Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way.
Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way. There are certain trainers who capture the public imagination and affection, but the same crowds who regularly dissolve into tears at the sight of a Henry Cecil winner would no more dream of intruding on Barry Hills than would a punter dare ignore a horse of his at the Chester May meeting.
Respect, admiration, a certain wary apprehension, these are what ‘Mr Grumpy’ has always demanded of the world, and ‘hard’, ‘brave’, ‘professional’, ‘exacting’ and ‘combustible’ the terms in which he is most often described. Those who know him best speak fondly of a mellow and even sentimental side, but if one wanted to picture a man who embodied a pre-Diana world of emotional privacy and ‘old-school values’ then one could do a lot worse than the trim, impeccably turned-out Barrington Hills.
It is odd in a way that he has never earned the punter’s love, because the foundation of his whole training career was a clinically executed betting coup that has become part of racing lore. The son of a travelling head lad, Hills was following in his father’s footsteps when a horse called Frankincense came into the yard, and over the winter and early spring of 1968 he and his fellow conspirators went to work, placing small amounts here and there across the country at every price from 66/1 downwards on the four-year-old — an absolute certainty, Hills reckoned — to win the first major handicap of the coming flat season, the Lincoln.
When on 27 March Frankincense duly obliged by half a length, Hill’s share of the winnings was, in modern terms, £1,520,000, and with it he bought his first racing stable.
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