The turf | 13 December 2018

The Scudamores are one of the bedrock families of jump racing. After being shot down and spending two years as a PoW, Geoffrey Scudamore trained racehorses in Herefordshire, including a Cheltenham Festival winner ridden by son Michael. Michael, one of the great horsemen of his day, won the 1957 Gold Cup on Linwell and the 1959 Grand National on Oxo. But in November 1966 a horse slipped up: a punctured lung, a broken jaw and cheekbone, a cracked skull and an eye injury forced him, too, to turn to training.

Michael’s son Peter was initially nervous of approaching the wired-up Martian-like figure who emerged from hospital. But his childhood identity came from his father’s riding: ‘Whenever I walked into a room, I was the son of Michael Scudamore who’d won the Grand National.’ He never considered any career but the one that made him eight times champion jockey. Scu, as the racing world knows him, was a game-changer, setting new standards of toughness, dedication and professionalism before retiring in 1993 with a then record total of 1,678 winners.