Rarely can a jockey’s career spanning just three years, 18 rides and one winner have been considered good autobiography material, but when the unheralded Karen Wiltshire won the Winterbourne Handicap at Salisbury on The Goldstone in 1978, it was a feat up there in its own way with Alex Greaves’s Nunthorpe, Hayley Turner’s July Cup and Rachael Blackmore’s Grand National.
Wiltshire’s unlikely victory, a first in Britain for a professional female Flat jockey, also came against the backdrop of the 1970s in a sport dominated for its first three centuries by men and, unsurprisingly, she had to fight for her place while experiencing overt sexism.
The cogs had just about begun moving but grindingly slowly: the Jockey Club had reluctantly allowed women to officially train horses in 1966, let female amateur riders have a go on the Flat in 1972 and, finally, sanctioned them turning professional in 1975, although the take-up was virtually non-existent. Indeed, Dido Harding may be the Jockey Club’s first female senior steward but when Wiltshire provided racing with her historic moment, it had allowed female members of its own organisation for only a year.
Still, convent-educated Wiltshire was not the type to be put off. With a background in show jumping, she wrote to Bill Wightman, an old-school local trainer in Hampshire.
“I told him I just wanted to get onto the racecourse,” she recalls. “He said he wouldn’t be able to give me preferential treatment, the boys break the yearlings and do all the hard work, I’d have to do the same.”
She arrived in November, put in the hard yards, and within six months she had her first ride on May 13, 1977. “I realise now it was pretty quick from arriving to racing – I think it was because I kept on bullying poor old Bill. Even now, girls still have to be quite assertive to get on.
“I knew my value to him was as a lightweight jockey. To ride at 7st 2lb I had to be 6st 12lb stripped. There were only a couple of others who could do the real lightweights. Naturally I’d be between 8st 7lb and 9st. I had to dehydrate and I went to the gym, which no male jockeys did but I felt I needed the added benefit of building muscle.
“Bill hadn’t told the owners he was putting up a female. He told me to cut my hair and in the papers I would be down as K. Wiltshire [all jockeys were just given an initial in those days] – no one would be any the wiser that I was a woman but he’d break the news afterwards.”
A few shocking incidents happened along the way. Having usually had to change with the male jockeys, at Warwick one day she was given a partition behind which she could have some privacy.
“I was standing there in my bra and pants when a jockey jumped over and attacked me. I screamed and he scarpered but at the convent the nuns had taught us judo for that very purpose. So I dealt with him!”
On another occasion she was whacked so hard across the backside by another jockey’s whip on the home turn that it split her breeches. A gentleman trainer had to follow her back to the weighing room to shield her embarrassment.
Yet reflecting on her time as a jockey there are more fond memories than bad. “I remember when Lester Piggott saw me at Sandown one day he said, ‘I didn’t realise there was a ladies’ race today’. I told him there wasn’t, but he was for us [female jockeys]. I was honoured to ride against them all. Willie Carson was always making jokes in the stalls when I was trying to concentrate and when I was in a stewards’ inquiry at Epsom one day Walter Swinburn told me not to let the stewards bully me.
“You had to fight your corner though. After I’d given The Goldstone a ride round the outside at Brighton one day because he needed the race, I returned to the weighing room, where Taffy Thomas said he’d be back on him when he was ready to win. I said, ‘No you won’t, I’m not riding him just to get him fit for you’.
“I went to Bill and asked him if it was true. He said it was up to the owners and he had to keep the other jockeys happy. So I said, ‘I’m wasting my time here’ and ran down the drive. He chased after me and promised I’d keep the ride. He was incredibly supportive and no one else would have given me rides, but it took that to stay on the horse.”
‘I very much envy modern girls’
Wiltshire quit aged 24 as she would have been timed out on her 7lb allowance; apprentice jockeys used to lose their right to claim a weight allowance for inexperience at 24, regardless of whether they had ridden one winner or 50.
Now in her sixties but still leading cardio classes at the fitness centre she runs in Havant, how does the pioneer of female Flat jockeys regard it today?
“There was a huge gap between my win and Gay Kelleway winning at Royal Ascot, then another long gap between Gay and Hayley,” she says. “Hayley really broke the glass ceiling. At racing school now it is 50-50 boys-girls, but that is still not reflected in the numbers of jockeys – there’s still a lot of work to do.
“If I’d been born 40 years later, it would have been very different. I very much envy modern girls. I gave Hayley an award on the 30th anniversary of my win and she asked what it was like when I was riding. I burst into tears and told her the worst thing I ever did was retire. Look what that’s done to her [Turner is still riding at 41] – she’s thinking she mustn’t retire!”
Wiltshire is like many former jockeys in that she never truly got competing out of her system and, when she goes racing, she would still prefer to be out there doing it than watching. “I deal with it by eating a cream bun, which is what I used to crave when I was starving myself,” she says.
No Place For A Girl, by Karen Wiltshire with Nick Townsend, £25, Pitch Publishing.
