The story of Never Say Die

By James C. Nicholson

The first Kentucky-bred winner of the Epsom Derby would earn a place in Thoroughbred racing lore and even played a small role in the early history of the most successful musical group of the twentieth century. But he nearly didn’t survive his first night of life. 

In late March 1951, John Bell and his wife returned from a night out to find that a new foal had arrived at their leased acreage outside Lexington. Its mother, an undersized daughter of American Triple Crown winner War Admiral named Singing Grass, was exhausted, as was the barn foreman who had helped her with a difficult delivery. 

Never Say Die

The unusually large chestnut colt, by Irish-bred stallion Nasrullah, was having trouble breathing as he lay beside his mother. His right foreleg was tucked awkwardly under his body. Concerned that the newborn might not make it, Bell retrieved a bottle of bourbon whiskey from a desk in the tack room. He took a quick nip for himself and poured the rest of the bottle’s contents down the throat of the struggling foal. The elixir revived the woozy colt, which, fittingly, would be named Never Say Die. 

After being taught to carry a rider by Bell and his Jonabell Stables team, the colt was sent to the Newmarket training yard of seventy-two-year-old conditioner Joe Lawson, who had twice been British flat racing’s Champion Trainer, and had captured most of England’s top races, but for whom the Derby had proven elusive. The colt’s owner, Robert Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune, split his horses between Lawson and another trainer named Harry Peacock. Peacock had won a coin flip to determine which man would receive first choice of Clark’s horses that year. Though he liked the look of Never Say Die, he was not interested in training a son of Nasrullah. Nasrullah was well on his way to one of the most outstanding stud careers in history, but the memory of the stallion’s inability to run to his potential because of temperamental idiosyncrasies was still fresh for many British horsemen. 

Never Say Die had been a gangly foal, but he filled out to become a lovely, compact, balanced young colt with a slightly better disposition than that of his notorious sire. Though he never displayed the mental peculiarities on the racetrack that Nasrullah had, Never Say Die did develop a reputation for moodiness and difficulty among the humans that cared for him. 

A turf writer for the Daily Express observed that Never Say Die had “an excellent, strong, straight pair of hind legs, even if the joints appear to be somewhat rounded. The captious critics might say that he is over-long of his back. Undoubtedly his best points lie in front of the saddle. There is a rhythmical quality about the set of his neck, shoulder, and powerful forearm which is carried down through the flat knees to a hard, clean underpinning.” The handsome colt’s most notable feature was a prominent white blaze that ran the length of his head—from above his eyes to the tip of his nose.  

After some encouraging performances as a two-year-old, including a win in the six-furlong Rosslyn Stakes at Ascot and a third-place finish in the Richmond Stakes at Goodwood, Lawson held guarded hope for Never Say Die at three, and believed a talented young rider named Lester Piggott would help the American colt reach his potential. 

John A. Bell III at Jonabell Farm. Never Say Die’s success helped Bell establish Jonabell Farm as one of the leading Thoroughbred operations in America

If anyone was ever destined to become a jockey, it was Lester Keith Piggott, born in 1935 on Guy Fawkes Day in Oxfordshire. The branches of Piggott’s family tree were littered with jockeys and equestrians, dating back to the 1700s. His grandfather Ernie Piggott had won the Grand National three times as a jockey. Lester’s grandmother came from a long line of riders that included her two Derby-winning brothers. Lester’s father, Keith, was a successful jockey, winning five hundred races over a thirty-year career, before becoming a champion trainer of jumpers. Lester’s mother, Iris, also descended from a long line of top-notch jockeys and trainers and was an accomplished rider in her own right. 

Lawson took his time with Never Say Die early in his three-year-old season. With eighteen-year-old Piggott in the irons, the colt began the year with a respectable second-place finish in the Union Jack Stakes at Aintree. He regressed next time out, starting slowly in the seven-furlong Free Handicap at Newmarket, and never factoring in the race. But when stretched out in distance two weeks later for the Newmarket Stakes, Never Say Die gave a performance good enough to convince his owner to give him a shot in the Derby. Though he had tired in the late stages to finish third, he was beaten just a half-length and a head in the ten-furlong test.

Piggott had chosen to ride at Bath that day, and Lawson was inclined to remove him from the Derby-bound colt for his disloyalty. Fortunately for Piggott, the trainer’s first three choices to replace him already had Derby mounts. With the “boy wonder of the turf” again aboard, Never Say Die joined twenty-one rivals on a chilly and damp afternoon at the starting line for the 175th running of the Epsom Derby. Top contenders included Darius, the Two Thousand Guineas victor; Rowston Manor, winner of the Derby Trial Stakes at Lingfield; and the Queen’s colt, Landau. Bookmakers listed Never Say Die as a 33 to 1 long shot. His odds would have been even higher but for the popularity of his young rider and the charm of the colt’s name.    

Never Say Die was away quickly from the starting barrier and fell in just behind the first group of front-runners in the early going. He maintained his position, clear of trouble, into Tattenham Corner. Rounding the final turn, Piggott bided time, well off the rail and just behind Rowston Manor, Landau, and Darius. Early in the final straight he eased his mount to the outside. Passing tiring rivals, Never Say Die roared to the front in mid-stretch and strode on for a two-length win, to the astonishment of hundreds of thousands in attendance and millions listening to the BBC radio broadcast. 

With his colt’s Derby conquest, Sterling Clark became the first American owner to win the renowned race with an American horse that he bred himself. In the Derby’s long history there had been only one American-born horse to win—Pennsylvania-bred Iroquois, in 1881. No horse born in Kentucky, the commercial breeding center of the American Thoroughbred industry, had ever won the British Classic.  

American horsemen were overjoyed. In The Thoroughbred Record, a Kentucky-based weekly publication, columnist Frank Jennings noted that, prior to Never Say Die’s victory, “repeated failure on the part of Americans in the English Derby not only was becoming monotonous but was downright discouraging. Men of less determination and means than Mr. Clark gradually had become reconciled to the idea that a score in the big race at Epsom was virtually impossible with a colt bred and raised on this side of the Atlantic. Never Say Die did a great deal toward changing this thought and at the same time [demonstrated] that American bloodlines, when properly blended with those of foreign lands, can hold their own in the top company of the world.”

The seventy-six-year-old Clark had lived a remarkable life. He had served as a U.S. Army officer during the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion, led a research expedition through rural Asia, and built one of the finest private collections of European painting masterpieces in the world. In his later years, he created the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute near the campus of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. But nothing provided him greater satisfaction than that historic Derby triumph.  

Clark learned the race result via telephone. The winning owner was in a New Your City hospital, having chosen not to postpone some scheduled tests. But he was often reluctant to attend the races even when circumstances did not preclude his presence. Large race day crowds made him nervous. 

An impromptu champagne celebration was organized in the hospital room, and Clark proposed a series of toasts. A small group of friends and family first drank to Piggott and Lawson. Then they saluted Bell, the young Kentucky horseman whose fast thinking had helped the Derby champion survive his first night and at whose Jonabell Farm the colt was raised and introduced to a saddle. For Bell, born into a wealthy Pittsburgh family that lost its banking and coal fortune amidst scandal when he was still a child, Never Say Die’s Derby score provided a vital piece of early publicity for his fledgling equine operation that would eventually become one of the most respected in the world and, following a 2001 sale to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, home to Darley’s North American stallions. 

In Liverpool, two hundred thirty miles northwest of Epsom, a middle-class housewife named Mona Best listened to the BBC broadcast of the Derby on the family radio. When the results were announced, she jumped for joy. Mona had pawned her jewelry to finance a bet on Never Say Die because she fancied his name. With her winnings, she put a down payment on the house she had long admired, a large fifteen-room Victorian at 8 Hayman’s Green in the West Derby section of Liverpool.  

Before it was fixed up, children called it “Dracula’s Castle.”  But it had an unusually spacious cellar where, after renovations, Mona opened the Casbah Coffee Club as a place where her son Pete and his friends could congregate. The idea proved much more popular with the neighborhood youth than she had imagined, however, and soon the club had a thousand members who paid an annual fee of 12 ½ pence. 

A group of teenaged musicians called the Quarrymen played the opening night in late August 1959, after helping to paint the walls and the ceilings that summer. Their set included American rock n roll favorites such as Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” The group’s name was a nod to Quarry Bank High School, which their lead singer, John Lennon, had attended. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ken Brown rounded out the lineup.  

Mona was sufficiently impressed with the four guitarists to offer them a weekly engagement at the Casbah. Their compensation was to be three pounds cash, and all the Coca-Cola and crisps that the boys could consume. Soon the young musicians dropped Brown, changed their name to the Beatles, and were looking for a drummer to join them for an extended booking in Germany. Pete became the Beatles’ first regular drummer and played with the band for two years, including their three formative stints in Hamburg, before being replaced by Ringo Starr at the precipice of international celebrity.   

Whereas the Beatles were four lads from Liverpool who took America by storm with music that had distinctly American roots, Never Say Die was an American-born horse with a pedigree dominated by European influence that won England’s greatest horse race. Although Never Say Die’s Derby victory did not have the immediate impact on Thoroughbred racing that the Beatles had on western culture, his win at Epsom in 1954 was an important signal of change that had been taking place for decades. Vast fortunes with roots in the American industrial expansion of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had made it possible for wealthy Americans and their heirs to purchase many of Europe’s top Thoroughbreds from their aristocratic owners and import them to America for breeding purposes. By the 1970s, American racehorses produced from those European bloodlines would be winning Europe’s top races with some regularity, and with lasting ramifications for the international Thoroughbred industry.