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.
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