IF Cormac Hanley’s enthusiasm could be harnessed into electricity, the indoor arena at Claremorris School of Equitation would have sparkled like Times Square for its inaugural Grand Prix show. Instead, there was a problem that weekend.
Local character and electrician Shady Malee oversaw the electrical work for Hanley’s latest business venture. “It was the first big show back in September 1980. Steve Hickey loved the pillars in the arena, he built around them. Paul Darragh, who was after buying Carat for £40,000, arrived with a full load of horses. Carat refused at the first fence and Paul went home,” said the CSOE owner.
Worried that the word would get out that “there was no lights in the place and the horses couldn’t see the jumps,” a plan swung into place between show jumping judge Ado Kenny and Hanley to ensure Eddie Macken showed up for the Grand Prix.
“We got on to Brian Gormley as we had to have Eddie turn up. We were upstairs in the bar waiting for Eddie to come. He arrived in this big Jaguar and came up. Shady didn’t know Eddie but he put his arm around this stranger to show him the arena lit up below and said ‘If Eddie Macken says that lighting isn’t good enough, I’ll throw him down there.’ Eddie won the Grand Prix on Carroll’s Royal Lion!”
A customary early morning hack led to building the centre. “Like everything he does to this day, he can’t do anything by halves!” said his eldest son, Charles, in admiration.
“He was a very good footballer who played for the Mayo senior team from 1961 to 1965. His father Charlie, that’s how I got my name, was the manager of the local bacon factory. The Hanley’s wouldn’t have anything really to do with horses, that was my grandmother’s side, Biddy Dixon. You could write a book about the Dixons.”
FASCINATED
“I was fascinated by horses,” recalled Cormac. “Jimmy Corbett kept two horses – Bay Gift and Christmas Gift – in stalls at the back of his shop in town. During the week he’d ride them out on the road and then on Thursday, which was half-day closing in Claremorris, he’d school them in the garden at Brookfield.
“I remember going on the train – three horses in each carriage – from Claremorris to Galway and walking the horses down to O’Brien’s stables by the Sportsgrounds, to the show. I was only 10 or 11 at the time but I was a very proud little man when Jim Corbett beat Captain Ian Dudgeon, who was the Eddie Macken of his time, and Golightly.”
Tractor and trailer was another means of show transport. “No ramp on the trailer so you’d back up to a bank to load the horses. Jimmy won three competitions in Headford once; the novice, open and stone wall and while they celebrated in Henehans Hotel, I stayed in the trailer minding the horses.”
Cormac owned both the Trendy Shop Inn and 50 acres on the Galway road. “The shop was a three-story building, like a department store with shoes, menswear, ladieswear, sportswear and a pub. We lived above it. There were seven or eight people working there and I used to mind the pub for half an hour in the evening so Cormac could go upstairs for his tea,” Charles explained.
When Charles started playing and winning pool with the customers, Cormac “was worried that I was getting too much into pub life.”
Winning Junior team at the RDS Spring Show 1980 (l-r) Sinead Slattery (now Hanley, wife of Charles), Cameron Hanley, Gabriel Slattery Jr and Ian O’Grady are pictured with Cormac Hanley Snr and Charles Hanley
So an unbroken pony named Trendy Bobby was bought “to get me out of the pub! And then Dad went to Ballinasloe to buy a horse for himself.” Having gone to the fair with £200, he needed a short-term loan from George McNabb, another local attending the fair, to buy Trendy Jack for £375.
“We had this ritual that I can vividly remember. We’d leave the house early and hack our two horses, back by 8.30, have breakfast, then I’d go to school and he’d go to the shop,” Charles said. “One morning, we met Jim Burke, a very famous stallion owner who owned Bloomfield Bobby. He pulled up in this big Mercedes car to tell the happy hackers: ‘You’re wasting your time. You need lessons.’”
Transport to Rockmount Riding Centre for a Saturday morning lesson with Tony Cox was readily sorted when local man Mattie Gilligan made a “three-horse box that had Trendy Shop Inn painted on the side. Monica Flanagan was an instructor there too and David Moore was about five years ahead of me, he was at Golden Saddles and moving into horses. Philip Dagg was my idol and David and Paul were the other big names then,” Charles recalled.
“The Moores had a dun 13.2hh Olympic Star for sale but they were asking £1,000 for him. Bobby was £80! Tony could see though that I was taken with the pony and he said to Cormac, ‘You should buy him, John Moore is easy to deal with.’
“John met with Cormac and said ‘Pay whenever you can.’ It was the best thing that ever happened to me. We got one green ribbon with Trendy Bobby when he was fourth at Ballinrobe but two years later, I was the leading rider at Galway County Show.”
The renamed Trendy Star was later sold to Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and another pony, Trendy, was sold to Sweden.
THE NEXT STEP
It wasn’t long before Cormac embarked on the next step. “He was paying the bank 19% interest rates and knew the writing was on the wall. The shop and pub had to go.
“I was riding a pony for a man named Prendergast who had bought it for his grandson. He had owned three or four pubs in Dublin, retired home to Claremorris and then lo and behold, what did he do but buy our pub. He gave us three times what it was worth really, maybe he knew things were bad.
“The pub started off the equestrian centre because once it was sold, Cormac rang up Noel C. Duggan and the indoor arena was built,” continued Charles. “My mother Eleanor used to run the draper’s shop and when it was all sold, we moved to a mobile home on the land until the house was built. It was ‘only for a couple of months’ but we ended up living in it for seven or eight years while we went to school. We had the best of times in it.”
Claremorris School of Equitation was officially opened on Easter Monday, 1980 by their good friend John Moore. “I remember Jim Norton writing about us and how could you put an equestrian centre so far west. We were midway between Sligo and Rockmount but once it was built, how was it going to pay for itself? So Cormac came up with this notion. Second-hand cars auctions on Wednesday nights, they were a huge success.”
Car auctions are still a regular feature but has the business been affected by online advertising? “Done Deal has helped us. You can bring in your car on a Monday or Tuesday, we do the rest. Some people wouldn’t like strangers coming to their yards,” said Charles.
“Teaching is quite good, even through the crash when you’d wonder would parents bring their kids horse riding. We’ve always been a teaching yard, Noreen Somers, who’s now in Texas, was the head instructor. Then there was Vinnie Duffy’s wife Sandra McCarthy, a good friend of Trish Dodd and Kay Nolan.
“Since 1980, we ran shows. The SJAI records show we ran two and three-day shows. There is still a mark on the roof 30 years later when a shoe came off Rainbow, ridden by Michael Stone who now runs Wellington, during the Grand Prix and hit it.”
Another venture was horse sales. “Kitty Donohue and Cormac were great buddies, they both set up the same time. She concentrated on the sales and grew it up. I went down there on holidays, Edmund Donohue is a very good friend of mine. It was always going to be very difficult in the west of Ireland to attract foreign buyers if they had to drive over here, there was no Knock airport then either. Sometimes things work out, sometimes not.”
Charles remembers Claremorris fair days when local owners paraded their stallions, including Sean Stagg’s “very famous pony, Little Joe.” Now their annual stallion parade fills that gap. “Most of the other stallion parades stopped running, everything has a certain shelf life. We get a good turnout and Red Mills, fair play to them, sponsor it. We host Connemara inspections too, the wedding carriage trade has gone very quiet but we also supplied horses for film work. Trendy Bobby was in Into The West!”
What about their stallion of the same name? “Into The West covered 100 mares in his first year here. He was one of the first warmbloods here, serious breeding and presence but it turned out he was no superstar,” is Charles’ candid reply.
Other CSOE stallions include Cummer Park Minstrel. “He won the national award for Connemaras, presented at Dublin Indoor International,” and the thoroughbred Dail Eireann. “Joe Keeling, from Keelings Fruit, sold us him, he was happy to see the horse coming west. We do like Irish-breds. We bought Bahrain Cruise as a two-year-old and he was fully approved later on, that was a great thing. Fintan Flannelly gave us Mary McCann’s phone number. We told her we were looking for something by Cruising and she put us in touch with Bahrain Cruise’s breeder in Enniscorthy, Seamus Murphy.
“Then I had a half-share with Tom Meagher in the Irish Draught stallion Celtic Gold, who went out to Australia later. Tom would drive up from Tipperary twice a week to scan mares, there were huge numbers in those days.”
CAPTAIN CLOVER
“We actually bred Captain Clover and sold him to the Slatterys.” He was out of the thoroughbred mare Merlina and there was payment in kind involved for Clover Hill’s stud fee. “My father used to take down a salmon from the Moy!
“You couldn’t pay Philip [Heenan] but I heard that he liked salmon, so I’d always bring him one,” said Cormac. “Philip was a unique man. I used to sit on the sleeper bench and it was like going to confessions, you’d move up along the bench as someone left.”
Charles came back to Claremorris in the late 1980s. Before then, there was a team silver medal won at the 1984 European junior championships in Gesves on Yankee, later sold to Sweden.
Charles Hanley and Yankee at the Junior European Championships in 1984
“People thought he was a junior horse with no scope but he came back and jumped at Dublin on the Swedish team. Typical Irish horse, heart of a lion. Nigel Smith, Steven Smith, Linda Courtney and Mikey Cash were on the team too and Tommy Brennan was the Chef d’equipe. We were all supposed to stay in the dormitories after eight o’clock at night but we had some stories from there as soon as Tommy was gone in the opposite direction!” Charles said with a laugh.
He spent two summers with Peter Weinberg in Germany, initially arranged by Gerry Mullins, and then through family friend and New York bar owner James Sheridan, he went to Bruce Davidson’s Pennsylvania yard in 1985.
“I had no more a clue about eventing but it was a huge experience and good grounding. I still have to be thankful to James for setting it up. Then Peter Weinberg got me a job with a Canadian guy in California.”
Based at Atlantis Farm, which specialised in imported European warmbloods, Charles was in charge of 25-30 horses. “That was the time of my life with Mexican grooms to do the grooming. It was heaven.”
Having returned home in 1986 to organise a visa, he rode Carrick Titan at Dublin before going to Germany where again Peter Weinberg set him up with a job. “It was for a client of his named Manfred Hausberg, he was the main Ford and Jaguar dealer in Aachen. The next thing there’s a phonecall, my father really needed me to come home and that was it.”
His international stints over, Charles settled back into the national circuit finishing second with Fr. Trendy to Paul Duffy in the National Championships at Salthill. “I did livery too. Then I got married to Sinead [Slattery] on Easter Monday, 1995. She started off with show ponies, by the time she was 10 she was riding 14.2s and of course there was Dunmacreena Davy.”
FAMILY
Both parents did the circuit with Cormac Jnr, now based in America, and his younger sister Ciara (17). “She loves eventing,” says her father, who often has his ‘apprentice’ on hand when course building at shows.
“I did my international exams in 2006. Alan Wade has been a great help to me. And Tom Holden. It’s an amazing community, we’re all fighting for work but we help one another out,” said Charles, who was one of Wade’s assistants in Tryon at the 2018 FEI World Equestrian Games.
Amanda, Charles’s sister, and her husband Frankie Glynn live nearby in Ballindine. Their son Eric is currently home organising his visa to return to a job in the States with Andrew Welles. “Eric looked after the late doctor’s horses [Paul O’Byrne, breeder of Lanaken gold medallist, Uppercourt Cappucino, ridden by Richard Howley] in Freshford,” said his grandfather.
Then of course there are Charles and Amanda’s brothers, show jumpers Cameron and Carl. “Cameron is seven years younger than me and Carl is seven years younger than him. Cameron left at 18 to work for the Etters. I’ll always remember him described as Millennium Man on the front of the SJI bulletin after he won the Dublin Grand Prix with Ballaseyr Twilight. There was a huge crowd in the Western Hotel the following night when he came home for the celebrations,” Charles said.
“When Cameron was coming out of the ring after winning, Eddie Macken said to him ‘You little f*cker! I’m 29 years trying to win it and you won it on the first try!” laughed Cormac, who retired from business in 2010.
“Carl was going to build his own equestrian centre but luckily they didn’t do it. He went to Switzerland, ended up in Germany and hasn’t looked back, he’s flying it. Cameron is only half an hour away near Osnabrück too. I’ve only been there once but Cormac goes out regularly.”
In another coincidence Charles and his aunt Clare both lived nearby in California. “Dad recognised the similar postcodes, it was amazing that two people from Claremorrris ended up five miles apart!”
There have been many twists along the road for the Hanley family. Charles recalled missing out on the Army Equitation School, while his friend Walter Hunt, whose father bred Fr Trendy, was accepted. “It turned out I was colour blind so I couldn’t join. Father drove me home and he was so happy because it meant I was staying with the family business,” Charles said.
“The Lord has been very good to me,” said founder of that family business, the irrepressible Cormac Hanley Snr. “People have dreams and dreams come true.”
NEXT WEEK
Part II: Susan Finnerty meets Cormac Hanley Jnr at the Washington International Horse Show.