Robin Oakley

There are now two Kings of the Marlborough Downs. Leading jumps trainer Alan King has long trained top horses at Barbury Castle but since summer 2014, to the confusion of delivery drivers, he has had a new neighbour, the former Newmarket trainer Neil King. The only surprise is that Neil did not come sooner: driving with him up and down the gradients and gulleys of Upper Herdswick Farm was — if his wife Clare will forgive the comparison — like witnessing the consummation of a love affair. He eagerly showed off his refurbished woodchip gallop, his fine schooling grounds and the laurel bushes that will in time provide cross-country obstacles, his loose school and the ponds he has established to benefit local wildlife.

Racing Life is all about judgment and I got one thing right at Cheltenham last Saturday after the overnight rain. Waved on to soggy grass by a parking attendant, I demurred, insisting that anyone who parked there would never drive off. I was waved on impatiently and foolishly let her win. When it came to leaving, I managed to start slithering across the grass towards safety, only for a 4 x 4 driving up the hard core to refuse to let me in. As I braked, I knew I was doomed. It must be something about being so high up that makes 4 x 4 drivers so arrogant but at least the arrival of the tractor 50 minutes later taught me where to find the bolt-on towbar for my car.

Cheltenham, Ascot and Sandown Park are wonderful but without the little tracks racing would be lost. It was perishing cold — cold enough for brass monkeys to be keeping a watchful eye on their private parts — and the ground was heavy, but you could not have a better day’s racing than Warwick gave us on Saturday. I fuelled myself at the blue-and-white Whitby scampi stall, which would be a welcome presence on any track, and a fellow muncher set the tone: ‘I only really come for the scampi,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mind if I never back a winner.

The well-bred Sea Pigeon, who had finished seventh in the Derby when trained at Beckhampton by Jeremy Tree, was later bought by the wine and spirits importer Pat Muldoon to go into training over hurdles with Gordon W. Richards in Penrith. The story goes that on his first foray out of his new northern yard, the gelding who was to become one of the greatest hurdlers we have seen stopped still in shock at the sight before him: it was the first time he had ever encountered a cow. Many find the north is a different place. As one who cut his journalistic teeth in Liverpool, I go with Tennyson’s verdict: ‘Bright and fierce and fickle is the South/ And dark and true and tender is the North’.

‘Think dogs in wetsuits,’ said our guide of the cluster of sea lions at our feet on San Cristobal, one of the remote collection of 19 volcanic Pacific islands slap bang on the Equator that make up the Galapagos. Struggling awkwardly up black lava rocks or even there along the sands of Cerro Brujo, the most beautiful beach I have ever seen, the 31-stone beachmaster and his harem looked ungainly, even ridiculous. But when they join you as you snorkel amid brilliantly striped and spotted technicolour fish in every shape and size, you can only marvel at the sea lions’ power, elegance and playfulness as they barrel-roll alongside you and accelerate effortlessly away in their natural element.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s image never quite recovered in many people’s view from the photograph of him picking up his two beagles by their ears. Personally, I was nearly as affronted by the names he had given the two dogs: Him and Her. A dog is entitled to a good name, and so, for me, is a horse. The Tennessee novelist John Trotwood Moore once noted, ‘Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilisation we will find the hoofprint of the horse beside it,’ and while that may be going it a bit in the age of the drone and the mobile phone, racehorses are noble beasts and the names some people give them are an insult to their breeding.

Three personalities dominated the Flat season: Gosden, Dettori and Golden Horn. Victories for the trio in the Derby, the Irish Champion Stakes and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe ensured that John Gosden, a true ambassador for the sport, once again won the trainers’ championship, a title determined by the value of victories won. Frankie Dettori was not champion jockey and never again will be: that title (who needs logic in racing?) is determined by the number of winners ridden and deservedly went to the hardworking Brazilian Silvestre de Sousa. What Dettori did was to demonstrate that he is still as good as anybody when it comes to the flair, the judgment and the sheer balls needed on the big occasions.

Thank God for jump racing. The Flat has its glitz and speed and glamour, and we could not help but thrill to the sheer quality on view at Ascot’s Champions Day this year with Solow and Muhaarar strutting their stuff. But as Jack Dowdeswell, champion jump jockey in the days when it was £3 a ride and a fiver for a winner, once said of the Flat: ‘In the end it is just going down and coming back.’ With jump racing there is a story in every race — not just the thrills and spills from extra risks over obstacles but the promising novice chaser who catches your eye and who you follow until he runs three years later in the Gold Cup.

I was both delighted and unsurprised that Denis Healey made it to 98. One day in the 1970s I took him to lunch at L’Epicure. As he encouraged the waiter to pile his plate higher and higher from the hors-d’oeuvre trolley, my astonishment must have been plain because he grinned and declared: ‘Don’t worry about me — both my parents lived into their nineties.’ Another time, Mrs Oakley and I were in a dusty square in Collioure in south-west France when music began blaring from a loudspeaker to advertise a nearby circus.

One of Alan Bennett’s characters once lamented, ‘We tried to set up a small anarchist community ...but people wouldn’t obey the rules.’ Perhaps he should have found a job within horse-racing. Just look at the aftermath to this year’s St Leger. I was at Bath Races that day when the authorities thoughtfully broadcast the Doncaster Classic on their big screen, and I am not writing without prejudice. Some near the Bath screen endured the undignified spectacle of a tan-trousered spectator, now well qualified for his bus pass, giving a passable imitation of a whirling dervish while shouting home Ralph Beckett’s filly Simple Verse as she flashed first past the post after a battle with Bondi Beach.

It’s a tough old business, this racing. Hayley Turner is the best woman rider we’ve ever seen in this country. She rode two Group One winners in the space of six weeks in 2011 and is only 32, but she has decided to end the struggle to find enough decent rides and to quit at the end of the season. Former champion Kieren Fallon, the rider of three Derby winners, has disappeared to the US. ‘At 50 there was nothing left for him here: it was a case of go abroad or get out,’ one of his former rivals told me last week. Then there is Seb Sanders, who in 2007 shared the Jockeys’ Championship with Jamie Spencer.

Heaven be praised for the sinner who repenteth, however long it takes. For President George Bush Senior, his occasional meetings with Margaret Thatcher were like visits to the dentist: an inevitable occasion but not one to be anticipated with pleasure. Mrs Oakley has long taken the same attitude to going racing: at one Sandown Park meeting she was spotted back in the car park with a novel. At Windsor last weekend, however, she turned to me and declared: ‘You know, when you get to see the horses properly I can understand the appeal.’ Two circumstances had assisted the breakthrough.

Reviewing a biography of Arkle, Peter O’Sullevan wrote, ‘He had an obit to die for.’ So did The Voice himself. It could have been a sad Goodwood with the death of the greatest racing journalist and the retirement of champion jockey Richard Hughes, the stylish equine burglar who stole so many last-gasp victories on the difficult undulating track, but instead it proved to be as Glorious a week as ever celebrating those two fantastic careers. Peter O’Sullevan (like his late friend Lord Oaksey) drew countless thousands of us into racing with his ability to convey the excitement of the sport in print or behind the microphone. He then kept us there with his wit, his compassion and his instinctive ‘sens du cheval’.

For all their formidable physical presence, racehorses spook easily. A sudden gust of wind flapping a plastic sack, a page from yesterday’s Racing Post blowing across the stable yard can provoke a fit of the twitches: eyes rolling, nostrils flaring and back legs snapping out a lethal kick. Trainers need a capacity for quiet reassurance and you don’t need long at Clive Cox’s Beechdown Farm in Lambourn to be struck by its overriding calm. His charges had pounded up watered gallops dried by a breeze like a hairdryer and as Clive hosed down their sleek coats afterwards, he declared, sponge in hand, ‘This is the best part of the day, a proper de-stress.’ ‘Yes, they love it, don’t they?’ I replied — but he meant for him.

Eclipse was one of the most remarkable racehorses ever. Sired by the then undistinguished Marske, whom mares could visit for a mere half-guinea,and born in Windsor Great Park on the day of the annular eclipse of the sun in 1774, the chestnut with one white stocking retired unbeaten after 18 victories in the days when races were run in heats over two or four miles. Famously, Dennis O’Kelly, who became his part-owner, placed a bet on his second contest that the result would be ‘Eclipse first, the rest nowhere’, which technically meant that he had to finish a ‘distance’ (that is, 240 yards) clear of the rest.

Nothing pleases the Royal Ascot crowd more than a winner for the meeting’s crucial supporter, the Queen. Imagine, then, the dilemma of one of her Windsor Castle lunch guests, trainer Roger Charlton, when Her Majesty asked him, ‘Are you going to beat me?’ on the day of the Tercentenary Stakes. Charlton is one of the six Flat trainers with whom she has horses, but in that race his entry was Times Test, whom he trains for Khalid Abdullah, and Her Majesty’s runner was Peacock, trained by Richard Hannon. Charlton didn’t know how to answer and just hoped for a dead heat. After Times Test had run out one of the most impressive winners of the week, beating Peacock by three-and-a-quarter lengths, he reflected, ‘I don’t think I’ll get lunch again.

Getting to Goodwood last Saturday was an achievement in itself. On the Bank Holiday weekend I calculated a cross-country route from Oxfordshire to avoid the traffic. All went well until my satnav threw a hissy fit at my variations. Its female voice, that of an eager hockey mistress contemplating a career change to dominatrix, instructed me to take the fourth turning off a roundabout that possessed only three. Shortly afterwards came a peremptory order to ‘turn right’ off a long straight road that offered no exit, so I switched her off and navigated the old-fashioned way with a map.