the phone and his face is just shining. Aidan gave me it at the funeral. He said: “That was him speaking to you that day.”
Two months after that glorious moment, a late-night phone call comes through to the yard at Arlary. “There’s a dead horse on the road.” Oh, God. One of the mares has obviously jumped out of the field and been hit.
Peter: It’s light, it’s summer, so you drive up, look in the field. And Brindisi’s not in his paddock. Luce says to me: “It’s not a mare, it’s fucking Brindisi.” The heart falls out of you. And then you see the dead body. It becomes a very personal thing. It’s not our fault but it’s our responsibility. It makes you grow up in some ways, you’ve got to face things. You’ve got to dust yourself off and go on.
For no known reason, Brindisi Breeze jumped his way across two fields to get to the road. He evidently hurt himself, because a trail of blood is found, leading into the driveway. Heartbreakingly, the trail stops at a pair of gates, newly installed. Six months earlier, he could have carried on up the drive to the stables.
One month later, Campbell agreed to go on a hastily arranged holiday with some friends.
Lesley: I had just negotiated to buy Campbell a house. He’s 21 and a real saver. He used his money from that race to help. I was at my friend’s daughter’s ballet performance and I got a phone call from Campbell, saying he was going to Kavos. I hadn’t even heard of it, to be honest. Why are you going to Kavos, you’ve just bought a house? “Oh, it’ll be fine, I’ll sign it all when I get back.”
It was very last-minute. One of the boys had broken up with his girlfriend and had said: “Let’s go.”
Mark Ellwood [Lucinda’s head lad] told me as much as he could when he came back. He said, yes, they’d all been out for a drink, cos they arrived at something like three in the morning. They chucked their stuff in the room and went out. They came back about six o’clock in the morning and decided to go straight in the pool.
He said: “Campbell, the most sensible of all of us, went up and put his swimming shorts on, the rest of us were just going in, wearing what we had on. And then Campbell said: ‘Let’s have a race to see who can swim two lengths underwater the fastest. I’ll go first.’ Took a few deep breaths, got up one end, turned, got about halfway down. And then he just went to the bottom.’”
They ignored him because he’s always mucking about. Eventually, Mark’s like: “Harry, give him a kick, he’s been down there too long.”
Having done some research, Lesley now believes Campbell was a victim of shallow water blackout, a phenomenon that can particularly affect the physically fit. If the victim resists the urge to surface for long enough, oxygen levels in the body can drop low enough to cause a blackout, which would look just as Mark Ellwood described what happened to Campbell.
Lesley: “It’s happened to loads of people and they just stop, go unconscious. He didn’t hit his head, hadn’t slipped and fallen into the pool, like a lot of people thought.”
Peter: “I still don’t understand it. Sometimes when I swim, I think how the fuck do you go down and not come up again? It was numbing. I suppose that’s the only way to deal with it. I remember when his agent rang and what went through my brain was that he must have been killed in a car accident. But I remember thinking: “This has got to be wrong.” He was so full of life.
Campbell’s ashes were scattered over the gallops at Arlary. His helmet and body protector hang on display in the yard. Those who live and work there will not forget their Festival winners who disappeared almost as soon as they had arrived.
Peter: It was a James Dean thing, wasn’t it? It really was going out in a blaze of glory. Brindisi had a heart of a lion. He wasn’t fast, he was just braver than everything else and that’s why he won the race. Campbell was a fabulous talent. It was a privilege to be involved with him and his joie de vivre.
“We think about him all the time,” Lesley says of her lost son. But there is some consolation in the knowledge that, in the short time available to him, Campbell found exactly the right world for him to live in and enjoyed success there.
Lesley: He was a thrill-seeker, a risk-taker, so racing suited him fine. He really enjoyed the close-knittedness of the jockeys and the camaraderie and the whole bit about being totally absorbed, everybody works together, plays together, lives together.
The colours of Campbell’s family are to be carried by a newcomer to Lucinda’s stable, Prince Dundee. Racing is evidently a source of comfort to Lesley. Did she never feel like pulling away from the sport?
Lesley: “I wanted to, believe me. Even now when I’m watching, I still think: ‘Do any of them look like Campbell?’”
Three Of A Kind: The Scudamores is published by Racing Post books and on sale now, priced £25, or £22 from the Guardian bookshop
