Low life
Horse sense
Jeffrey Bernard
There is a small light at the end of the tunnel. Flat racing starts again a week today. That, for me, has always been the first day of spring and not the anniversary of J. S. Bach's birthday. And last week the Timeform people sent me my annual treat. This year Racehorses of 1988 is still £55. I
wouldn't call that a snip for most punters but it is still extremely good value. In fact, most punters if they had the sense could save that by staying out of the betting shop for a week or two.
Racehorses has 1,040 pages and 350 pic- tures. It is written by a team of men who seem to be just about the only people who know what they are talking about when it comes to racing. If trainers, owners, jock- eys and breeders think they can't do without it I wonder why mug punters think they can. It is an essential reference book for anyone who takes seriously the trivial matter of whether one horse can go faster than another. It is no less than encyclo- paedic and while, of course, it can't and doesn't attempt to tip horses it certainly points you in the direction of this year's potential big race winners.
At the other end of the rainbow, the black end, comes the news that the Queen will not renew Major Dick Hern's lease at her West Ilsey stables when it runs out in November. It is quite appalling that such a great trainer and good gentleman should be treated thus. The Queen was quite obviously acting under the advice of her racing manager, Lord Carnarvon. And what a man he is, probably the most humourless man you could meet on the turf. A most miserable and pompous fel- low. His father was a very jovial old chap and in the old days there was plenty of hanky-panky at Highclere. God alone knows what they do there for laughs nowadays.
I remember two glorious parties at the Major's when I lived in Lambourn. He gave a party for both Troy and Henbit when they won the Derby. They were both held on lovely summer days with a mar- quee on the lawn bursting with good people and champagne. In Troy's year we were driven over by Fred Winter, which is a good start to any morning. What a pity it was that it would have been too dangerous to bring the horse out on to the lawn. But you would be a rather angry owner if your Derby winner broke a leg at a party. Oddly enough, when Ormonde won the Derby in 1886 the Duke of Westminster had him brought up to London to attend a recep- tion he gave at Grosvenor House, his London home in Park Lane. Ormonde behaved impeccably and without getting over-excited gently consumed the carna- tions and geraniums that were offered to him by European royalty and Indian princes. I would have liked to have given Troy a cucumber sandwich.
Still on sport, I have been reading with great interest about the Queen's Park Rangers player, Martin Allen, who was fined two weeks' wages for walking out of the team hotel before the match against Newcastle to he at his wife's side when she had her first baby. The fine was £1,200. He was in breach of his contract, of course, but it also occurs that he and his wife entered into a contract when they got married. When he was handed an envelope telling him of the fine he thought it was a note of congratulations from the manager.
Funny people, managers. I think it was Jock Stein who on being asked, 'Football is a matter of life and death to you, isn't it?' replied, `Och, no. It's much more impor- tant than that.' Then, more recently, we had Terry Lawless telling Frank Bruno that he mustn't have sex before the fight with Mike Tyson. Would it have made any difference? Tyson makes you look as though you've been at it all night anyway after the first round. Take my advice and stick to sex, Frank.
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