Did jockey Edward Dempsey really hide Caughoo behind a haystack in the 1947 Grand National?

History records that, on March 29, 1947, at a fog-bound Aintree, Caughoo, trained by Herbert McDowell and ridden by Edward ‘Eddie’ Dempsey, won the Grand National by 20 lengths at odds of 100/1. That victory, in itself, was unlikely enough, but also served to spark a controversy that would not be resolved for another five decades or more.

For whatever reason, Daniel McCann, who rode the eventual distant second, Lough Conn, accused Dempsey of hiding Caughoo in dense fog near the twelfth fence (which becomes the twenty-eighth, or third-last, fence on the second circuit) and only re-joining the race when the field passed for a second time. It may have been that McCann truly believed that Caughoo could not have completed the entire course so quickly – his winning time was a respectable 10 minutes and 3.8 seconds – on the prevailing heavy going. Whatever his motivation, a physical altercation and legal action followed before Dempsey was finally absolved of any wrongdoing.

Nevertheless, doubts lingered and Dempsey did himself no favours when, well into his retirement, he claimed to have hidden Caughoo not in the fog, but behind a ‘haystack’ (of which there were none at Aintree that day), during a newspaper interview. Meath-born Dempsey died in 1989, but a decade later the ‘Irish Mirror’ revealed that it had in its possession still photographs of Caughoo clearing Becher’s Brook (which is the sixth and twenty-second fence on the National Course) on two separate occasions. It’s therefore safe to say that Caughoo did complete the course and, despite protestations to the contrary, was, in fact, a perfectly legitimate winner of the Grand National; exactly what McCann was playing at is anyone’s guess.