All the Queen’s horses

Royal trainer Richard Hannon, we learn from an intriguing new volume about the Queen’s lifetime love affair with horse-racing, is essentially a stockman. He recognises horses by their shape and mannerisms rather than by what their owners choose to call them. So the chestnut colt with three white socks is, in Hannon-speak, ‘the Galileo colt’.

I know one other racing figure who does the same. One afternoon at Newbury Mrs Oakley and I were surprisingly and suddenly invited to take tea in the Royal Box and I was intrigued to find throughout a fascinating afternoon that Her Majesty never referred to the horses’ names in the racecard. For her, too, it was ‘the Sadler’s Wells colt’ or ‘the Storm Cat filly’ because, perhaps appropriately, it is playing chess with nature that is her primary racing focus. Author Julian Muscat calls her involvement with the turf  ‘not so much a favoured pastime as a full-bodied embrace’.