Welcome to Live View – Take the tour to learn more
Start Tour
There is currently 1 person viewing this thread.
11 Jun 13
12:03
Joined:
Date Joined:
05 Jan 10
On twitter. Hope it's no true
Show More
Joe Mercer reflects on his career as stable jockey to Sir Henry Cecil
'I had the most enjoyable four years of my riding career. He was a lovely man and I found him so very easy to work with'
Joe Mercer The Guardian.co.uk Tuesday 11 June 2013 16.09 BST
I had the most enjoyable four years of my riding career with Henry. He was a really lovely man and I found him so very easy to work with. He was just a nice person and over the years since, whenever I've been down to Newmarket, I've made certain that I saw him and chatted with him.
I saw him a couple of times last year and when Frankel won at Newbury, I was there to shake his hand and congratulate him. I shall miss him greatly.
I haven't seen him for about 10 months, sadly. I've seen him on interviews and things, his voice getting weaker. I think Frankel carried him through last year, he gave him something to live for.
I started with him in 1977, after I'd got the tin tack from [the owner] Lord Weinstock and I was offered a job riding for Ian Balding. I said I'd think about it and then a few days later, Henry came on the phone. He said: 'I'd like you to be first jockey here at Warren Place.' Well, I just jumped at it. I thought it was absolutely marvellous.
When I went there the house and the gardens had his print on it. He loved his garden, he loved growing his roses and flowers, vegetables too. He had a gardener, Gordon, who was known for growing this fabulous asparagus, rows and rows of it. Henry used to enjoy seeing things grown properly.
He enjoyed his horses, he liked to be out on the Heath with them or around the stables. He knew them individually; he knew everything about them.
I rode winner after winner for him, it was a great time. We'd sit down together on a Friday or Saturday and look at the next week's racing, I'd have the Handicap Book, a paper that gave you the whole week's racing. We'd start off on Monday, he'd say we'll run this and this and that'll win, and we'd just go through the whole week like that.
He was wonderful with his staff and they all loved him to pieces. He'd do an awful lot for them as well.
The public adored him. The press, he could be one way or the other with them; sometimes he liked you and sometimes not.
He was a good winner but a good loser, too. You could always see if he was a bit upset because he'd smoke an awful lot. His jaw would drop a bit if one had got beat that was supposed to win. But there was never a cross word between us.
I often had dinner with him in the evenings at Warren Place, especially during asparagus season. He was cheerful company, jolly.
There were dozens of exceptional horses in our time. He just had so many good ones. One year I rode more than 100 winners for him.
Le Moss would be one of the highlights, when he won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot in 1980. I remember one day, I was just there on the gallops to watch him. We waited 10 or 15 minutes, no Le Moss. So we drove right the way down to the bottom of the Limekilns to see what was happening and there was Le Moss, refusing to move.
Henry turned to me and said: 'Jump on him, he'll go for you.' He didn't go for me either.
So we went back to Warren Place and Henry had one lad in the yard for this kind of thing. He told him: 'Get on this horse, take him down Racecourse Side, right the way round to the Cesarewitch start. If he wants to canter, let him canter; if he wants to gallop, let him gallop.'
We left it at that. Le Moss went to the Gold Cup without a race that season and I think the only time I ever saw him gallop was when we did a bit of work after racing at Kempton Park. He was a horse with his own way of doing things but Henry worked him out and he won at Ascot.
The only time I got the champion jockeys' title, in 1979, it was Henry who made me champion. We'd had a good year and I remember him saying, with six weeks to go: 'We'll make you champion, Joe'. He ran quite a lot of two-year-olds at the end of that year when he normally wouldn't have run them until they were three.
We'd go up to Doncaster, win one race by six lengths and another by seven, and those horses would have lost their maiden allowance, but it didn't matter to him. 'That's two more,' he'd say. He was behind the whole thing.
'I had the most enjoyable four years of my riding career. He was a lovely man and I found him so very easy to work with'
Joe Mercer The Guardian.co.uk Tuesday 11 June 2013 16.09 BST
I had the most enjoyable four years of my riding career with Henry. He was a really lovely man and I found him so very easy to work with. He was just a nice person and over the years since, whenever I've been down to Newmarket, I've made certain that I saw him and chatted with him.
I saw him a couple of times last year and when Frankel won at Newbury, I was there to shake his hand and congratulate him. I shall miss him greatly.
I haven't seen him for about 10 months, sadly. I've seen him on interviews and things, his voice getting weaker. I think Frankel carried him through last year, he gave him something to live for.
I started with him in 1977, after I'd got the tin tack from [the owner] Lord Weinstock and I was offered a job riding for Ian Balding. I said I'd think about it and then a few days later, Henry came on the phone. He said: 'I'd like you to be first jockey here at Warren Place.' Well, I just jumped at it. I thought it was absolutely marvellous.
When I went there the house and the gardens had his print on it. He loved his garden, he loved growing his roses and flowers, vegetables too. He had a gardener, Gordon, who was known for growing this fabulous asparagus, rows and rows of it. Henry used to enjoy seeing things grown properly.
He enjoyed his horses, he liked to be out on the Heath with them or around the stables. He knew them individually; he knew everything about them.
I rode winner after winner for him, it was a great time. We'd sit down together on a Friday or Saturday and look at the next week's racing, I'd have the Handicap Book, a paper that gave you the whole week's racing. We'd start off on Monday, he'd say we'll run this and this and that'll win, and we'd just go through the whole week like that.
He was wonderful with his staff and they all loved him to pieces. He'd do an awful lot for them as well.
The public adored him. The press, he could be one way or the other with them; sometimes he liked you and sometimes not.
He was a good winner but a good loser, too. You could always see if he was a bit upset because he'd smoke an awful lot. His jaw would drop a bit if one had got beat that was supposed to win. But there was never a cross word between us.
I often had dinner with him in the evenings at Warren Place, especially during asparagus season. He was cheerful company, jolly.
There were dozens of exceptional horses in our time. He just had so many good ones. One year I rode more than 100 winners for him.
Le Moss would be one of the highlights, when he won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot in 1980. I remember one day, I was just there on the gallops to watch him. We waited 10 or 15 minutes, no Le Moss. So we drove right the way down to the bottom of the Limekilns to see what was happening and there was Le Moss, refusing to move.
Henry turned to me and said: 'Jump on him, he'll go for you.' He didn't go for me either.
So we went back to Warren Place and Henry had one lad in the yard for this kind of thing. He told him: 'Get on this horse, take him down Racecourse Side, right the way round to the Cesarewitch start. If he wants to canter, let him canter; if he wants to gallop, let him gallop.'
We left it at that. Le Moss went to the Gold Cup without a race that season and I think the only time I ever saw him gallop was when we did a bit of work after racing at Kempton Park. He was a horse with his own way of doing things but Henry worked him out and he won at Ascot.
The only time I got the champion jockeys' title, in 1979, it was Henry who made me champion. We'd had a good year and I remember him saying, with six weeks to go: 'We'll make you champion, Joe'. He ran quite a lot of two-year-olds at the end of that year when he normally wouldn't have run them until they were three.
We'd go up to Doncaster, win one race by six lengths and another by seven, and those horses would have lost their maiden allowance, but it didn't matter to him. 'That's two more,' he'd say. He was behind the whole thing.
Only MV O'Brien was on his level this past 50 years and that's some pedestal to be on
Terrible news , A truly remarkable man , I had the pleasure of meeting him just before Commander in Chiefs Irish Derby ...He spoke with me for several minutes while waiting to go and saddle up...I told him I'd backed His horse , He asked me what price i'd got , when i told him he wished me well and said I'd got a great price ..May God hold You in His arms this very day ....R.I.P.....
Oh So Sharps triple crown (1000 Guineas, The Oaks, The St Leger) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIxUFjdEOGc&feature=player_embedded#!
would say that oh so sharps oaks victory was one of the best ever performance in a group 1 race, to thrash triptych 6 lengths was awesome
GG even missed Oh So Sharp in the 1000 Guineas . .easy mistake considering it won
I was present at Ripon on Saturday May 17th 1969 when HRAC had his first winner. Little did we know then when he won this little flat race for amateur riders that he would become one of the all time greats. I've still got the racecard, price 1/-.
Sir Henry Cecil: charming and gifted man whose modesty won affection
Though he might have been described as the most authentically posh trainer in Newmarket, Cecil did not use his status as a barrier to deter approach, as some still do
Chris Cook
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013
The death of Sir Henry Cecil has deprived horse racing of one of its most gifted and accomplished trainers, as well as one of its most charming and popular. Long before his battle with cancer made him the natural object of sympathy, he had won admiration for his successes and affection for his modest response to them.
In the sprint handicap of life, Cecil's familial connections amounted to a flying start from a favourable draw. His mother was a daughter of a major-general, the 13th Baronet of Leys. His father, killed in the second world war a fortnight before Cecil's birth, was a younger brother of Lord Amherst of Hackney while the man who became his stepfather the following year, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, was a son of a major in the 15th Hussars with a large family home near Mullingar, Ireland.
Boyd-Rochfort was also a very successful trainer at Freemason Lodge in Newmarket. Cecil was raised there and, when he eventually married, it was to a daughter of Sir Noel Murless, another high-profile Newmarket trainer, whose yard at Warren Place was sold to Cecil "for a very reasonable price" when he was 33.
As a boy, Cecil spent his summer holidays at his grandparents' place, Crathes Castle, set in a 30,000-acre estate in Aberdeenshire. As a young man, he was at ease in the most exalted company, as he was able to show when the Queen Mother visited Freemason Lodge in the mid-60s. The lights fused in the dining room, so, at Cecil's direction, he and the royal guest carried the table between them to the drawing room.
Refined in manner, in voice and in dress, Cecil still wore his privilege lightly. Though he might have been described as the most authentically posh trainer in Newmarket, he did not use his status as a barrier to deter approach, as some still do, and he was never a martinet towards his staff, as others are and as Boyd-Rochfort appears to have been.
"Work and the care of the horses have to be taken very seriously indeed," he wrote in his autobiography of 1983, On The Level, "but I have never believed that any of us should be so solemn about it that there ceases to be any pleasure at all. I like to hear the lads laughing and chaffing each other, for I firmly believe that a happy staff makes happy horses."
Habitually self-deprecating, he often gave the impression in post-victory interviews that he had had very little to do with it and this was just another very talented horse which happened to have turned up in his stable. It was surely one of the traits that so endeared him to the racing public but he also found it a convenient way to deflect media attention.
He had other tricks for that purpose, notably his habit of answering a question with a question. "What do you think?" he would often reply, with every appearance of being in earnest, having been asked where a winner should run next. Many a reporter with only a flimsy grasp of the programme book was struck dumb thereby and many an interview brought to a rapid conclusion. Once, at Longchamp, he responded to the first question from a French TV presenter by throwing his arm around a nearby British journalist and asserting to camera that the man was his long-lost brother. "He can give the impression of being casual and often appears as the court jester," wrote Lester Piggott in the foreword to On The Level, at a time when he was Cecil's principal jockey. "His outward appearance, however, can be deceptive as underneath is an ambitious man, determined to remain at the very top of his profession."
Cecil's peak lasted for the thick end of 20 years from the first time he was champion trainer, in 1976, and he enjoyed a charmed run through the 1980s, when his association with the jockey Steve Cauthen was especially productive. Those were the years of Slip Anchor and Reference Point, of the Triple Crown-winning filly Oh So Sharp and of Indian Skimmer, who was so nervous before the 1988 Champion Stakes that Cecil walked a mile and a quarter down the track with her to the starting stalls.
But the good times were followed by some dreadful experiences, notably the death from cancer of his twin brother, David, with whom he was very close. Cecil's second divorce followed salacious allegations about his private life in tabloid newspapers. He was found guilty of drink-driving.
At around the same time, his career fell into serious decline. The owner-breeders who had provided him with such excellent material were dying off, while Sheikh Mohammed had taken his horses away in 1995. By 2005, Cecil was down to only a dozen winners for the whole season and his prize money total was a 10th of what it had been in previous years. His own cancer diagnosis came soon after.
That is the context for what must count as one of the most extraordinary revivals in all of sport. Having at one stage gone seven years without success in a domestic Group One race, Cecil won 16 over the past three seasons, largely thanks to Frankel, widely regarded as the best British racehorse of the modern era but a highly strung animal who would have been no certainty to thrive with a less sensitive trainer. Somehow, he also found top-class success with more modest talents like Twice Over and Timepiece.
Training is a taxing job, even for a young person in perfect health, but the extent to which Cecil was coping with the debilitating effects of his condition and its treatment was made clear to racegoers at York in August. Appearing in public for the first time in two months, he walked with a cane, kept his head covered with a black trilby and spoke in a croak.
There were several occasions over the past five years when gallops-watchers at Newmarket were dismayed to see him grey-faced and worn out by another round of chemotherapy. Many a press room sage did, in that time, make a regretful but confident prediction of his imminent demise, only for a cheery Cecil to turn up in a winner's enclosure soon after, the colour returned to his cheeks.
It could not go on forever and the pity of it is that he was denied the happy retirement he outlined as recently as last summer, when he told the Guardian of his plans to spend more time shopping and gardening. With a tailor friend in London, he hoped to have a go at designing clothes, he said.
It might have been more bravery than real intent. For all his dandified ways, it seems Cecil was as tough and courageous as any staying chaser
Though he might have been described as the most authentically posh trainer in Newmarket, Cecil did not use his status as a barrier to deter approach, as some still do
Chris Cook
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013
The death of Sir Henry Cecil has deprived horse racing of one of its most gifted and accomplished trainers, as well as one of its most charming and popular. Long before his battle with cancer made him the natural object of sympathy, he had won admiration for his successes and affection for his modest response to them.
In the sprint handicap of life, Cecil's familial connections amounted to a flying start from a favourable draw. His mother was a daughter of a major-general, the 13th Baronet of Leys. His father, killed in the second world war a fortnight before Cecil's birth, was a younger brother of Lord Amherst of Hackney while the man who became his stepfather the following year, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, was a son of a major in the 15th Hussars with a large family home near Mullingar, Ireland.
Boyd-Rochfort was also a very successful trainer at Freemason Lodge in Newmarket. Cecil was raised there and, when he eventually married, it was to a daughter of Sir Noel Murless, another high-profile Newmarket trainer, whose yard at Warren Place was sold to Cecil "for a very reasonable price" when he was 33.
As a boy, Cecil spent his summer holidays at his grandparents' place, Crathes Castle, set in a 30,000-acre estate in Aberdeenshire. As a young man, he was at ease in the most exalted company, as he was able to show when the Queen Mother visited Freemason Lodge in the mid-60s. The lights fused in the dining room, so, at Cecil's direction, he and the royal guest carried the table between them to the drawing room.
Refined in manner, in voice and in dress, Cecil still wore his privilege lightly. Though he might have been described as the most authentically posh trainer in Newmarket, he did not use his status as a barrier to deter approach, as some still do, and he was never a martinet towards his staff, as others are and as Boyd-Rochfort appears to have been.
"Work and the care of the horses have to be taken very seriously indeed," he wrote in his autobiography of 1983, On The Level, "but I have never believed that any of us should be so solemn about it that there ceases to be any pleasure at all. I like to hear the lads laughing and chaffing each other, for I firmly believe that a happy staff makes happy horses."
Habitually self-deprecating, he often gave the impression in post-victory interviews that he had had very little to do with it and this was just another very talented horse which happened to have turned up in his stable. It was surely one of the traits that so endeared him to the racing public but he also found it a convenient way to deflect media attention.
He had other tricks for that purpose, notably his habit of answering a question with a question. "What do you think?" he would often reply, with every appearance of being in earnest, having been asked where a winner should run next. Many a reporter with only a flimsy grasp of the programme book was struck dumb thereby and many an interview brought to a rapid conclusion. Once, at Longchamp, he responded to the first question from a French TV presenter by throwing his arm around a nearby British journalist and asserting to camera that the man was his long-lost brother. "He can give the impression of being casual and often appears as the court jester," wrote Lester Piggott in the foreword to On The Level, at a time when he was Cecil's principal jockey. "His outward appearance, however, can be deceptive as underneath is an ambitious man, determined to remain at the very top of his profession."
Cecil's peak lasted for the thick end of 20 years from the first time he was champion trainer, in 1976, and he enjoyed a charmed run through the 1980s, when his association with the jockey Steve Cauthen was especially productive. Those were the years of Slip Anchor and Reference Point, of the Triple Crown-winning filly Oh So Sharp and of Indian Skimmer, who was so nervous before the 1988 Champion Stakes that Cecil walked a mile and a quarter down the track with her to the starting stalls.
But the good times were followed by some dreadful experiences, notably the death from cancer of his twin brother, David, with whom he was very close. Cecil's second divorce followed salacious allegations about his private life in tabloid newspapers. He was found guilty of drink-driving.
At around the same time, his career fell into serious decline. The owner-breeders who had provided him with such excellent material were dying off, while Sheikh Mohammed had taken his horses away in 1995. By 2005, Cecil was down to only a dozen winners for the whole season and his prize money total was a 10th of what it had been in previous years. His own cancer diagnosis came soon after.
That is the context for what must count as one of the most extraordinary revivals in all of sport. Having at one stage gone seven years without success in a domestic Group One race, Cecil won 16 over the past three seasons, largely thanks to Frankel, widely regarded as the best British racehorse of the modern era but a highly strung animal who would have been no certainty to thrive with a less sensitive trainer. Somehow, he also found top-class success with more modest talents like Twice Over and Timepiece.
Training is a taxing job, even for a young person in perfect health, but the extent to which Cecil was coping with the debilitating effects of his condition and its treatment was made clear to racegoers at York in August. Appearing in public for the first time in two months, he walked with a cane, kept his head covered with a black trilby and spoke in a croak.
There were several occasions over the past five years when gallops-watchers at Newmarket were dismayed to see him grey-faced and worn out by another round of chemotherapy. Many a press room sage did, in that time, make a regretful but confident prediction of his imminent demise, only for a cheery Cecil to turn up in a winner's enclosure soon after, the colour returned to his cheeks.
It could not go on forever and the pity of it is that he was denied the happy retirement he outlined as recently as last summer, when he told the Guardian of his plans to spend more time shopping and gardening. With a tailor friend in London, he hoped to have a go at designing clothes, he said.
It might have been more bravery than real intent. For all his dandified ways, it seems Cecil was as tough and courageous as any staying chaser
Just in from work and found out, a good day has just been turned into an absolute nightmare day...Remember the 80s when every 2yo he sent out seemed to win and most of the favs he sent out seemed to win too! I remember having a good bet on Reference point when he won the Derby, and for all of these things i thank you from the bottom of my heart Sir Henry..He was without doubt the best trainer of horses there has ever been and i mean EVER...God bless you Henry, you have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure
It seems a consolation that he was able to train Frankel 2010-2012.
RIP Sir Henry.
RIP Sir Henry.
PA Stables @PA_Stables 21m
Prince Khalid Abdullah has paid a personal tribute to his "great friend" Sir Henry Cecil following the trainer's death on Tuesday.
He said: "It was with great sadness that I learnt of the death of Henry. His life is a remarkable story which has inspired so many."
Prince Khalid Abdullah has paid a personal tribute to his "great friend" Sir Henry Cecil following the trainer's death on Tuesday.
He said: "It was with great sadness that I learnt of the death of Henry. His life is a remarkable story which has inspired so many."
rip sir henry,i will certainly miss backing his supposed second strings,which often obliged at huge prices.
a gent and a top class trainer of top class horses
a gent and a top class trainer of top class horses
Sir Henry Cecil won 75 times at Royal Ascot. Equivalent of every race at Royal Ascot for two-and-a-half years
Geos - it's huge testimony to his integrity & popularity that when those second strings won, nobody ever batted an eyelid as Henry's really were always trying...unlike many others.
The one that always stands out for me was when Belmez won at 50/1 beating his more fancied stable companion, the favourite Satin Wood.
We'll have to compile a list of these...Commander In Chief was second string to the odds-on Tenby when winning his Derby.
The one that always stands out for me was when Belmez won at 50/1 beating his more fancied stable companion, the favourite Satin Wood.
We'll have to compile a list of these...Commander In Chief was second string to the odds-on Tenby when winning his Derby.
My favourite horseracing person in my lifetime of betting on and watching horseracing
RIP Sir Henry Cecil
RIP Sir Henry Cecil
A truly great trainer and was liked by both the rich and poor - he had his human frailties but as a horseman he was genuinely outstanding and understood the horses in his charge. Fitting that Frankel should be the final chapter in his illustrious career and will help retain his name in lights for many future generations of racegoer
Genius! Legend! R I P Sir Henry and kindest thoughts to family and friends.
very sad news, followed his career for 40 years from one in a million to frankel and many great horses along the way.
just when you thought he was down and out in 2005 with only 12 winners he gets back up fights a terrible illness and gets back to the top of his profession, showing great courage.
a true great.
sir henry cecil rip.
just when you thought he was down and out in 2005 with only 12 winners he gets back up fights a terrible illness and gets back to the top of his profession, showing great courage.
a true great.
sir henry cecil rip.
sad news. So glad he had the last few years , career wise.
"Never complain, never explain" That for me sums up Henry Cecil.
He suffered in silence. He probably couldn't put into words how he trained, and if he did the listener wouldn't understand the nuances.
He has put his life's love into the record books for future generations to admire. He never put himself on a pedestal.
"What do you think?"
He suffered in silence. He probably couldn't put into words how he trained, and if he did the listener wouldn't understand the nuances.
He has put his life's love into the record books for future generations to admire. He never put himself on a pedestal.
"What do you think?"
His feats as a trainer speak for themselves. As a personality he was in many ways the quintessential toff - but at the same time loved by the ordinary racegoer - quite an achievement.
Was always special growing up going to the track and seeing the great man had a runner engaged - seemed something almost mystical about looking down at one of his on the racecard.
To fight his illness as he did with such dignity and heart, he was foremost an amazing person, an amazing trainer and one thankfully who's legacy will live on in so many ways long after us and those that follow us are gone.
RIP Sir Henry
To fight his illness as he did with such dignity and heart, he was foremost an amazing person, an amazing trainer and one thankfully who's legacy will live on in so many ways long after us and those that follow us are gone.
RIP Sir Henry
I have been a racing fan all my life and I am choked up with emotion since hearing this sad news this afternoon. Of course we all knew he was unwell and I was shocked when I saw him at the races last year. Notwithstanding his illness, I just cant believe that he is no longer with us. Outstanding trainer and a real gent. Racing has lost a true great today and the esteem in which he was held by people in the industry and the racing public alike will never be replicated. Rest in peace Sir Henry and my condolences to his family
Sir ES
Sir ES
“I do not believe this country has ever produced a better trainer than Henry. I know there has never been one so loved. And then there was the toughness and courage, which had to be seen to be believed as he continued to supervise the training of his horses. Some man.”
Sir Michael Stoute
Sir Michael Stoute
How much pleasure must Frankel have given this Genius, knowing it was possibly his last Class animal RIP
During my lfetime I would put 2 people in the sporting environemt as undisputedly "greats"; firstly Muhammad Ali and Sir Henry Cecil, two completely different characters but neither liklely to be matched in my lifetime in the affection they are/were held by the general public. I am eternally grateful that Sir Henry was allowed in his last years the privilege of training Frankel rather than the Coolemore operation. If he had been trained there he would not have been the same horse, nor had such public affection, as he had being trained by Sir Henry.The end of an era, racing will never quite be the same again for me.
Recent Chapman interview with HRAC just come on ATR now.
Simply the best, Sir Henry and Frankel,match made in heaven.
Rest in peace my friend, we will not see your like again.
Rest in peace my friend, we will not see your like again.
One of the old school, we may never see their likes again.
RIP
RIP
Words taken from an old proverb ...
"Say not in grief 'he is no more' but in thankfulness that he was."
Rest in Peace Sir Henry
"Say not in grief 'he is no more' but in thankfulness that he was."
Rest in Peace Sir Henry
Some wonderful tributes and words on this thread.
Terribly sad news, I don't think words could do justice to the debt that Racing owes or the respect & admiration that I have for this man.
RIP.
RIP.
RIP Sir Henry, my favourite trainer of my favourite horse
Amazing thread
I doubt there is a better tribute or a greater understanding and appreciation of the great man anywhere right now
So good to see and will be a comfort to many who knew him closely
I doubt there is a better tribute or a greater understanding and appreciation of the great man anywhere right now
So good to see and will be a comfort to many who knew him closely
I did a day's work in Newmarket in March, and started the day by nipping up to Warren Hill to see the horses on the gallops. Didn't recognise a single horse or rider and, after 20 freezing minutes, decided to call it a day. As I drove off, HRAC was stood at the side of the road looking a million dollars (by comparison to the last time I had seen him on Champions Day). Really put a spring in my step for the rest of the day, so feel pretty shocked to hear today's sad news. I now feel quite upset that I didn't have the bottle to wind the window down and just say "hello".
As sad as today is, I think the fact that Frankel came along for Henry to oversee, enjoy and share in during his final years is a cause for celebration.
There's not a single bad word about the man in this thread. What an epitaph.
As sad as today is, I think the fact that Frankel came along for Henry to oversee, enjoy and share in during his final years is a cause for celebration.
There's not a single bad word about the man in this thread. What an epitaph.
Thoughts firstly are with Sir Henry's family and friends - they have lost a truly wonderful man.
The rest of us will feel the loss in varying degrees and in our own personal way, with our favourite moments and memories from his glorious career. I was five when I got hooked on racing and the cause of that was Kris - he was my first real enquine hero. As a result Henry Cecil seemed like a God to me. Kris won 14 races in his career, which, as far as my Sir Henry timeline goes, ended in perfect symmetry with Frankel's.
"The show must go on", they say - but racing's greatest, bravest actor has left the stage and this magnificent sport, for me, will never quite be the same again.
Thank you Sir Henry for all the memories, you truly will be missed.
The rest of us will feel the loss in varying degrees and in our own personal way, with our favourite moments and memories from his glorious career. I was five when I got hooked on racing and the cause of that was Kris - he was my first real enquine hero. As a result Henry Cecil seemed like a God to me. Kris won 14 races in his career, which, as far as my Sir Henry timeline goes, ended in perfect symmetry with Frankel's.
"The show must go on", they say - but racing's greatest, bravest actor has left the stage and this magnificent sport, for me, will never quite be the same again.
Thank you Sir Henry for all the memories, you truly will be missed.
It was like God was going to call him to the fold earlier and decided the people really love this man. ''St Peter go and get me that horse i was keeping for a special occasion and put him in that mare Kind and lets really give him a send off that everyone will remember with a horse throughout history and then we'll call him home''.
You don't believe in God. Each to there own then auld son. My apologies if i upset the atheists on here.
Horses have a strange way of weaving themselves into folklore...Aldanti's National etc
Frankel looked almost scripted and pre ordained...I agree
Very sorry to hear of Henry's passing. My brother and I got into horse racing in 1986 and along came Reference Point and Henry's incredible record with 2yo and 3yo Maidens got us hooked on racing. Henry been a hero ever since, racing wont be the same again.
Anaglogs I was thinking on similar lines I'm not religous but fate or whatever it is plays strange games with us humans. It seems Frankel gave Sir Henry a reason to keep fighting and the man showed true courage in his fight against cancer as many other sufferers do.
I am stunned at how this forum has come together today and I cannot think of anyone else living or deceased that would get such a positive response. I just wish we were all in a pub talking about him.
I hope he knew how much he was loved by the punters.
I am stunned at how this forum has come together today and I cannot think of anyone else living or deceased that would get such a positive response. I just wish we were all in a pub talking about him.
I hope he knew how much he was loved by the punters.
Spot on Arazithegreatest.
I was 8 when Kris won the Lockinge - my earliest racing memory - colours subsequently worn by my favourite ever horse and sire and trained by the trainer I have followed ever since, always returning to him after my head was turned by adolescence, university, work, wife, kids, always returning to what has Henry got running today, even when I bet against him a part of me hoping his runner would win because he stood for the sport and my original interest in it long before I even knew what gambling was. For all of us who love the greatest sport of all, win lose or draw, a little piece of us has died today.
I was 8 when Kris won the Lockinge - my earliest racing memory - colours subsequently worn by my favourite ever horse and sire and trained by the trainer I have followed ever since, always returning to him after my head was turned by adolescence, university, work, wife, kids, always returning to what has Henry got running today, even when I bet against him a part of me hoping his runner would win because he stood for the sport and my original interest in it long before I even knew what gambling was. For all of us who love the greatest sport of all, win lose or draw, a little piece of us has died today.
1986 was the year for my injection into horse racing, mainly due to Dancing Brave. However i soon became a keen race goer and in particular i remember i stood transfixed at seeing Reference Point in the parade ring at York for the Dante and Cecil in his pomp. He would have been 44 back then and i remember that aura. It was a great moment for me and i remember being wide eyed and so close to them.
Horse racing won't be the same without Sir Henry. RIP.
A Tribute to Sir Henry Cecil
Tue, 11 Jun 13
Ian Payne presents a special programme looking back at Sir Henry Cecil's career and achievements in horse racing. Includes tributes from Teddy Grimthorpe, Tom Queally, Steve Cauthen, Jason Weaver, Derek Thompson and Cornelius Lysaght.
Duration:
42 mins
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/5lspecials
Tue, 11 Jun 13
Ian Payne presents a special programme looking back at Sir Henry Cecil's career and achievements in horse racing. Includes tributes from Teddy Grimthorpe, Tom Queally, Steve Cauthen, Jason Weaver, Derek Thompson and Cornelius Lysaght.
Duration:
42 mins
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/5lspecials
Just think how lucky we all are, to have been born in an era that allowed us the rare privilege of witnessing a master craftsman at work--Sir Henry Cecil. A remarkable trainer of race horses, and an even more remarkable human being.
The King is dead, but never to be forgotten.
The King is dead, but never to be forgotten.
Elsie Ephsey - nice post of 22:27 
I wonder just how many more of us never had the balls to just say 'hello' to "El Gran Senor" (or ask for an autograph) when he was there in the flesh waiting to be harassed by us prol's
That's you, Fidway & myself so far admitting to it...anyone else?
PS - as great as M.V.O'Brien was, that horse (EGS) should've been with Henry
I remember nearly 20 years ago being gutted by the death of Bill Hicks but I have to say that Henry's passing has had more of an effect on me today, than the departures of many people I've actually known!
Bananas ain't it?
PPS - great to see that Matt Chapman interview on ATR earlier and for those that missed it, it's repeated at lunchtime tomorrow.
I wonder just how many more of us never had the balls to just say 'hello' to "El Gran Senor" (or ask for an autograph) when he was there in the flesh waiting to be harassed by us prol's
That's you, Fidway & myself so far admitting to it...anyone else?
PS - as great as M.V.O'Brien was, that horse (EGS) should've been with Henry
I remember nearly 20 years ago being gutted by the death of Bill Hicks but I have to say that Henry's passing has had more of an effect on me today, than the departures of many people I've actually known!
Bananas ain't it?
PPS - great to see that Matt Chapman interview on ATR earlier and for those that missed it, it's repeated at lunchtime tomorrow.
Forum regulars and rare posters alike are united on this thread in their appreciation of this wonderfully humble man. A man who always played down his talent of training racehorses. How beautiful that fate or maybe even god himself? (Even a non-believer like me has considered this!) Should bestow such a horse as Frankel into the care of this man, just to show the world what a truly great trainer he was. I'm raising a glass or two to this Gentleman tonight and I know a few others will too. RIP Sir Henry Cecil.
WP - as you state, it's nice to see such unanimity on a thread which is such a rarity on here, and there have been some very thoughtful posts that must be very consoling to those closest to the great man.
Sorry to be so pedantic but I've had a few tonight (in Henry's honour) but it should've been 'affect' in my last post...not 'effect'
Wouldn't it be nice to see a posthumous Royal Ascot winner...is anything pinpointed besides Frankel's sister Joyeuse?
Let's hope she goes and does the business
Sorry to be so pedantic but I've had a few tonight (in Henry's honour) but it should've been 'affect' in my last post...not 'effect'
Wouldn't it be nice to see a posthumous Royal Ascot winner...is anything pinpointed besides Frankel's sister Joyeuse?
Let's hope she goes and does the business
Would they consider a day out for Frankel for Henry`s funeral?
Possibly the best thread i've seen on here,Pure heartfelt emotion,No sniping and a communal spirit shown by all,
Been away working allday so am now raising a glass to the Greatest trainer of the last 50 years,
A true Gentleman in work and in his private life,
My thoughts are with his family and extended racing family,
Thank you for all the memories Sir Henry,
You'll be missed by so many including me,
RIP
Been away working allday so am now raising a glass to the Greatest trainer of the last 50 years,
A true Gentleman in work and in his private life,
My thoughts are with his family and extended racing family,
Thank you for all the memories Sir Henry,
You'll be missed by so many including me,
RIP
I was at Ascot for Frankels last race, and to be fair he looked in better health than Khalid Abdullah.
A great trainer, should have had more Classic Winners but for Wildenstein and Sheikh Mo not sending him horses..
A great trainer, should have had more Classic Winners but for Wildenstein and Sheikh Mo not sending him horses..
Was on holiday and decided to visit Newmarket early one morning hoping to see Sir Henry working his string. It was a beautiful sunny morning and the great man was there as I had hoped. He walked past me as he was heading back to his car and said hello, I was totally starstruck and was unable to respond. I think he realised this and just grinned, waved at my wee boy and walked on. To this day I still regret not even sticking my hand out to shake his hand but happy to have seen him in the flesh.
In some ways it was Sir Henry that fuelled my love for this sport.
I used to go to Windsor in my younger days and he absolutely "farmed" maiden's there - I used to check the card and if he had a runner I was off to Windsor like a shot!!
I had hoped that Frankel would have maybe given him the strength to beat this horrid illness and give us a few more years of this genious.
Yesterday was a sad day as we lost an all round good guy.
I used to go to Windsor in my younger days and he absolutely "farmed" maiden's there - I used to check the card and if he had a runner I was off to Windsor like a shot!!
I had hoped that Frankel would have maybe given him the strength to beat this horrid illness and give us a few more years of this genious.
Yesterday was a sad day as we lost an all round good guy.
Good post Travelrug.
I always get up very early at least one morning when i'm in Newmarket and head down to Warren Hill, and been lucky enough to get very close to the likes of Frankel and see him do a full gallop. It just won't be the same not seeing that figure of Sir Henry looking on.
I always get up very early at least one morning when i'm in Newmarket and head down to Warren Hill, and been lucky enough to get very close to the likes of Frankel and see him do a full gallop. It just won't be the same not seeing that figure of Sir Henry looking on.
Frankel became an incarnation of the spirit of Sir Henry Cecil
The legendary trainer passed away after a battle against cancer
Chris McGrath independent.co.uk
Tuesday 11 June 2013
And so it came just as those of us who adored him had feared. His final masterpiece had spent every last, vivid streak of colour on the palette. After Frankel, for Sir Henry Cecil, the rest would indeed be silence. The champion racehorse who consummated one of the great training careers in history had flared like a final, miraculous blossom among withering leaves. It was almost as though the consolations bestowed by Frankel, in Cecil’s most grievous need, also served to strip hollow those gaudy comforts that had preceded him. Frankel was retired last autumn, and Cecil had nothing left for the struggle. Today, at 70, he yielded at last to the sickness that had disclosed unsuspected fortitude through the previous seven years.
He had surprised everyone, with his animal courage – this fey, patrician flaneur, whose deteriorating health had been seemed to be giddily amplified by the indignity of professional and personal humiliation. Immersed in bereavement and drink, divorce and depression, he had been abandoned by the sport he once bestrode. In 2005, the man who accumulated 10 trainers’ championships between 1976 and 1993 won a bare dozen races. The following year he was diagnosed with cancer, the same disease that had claimed his twin brother, David, in 2000. But his response – by painful increments – was such that his final reward, in Frankel, seemed to be summoned into his darkened life upon some shaft of sunlight, a sample vouchsafed from eternity.
For there were several other late blooms, apart from Frankel: Light Shift, Midday, Twice Over. This resilience was never incongruous to Cecil himself. Sitting in the baronial drawing room at Warren Place, two summers ago, he expressed indignation when asked whether all this physical and mental excoriation had exhausted his love of ornament. He gestured with those large, loose hands, to include the statuettes, the heraldry and trinkets, his own cashmere and silk. “No,” he demurred, frowning. “I’ve always liked nice things, and nice things are ... a comfort.”
He led the way out to the gardens – past the famous roses, past the Wollemi pine. “Oldest tree in the world, that,” he drawled. Into a big mesh pen. “Try these. Wineberries.” And then the climax: the peas brought from Tutankhamun’s tomb by a relative of his stepfather. “He took them back to Ireland and after two and a half thousand years they germinated.” He did not have to explain. Exquisites like Cecil know perfectly well the evanescence of their pleasures. From generation to generation, however, they preserve and prolong mortal glories as perennially as his cherished roses.
Beauty, to Cecil, was defined by its fragility. A filly might go from liquid gallop to hideous, catastrophic breakdown in one step. But the more luminous life could be, the more precious, the harder he would fight. So all those tics, those flourishes of self-deprecation: the tilted head and rolling eyes, the wryly murmured questions to answer your own… They all masked a fierce determination.
Inwardly he was outraged by the sport’s communal infidelity. One morning, when a string of 200 bluebloods had dwindled to a rabble of barely 50, he heard one of Newmarket’s rising young trainers mutter to an owner on the gallops. “There’s Henry Cecil. Can’t understand why he doesn’t just give up.”
He thought of David, an alcoholic like their mother. He looked at himself, an embittered recluse. And he felt ashamed. He vowed to start living life on behalf of this constant spectre, the brother who alone seemed to accompany his own, wraithlike retreat into the emaciation of chemotherapy. “When David died, for a long time, half of me seemed to have gone,” Cecil confided. “It was like losing half of you, really. He’d have been very upset, looking down, if I hadn’t picked myself up from disaster. Very upset. So yes. Probably a lot of it, I’ve done for him.”
Nor was he wholly alone. He found new solidarity in Jane McKeown, who became his third wife in 2008. And the Prince had never left him. With ghastly symmetry, Khaled Abdulla lost his American trainer, Bobby Frankel, to lymphoma in 2009. It was in Bobby’s memory that a young Galileo colt, sent to Warren Place, was christened early the following year.
Frankel became an incarnation of the spirit that endured beneath the ravages of his trainer’s illness. A physical paragon, his career proved immune to the mischance that rebukes most who fly so close to the sun. Through three seasons, he sustained Cecil not just with his own virile grandeur but with the affection that pulsed anew among the racing public. For never had a knighthood seemed so merely formal a gilding as the one conferred upon Cecil in 2011. He always had the indifference to rank of a true gentleman, as courteous to those who beseeched a tip at the races as to royalty itself.
But if all recognised Frankel to be inscribing an indelible epitaph, then none should forget that Cecil would have been mourned as one of the all-time masters long before this final benediction. For here was one of few postwar trainers who could wear the label of “genius” as comfortably as any Hermes tie.
His father, a dashing army captain, was killed in action in North Africa shortly before the twins were born. His mother, a noted beauty, then captivated Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, who ran a celebrated Newmarket stable until his stepson took over in 1969. Borrowing further from the lore of his first father-in-law, Noel Murless, Cecil became a non-pareil whether measured by quality or quantity. In 1987, he saddled 180 winners – obliterating John Day’s record of 146 in 1867. Even in the late 1990s, after a dramatic falling out with Sheikh Mohammed, he was saddling four Oaks winners in five years.
That was testimony to his particular dexterity with fillies, who seemed to open up to his sensibilities as his roses did the summer night. But the challenge that matched most closely the margins of his nature – the gorgeous, carefree exterior, and the competitive hunger within – was Royal Ascot. He saddled 75 winners there, more than any trainer in history, and the rawness of his loss will lend next week’s pageant a strangely mute quality.
Cecil was raised in privilege, spending his schooldays at his grandparents’ Scottish castle, and started out making Bertie Wooster resemble Stephen Hawking. At agricultural college, he and David reassembled a car in the principal’s bedroom and painted lilies. But these quirky experiments foreshadowed the testing of deeper limits: of his own frailties, often enough; of the innate capacities of thoroughbreds, every day; and, ultimately, of his own resilience.
How do you chart the span of so rich a life? With 70 midsummers? With one Frankel? Every collar in his dandy wardrobe would fray in the end. Winter denuded his roses. Even Frankel was taken from him, in the end. But he preserved each pinnacle within, each immaculate moment. As Cormac McCarthy asks: “The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?”
The legendary trainer passed away after a battle against cancer
Chris McGrath independent.co.uk
Tuesday 11 June 2013
And so it came just as those of us who adored him had feared. His final masterpiece had spent every last, vivid streak of colour on the palette. After Frankel, for Sir Henry Cecil, the rest would indeed be silence. The champion racehorse who consummated one of the great training careers in history had flared like a final, miraculous blossom among withering leaves. It was almost as though the consolations bestowed by Frankel, in Cecil’s most grievous need, also served to strip hollow those gaudy comforts that had preceded him. Frankel was retired last autumn, and Cecil had nothing left for the struggle. Today, at 70, he yielded at last to the sickness that had disclosed unsuspected fortitude through the previous seven years.
He had surprised everyone, with his animal courage – this fey, patrician flaneur, whose deteriorating health had been seemed to be giddily amplified by the indignity of professional and personal humiliation. Immersed in bereavement and drink, divorce and depression, he had been abandoned by the sport he once bestrode. In 2005, the man who accumulated 10 trainers’ championships between 1976 and 1993 won a bare dozen races. The following year he was diagnosed with cancer, the same disease that had claimed his twin brother, David, in 2000. But his response – by painful increments – was such that his final reward, in Frankel, seemed to be summoned into his darkened life upon some shaft of sunlight, a sample vouchsafed from eternity.
For there were several other late blooms, apart from Frankel: Light Shift, Midday, Twice Over. This resilience was never incongruous to Cecil himself. Sitting in the baronial drawing room at Warren Place, two summers ago, he expressed indignation when asked whether all this physical and mental excoriation had exhausted his love of ornament. He gestured with those large, loose hands, to include the statuettes, the heraldry and trinkets, his own cashmere and silk. “No,” he demurred, frowning. “I’ve always liked nice things, and nice things are ... a comfort.”
He led the way out to the gardens – past the famous roses, past the Wollemi pine. “Oldest tree in the world, that,” he drawled. Into a big mesh pen. “Try these. Wineberries.” And then the climax: the peas brought from Tutankhamun’s tomb by a relative of his stepfather. “He took them back to Ireland and after two and a half thousand years they germinated.” He did not have to explain. Exquisites like Cecil know perfectly well the evanescence of their pleasures. From generation to generation, however, they preserve and prolong mortal glories as perennially as his cherished roses.
Beauty, to Cecil, was defined by its fragility. A filly might go from liquid gallop to hideous, catastrophic breakdown in one step. But the more luminous life could be, the more precious, the harder he would fight. So all those tics, those flourishes of self-deprecation: the tilted head and rolling eyes, the wryly murmured questions to answer your own… They all masked a fierce determination.
Inwardly he was outraged by the sport’s communal infidelity. One morning, when a string of 200 bluebloods had dwindled to a rabble of barely 50, he heard one of Newmarket’s rising young trainers mutter to an owner on the gallops. “There’s Henry Cecil. Can’t understand why he doesn’t just give up.”
He thought of David, an alcoholic like their mother. He looked at himself, an embittered recluse. And he felt ashamed. He vowed to start living life on behalf of this constant spectre, the brother who alone seemed to accompany his own, wraithlike retreat into the emaciation of chemotherapy. “When David died, for a long time, half of me seemed to have gone,” Cecil confided. “It was like losing half of you, really. He’d have been very upset, looking down, if I hadn’t picked myself up from disaster. Very upset. So yes. Probably a lot of it, I’ve done for him.”
Nor was he wholly alone. He found new solidarity in Jane McKeown, who became his third wife in 2008. And the Prince had never left him. With ghastly symmetry, Khaled Abdulla lost his American trainer, Bobby Frankel, to lymphoma in 2009. It was in Bobby’s memory that a young Galileo colt, sent to Warren Place, was christened early the following year.
Frankel became an incarnation of the spirit that endured beneath the ravages of his trainer’s illness. A physical paragon, his career proved immune to the mischance that rebukes most who fly so close to the sun. Through three seasons, he sustained Cecil not just with his own virile grandeur but with the affection that pulsed anew among the racing public. For never had a knighthood seemed so merely formal a gilding as the one conferred upon Cecil in 2011. He always had the indifference to rank of a true gentleman, as courteous to those who beseeched a tip at the races as to royalty itself.
But if all recognised Frankel to be inscribing an indelible epitaph, then none should forget that Cecil would have been mourned as one of the all-time masters long before this final benediction. For here was one of few postwar trainers who could wear the label of “genius” as comfortably as any Hermes tie.
His father, a dashing army captain, was killed in action in North Africa shortly before the twins were born. His mother, a noted beauty, then captivated Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, who ran a celebrated Newmarket stable until his stepson took over in 1969. Borrowing further from the lore of his first father-in-law, Noel Murless, Cecil became a non-pareil whether measured by quality or quantity. In 1987, he saddled 180 winners – obliterating John Day’s record of 146 in 1867. Even in the late 1990s, after a dramatic falling out with Sheikh Mohammed, he was saddling four Oaks winners in five years.
That was testimony to his particular dexterity with fillies, who seemed to open up to his sensibilities as his roses did the summer night. But the challenge that matched most closely the margins of his nature – the gorgeous, carefree exterior, and the competitive hunger within – was Royal Ascot. He saddled 75 winners there, more than any trainer in history, and the rawness of his loss will lend next week’s pageant a strangely mute quality.
Cecil was raised in privilege, spending his schooldays at his grandparents’ Scottish castle, and started out making Bertie Wooster resemble Stephen Hawking. At agricultural college, he and David reassembled a car in the principal’s bedroom and painted lilies. But these quirky experiments foreshadowed the testing of deeper limits: of his own frailties, often enough; of the innate capacities of thoroughbreds, every day; and, ultimately, of his own resilience.
How do you chart the span of so rich a life? With 70 midsummers? With one Frankel? Every collar in his dandy wardrobe would fray in the end. Winter denuded his roses. Even Frankel was taken from him, in the end. But he preserved each pinnacle within, each immaculate moment. As Cormac McCarthy asks: “The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?”
A UNIVERSAL AND ENDURING APPEAL
Alastair Down on the impact on the racing village of a dashing trainer
RACINGPOST.COM
BORN to the castle but beloved of the country cottage and council house, Sir Henry Cecil was the most cherished and totemic figure of his era, and beyond any doubt among the two or three finest and most instinctively gifted racehorse trainers of all time.
And there was an aura about Henry that made you feel that while the knight of Warren Place was still around then the age of chivalry was not yet dead. There was always the whiff of glamour about Henry, but it was no superficial thing as his style was always backed by substance.
While his achievements were remarkable and almost without precedent, what made Cecil unique was the unshakeable bond he forged with the racing public. Nobody else in racing over the last 40 years has been held in such respect and affection. The public loved the man and it is devoutly to be hoped he fully understood what he meant to people and, in recent times, drew some spiritual sustenance from it.
Cecil started training in 1969 and won the Eclipse in his first season. Up to then all the years were BC - Before Cecil. But from that point in time until Tuesday everybody who follows the sport will have their own particular memories of the defining trainer of their age.
Successive generations have grown up and grown old with him, which is why the sadness in many a racing household is not at the death of some remote grandee but the loss of someone regarded almost as a friend who had stitched many a moment of magic into the weave of our sporting lives.
In a way Henry died once before - professionally. Having ruled the heights, suddenly everything went adrift and between July 2000 and October 2006 he did not saddle a single Group 1 winner and many a mutter was that he had gone at the game. In 2005 there were just a dozen winners, Warren Place was haemorrhaging money as the stable strength dwindled from 200 horses to 50. The decline looked irreversible.
But running through every corpuscle in Cecil was an insatiably competitive streak and, crucially aided by the unswerving loyalty of Khalid Abdullah, he chiselled his way back inch by hard-fought inch. And how we all enjoyed and celebrated his return from a wilderness in which he spent much longer than the customary 40 days and 40 nights.
Most admirably, he bought his ferocious competitiveness to bear on the battle with cancer, which was first revealed in 2006. He refused to bow to it and the courage with which he "fought the long defeat" made him the lion in summer. He never once burdened us with details of treatment, complaints about pain or the sheer medical drudgery of trying to stay alive - he just got on with it, doing his job in public, fighting his battle in private.
Of course we could all see the toll gradually increasing, the almost ludicrous good looks of his undoubtedly wild youth being overhauled by something more gaunt. You couldn't stop your heart going out to the man. When Frankel won last year's Juddmonte International at York, Henry, black-hatted, husky of voice and plenty frail, stood next to his equine masterpiece and you could all but feel the goodwill emanating from the crowd.
Many there that August afternoon knew full well that it was unlikely they would see him on his beloved Knavesmire again, but it was important for them to stand and applaud and be witness to a famous day made unforgettable by two indelible greats. The respect there as usual, the affection as always.
To go and visit him in Newmarket was to enter something of an enchanted world, the heart of the wise wizard's kingdom. When last there the roses were not yet in full bloom but the famous mummy's peas were shooting and the recently discovered prehistoric tree growing steadily away.
The garden at Warren Place was where Henry took his mind when it needed rest and respite. Training a couple of hundred bluebloods was always pressure enough and one can only muse at what thoughts flickered across that brain during the barren years.
ONCE he was ill and the struggle far advanced there will have been days when, as flower, fruit and vegetable came to their peak, he knew he was seeing their seasonal splendour for the final time.
For all the Classic winners and the myriad Group 1s, it will be Frankel with whom he will forever be linked, the unbeatable trained by the inimitable.
Nobody who was on the Rowley Mile that afternoon when Frankel barnstormed the 2,000 Guineas will ever forget the palpable shock of his brilliance. Nobody had ever seen anything like it for the very simple reason nothing like it had ever happened before.
As Frankel's tale grew in the telling there was something spectacularly gratifying that he was in Henry's hands. The great man might indeed be suffering, but if Frankel was going to be his swansong then it was a glorious one that would echo down the centuries by way of a monument.
If Henry was increasingly frail, the sage in his loafers still had plenty of his old spark. He was, as ever, the very prince of politeness who could have written a textbook on manners. As the hacks gathered round after yet another spectacular Frankel triumph the customary happy pantomime would begin as Henry tilted that great head to one side and inquired of the assembled scribes: "What do you think?"
It was all you could do not to blurt out: "I think you are a bloody genius mate, and I wish you weren't ill."
Though he was by no means a saint, I can recall no whiff of scandal or suggestion of chicanery ever attaching itself to his horses or the way in which they ran. If he had occasional ups and downs in his personal life, the public saw his shortcomings as being like their own and thought none the worse of him.
For the next few days and weeks racing will be awash with tributes. But those closest to him and who loved him most dearly will simply be awash.
What is for certain is that racing's landscape will look very different no longer illuminated by the beacon of brilliance that was Cecil. Royal Ascot was for many years his stamping ground and where he ruled supreme, season in, season out.
Next week's meeting will be the first of my working lifetime without that lofty presence immaculately attired. I can see him now at the Ascot of old, silk-toppered, often blue of shirt and yellow of tie, with a saddle under his arm and striding from the weighing room towards the saddling boxes at the top of that beautiful paddock guarded by its phalanx of mighty trees, centuries in the making.
If Hollywood had tried to create the dashing, patrician English racehorse trainer they would never have dared come up with anything as splendid as Cecil.
So perhaps this year, among all the frippery, room could me made for a minute's silence in grateful memory of a man born for the Ascot stage who combined a love and understanding of the high-class thoroughbred with a lifelong flair for fashion.
WHEN great men die they inevitably pass into the hands of obituary and historians and Henry will be no exception. Facts and figures will be piled high and his praises rightly sung.
But for those of us whose racing life coincided with his, there is a genuine pang at his passing because with him goes the strongest connection with so much of our own racing histories. Henry composed and orchestrated the sporting back catalogue of countless hundreds of thousands of us for more than four decades. No surprise then that it hurts a bit because part of our own past dies with him.
There is a sense of relief that his suffering has come to an end and, although he must have been bowstring-weary with the fight, nobody could have been more valiant.
He will be mourned in every corner of the racing village because his appeal was universal and enduring. But above all he should be celebrated because he had more life, vigour, courage, individuality and sheer, natural, rampant talent than can usually be found in a legion of folk.
Our bright spark of genius has been extinguished. Well may the trumpets sound for him on the other side
Alastair Down on the impact on the racing village of a dashing trainer
RACINGPOST.COM
BORN to the castle but beloved of the country cottage and council house, Sir Henry Cecil was the most cherished and totemic figure of his era, and beyond any doubt among the two or three finest and most instinctively gifted racehorse trainers of all time.
And there was an aura about Henry that made you feel that while the knight of Warren Place was still around then the age of chivalry was not yet dead. There was always the whiff of glamour about Henry, but it was no superficial thing as his style was always backed by substance.
While his achievements were remarkable and almost without precedent, what made Cecil unique was the unshakeable bond he forged with the racing public. Nobody else in racing over the last 40 years has been held in such respect and affection. The public loved the man and it is devoutly to be hoped he fully understood what he meant to people and, in recent times, drew some spiritual sustenance from it.
Cecil started training in 1969 and won the Eclipse in his first season. Up to then all the years were BC - Before Cecil. But from that point in time until Tuesday everybody who follows the sport will have their own particular memories of the defining trainer of their age.
Successive generations have grown up and grown old with him, which is why the sadness in many a racing household is not at the death of some remote grandee but the loss of someone regarded almost as a friend who had stitched many a moment of magic into the weave of our sporting lives.
In a way Henry died once before - professionally. Having ruled the heights, suddenly everything went adrift and between July 2000 and October 2006 he did not saddle a single Group 1 winner and many a mutter was that he had gone at the game. In 2005 there were just a dozen winners, Warren Place was haemorrhaging money as the stable strength dwindled from 200 horses to 50. The decline looked irreversible.
But running through every corpuscle in Cecil was an insatiably competitive streak and, crucially aided by the unswerving loyalty of Khalid Abdullah, he chiselled his way back inch by hard-fought inch. And how we all enjoyed and celebrated his return from a wilderness in which he spent much longer than the customary 40 days and 40 nights.
Most admirably, he bought his ferocious competitiveness to bear on the battle with cancer, which was first revealed in 2006. He refused to bow to it and the courage with which he "fought the long defeat" made him the lion in summer. He never once burdened us with details of treatment, complaints about pain or the sheer medical drudgery of trying to stay alive - he just got on with it, doing his job in public, fighting his battle in private.
Of course we could all see the toll gradually increasing, the almost ludicrous good looks of his undoubtedly wild youth being overhauled by something more gaunt. You couldn't stop your heart going out to the man. When Frankel won last year's Juddmonte International at York, Henry, black-hatted, husky of voice and plenty frail, stood next to his equine masterpiece and you could all but feel the goodwill emanating from the crowd.
Many there that August afternoon knew full well that it was unlikely they would see him on his beloved Knavesmire again, but it was important for them to stand and applaud and be witness to a famous day made unforgettable by two indelible greats. The respect there as usual, the affection as always.
To go and visit him in Newmarket was to enter something of an enchanted world, the heart of the wise wizard's kingdom. When last there the roses were not yet in full bloom but the famous mummy's peas were shooting and the recently discovered prehistoric tree growing steadily away.
The garden at Warren Place was where Henry took his mind when it needed rest and respite. Training a couple of hundred bluebloods was always pressure enough and one can only muse at what thoughts flickered across that brain during the barren years.
ONCE he was ill and the struggle far advanced there will have been days when, as flower, fruit and vegetable came to their peak, he knew he was seeing their seasonal splendour for the final time.
For all the Classic winners and the myriad Group 1s, it will be Frankel with whom he will forever be linked, the unbeatable trained by the inimitable.
Nobody who was on the Rowley Mile that afternoon when Frankel barnstormed the 2,000 Guineas will ever forget the palpable shock of his brilliance. Nobody had ever seen anything like it for the very simple reason nothing like it had ever happened before.
As Frankel's tale grew in the telling there was something spectacularly gratifying that he was in Henry's hands. The great man might indeed be suffering, but if Frankel was going to be his swansong then it was a glorious one that would echo down the centuries by way of a monument.
If Henry was increasingly frail, the sage in his loafers still had plenty of his old spark. He was, as ever, the very prince of politeness who could have written a textbook on manners. As the hacks gathered round after yet another spectacular Frankel triumph the customary happy pantomime would begin as Henry tilted that great head to one side and inquired of the assembled scribes: "What do you think?"
It was all you could do not to blurt out: "I think you are a bloody genius mate, and I wish you weren't ill."
Though he was by no means a saint, I can recall no whiff of scandal or suggestion of chicanery ever attaching itself to his horses or the way in which they ran. If he had occasional ups and downs in his personal life, the public saw his shortcomings as being like their own and thought none the worse of him.
For the next few days and weeks racing will be awash with tributes. But those closest to him and who loved him most dearly will simply be awash.
What is for certain is that racing's landscape will look very different no longer illuminated by the beacon of brilliance that was Cecil. Royal Ascot was for many years his stamping ground and where he ruled supreme, season in, season out.
Next week's meeting will be the first of my working lifetime without that lofty presence immaculately attired. I can see him now at the Ascot of old, silk-toppered, often blue of shirt and yellow of tie, with a saddle under his arm and striding from the weighing room towards the saddling boxes at the top of that beautiful paddock guarded by its phalanx of mighty trees, centuries in the making.
If Hollywood had tried to create the dashing, patrician English racehorse trainer they would never have dared come up with anything as splendid as Cecil.
So perhaps this year, among all the frippery, room could me made for a minute's silence in grateful memory of a man born for the Ascot stage who combined a love and understanding of the high-class thoroughbred with a lifelong flair for fashion.
WHEN great men die they inevitably pass into the hands of obituary and historians and Henry will be no exception. Facts and figures will be piled high and his praises rightly sung.
But for those of us whose racing life coincided with his, there is a genuine pang at his passing because with him goes the strongest connection with so much of our own racing histories. Henry composed and orchestrated the sporting back catalogue of countless hundreds of thousands of us for more than four decades. No surprise then that it hurts a bit because part of our own past dies with him.
There is a sense of relief that his suffering has come to an end and, although he must have been bowstring-weary with the fight, nobody could have been more valiant.
He will be mourned in every corner of the racing village because his appeal was universal and enduring. But above all he should be celebrated because he had more life, vigour, courage, individuality and sheer, natural, rampant talent than can usually be found in a legion of folk.
Our bright spark of genius has been extinguished. Well may the trumpets sound for him on the other side
Galitzin 11 Jun 13 12:32
I've usually backed Thompson, but if he's seriously just tweeted on rumours about the passing of an absolute legend he's a first class a$$hole
Indeed - but then we've always known that.
I've usually backed Thompson, but if he's seriously just tweeted on rumours about the passing of an absolute legend he's a first class a$$hole
Indeed - but then we've always known that.
It has been a absolute joy reading the glowing tributes to the great Sir Henry Cecil on this thread. As Sir Henry used to say "What do you think?" - well now he knows. If I'm being totally honest I'm not looking forward to Royal Ascot next week in the same way that I have done for the past 35 years. To me and many others Sir Henry was Royal Ascot and we lost something very precious and special yesterday.
"Travelrug 12 Jun 13 07:54 Joined: 08 May 10 | Topic/replies: 114 | Blogger: Travelrug's blog
Was on holiday and decided to visit Newmarket early one morning hoping to see Sir Henry working his string. It was a beautiful sunny morning and the great man was there as I had hoped. He walked past me as he was heading back to his car and said hello, I was totally starstruck and was unable to respond. I think he realised this and just grinned, waved at my wee boy and walked on. To this day I still regret not even sticking my hand out to shake his hand but happy to have seen him in the flesh"
Great post squire.
It's amazing how Cecil made grown men feel awestruck with basic pleasantries...no plate-spinning, juggling or swallowing fire and that simple deportment manifested a real unassuming AURA
Was on holiday and decided to visit Newmarket early one morning hoping to see Sir Henry working his string. It was a beautiful sunny morning and the great man was there as I had hoped. He walked past me as he was heading back to his car and said hello, I was totally starstruck and was unable to respond. I think he realised this and just grinned, waved at my wee boy and walked on. To this day I still regret not even sticking my hand out to shake his hand but happy to have seen him in the flesh"
Great post squire.
It's amazing how Cecil made grown men feel awestruck with basic pleasantries...no plate-spinning, juggling or swallowing fire and that simple deportment manifested a real unassuming AURA
He loved what he did. Which is more than can be said about some.
Next.
Next.
Notice from Warren Place Stables PDF Print E-mail
http://www.sirhenrycecil.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=167:notice-from-warren-place-stables&catid=1:current-news&Itemid=2
Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:34
Warren Place Stables confirms that the funeral of Sir Henry Cecil will take place on Monday, June 24 at St Agnes Church in Newmarket. This will be a private funeral for family members only.
At a later date, there will be a service to celebrate Sir Henry's life. The details of this will be outlined after the funeral
http://www.sirhenrycecil.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=167:notice-from-warren-place-stables&catid=1:current-news&Itemid=2
Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:34
Warren Place Stables confirms that the funeral of Sir Henry Cecil will take place on Monday, June 24 at St Agnes Church in Newmarket. This will be a private funeral for family members only.
At a later date, there will be a service to celebrate Sir Henry's life. The details of this will be outlined after the funeral
I think everyone to a boy will be willing Morpheus home tomorrow
Sir Henry Cecil's yard chases memorial win
Five Warren Place horses run on Thursday, with Frankel's half-brother Morpheus in a maiden at Nottingham
Chris McGrath independent.co.uk
Wednesday 12 June 2013
If his horses are unwitting in their own loss, their unceasing demands may yet prove as useful as any words of consolation for those who were closest to Sir Henry Cecil. The trainer's grieving staff have had no choice but to maintain the daily routine, filling mangers and mucking out and all the rest of it; and his widow, Jane, has been given a temporary licence to ensure that all this activity retains some kind of purpose – precisely when it must seem most futile. Even in the broader Turf community, it is hard enough to face up to life without him. But the horses insist upon it. And, by slow degrees, each broken heart will ultimately see the wisdom implied in their animal ignorance.
So it is that Lady Cecil is today listed as trainer of five runners from Warren Place – including one who will poignantly evoke the consummation Cecil contrived, even as he fought the disease that finally claimed him on Tuesday morning. Morpheus, a half-brother to the great Frankel, has yet to learn how to channel his own energies but the form he showed when second at Goodwood last time qualifies him as the one to beat in a maiden at Nottingham.
The stable jockey, Tom Queally, returns to his native Ireland to partner Tickled Pink in a Group Three sprint at Leopardstown this evening. Her success in a similar contest at the Craven meeting, in her first start outside maiden company, reiterated her trainer's particular dexterity with fillies.
Likewise the belated but spectacular debut at Salisbury last month of Songbird, who makes a rather shorter journey for a handicap at Yarmouth in the colours of Sir Robert Ogden. The owner's racing manager, Barry Simpson, considers this filly a fitting symbol of Cecil's gifts. "I think Songbird typifies Sir Henry's great understanding and patience with his horses," he said. "She was very backward and Sir Henry didn't want to run her at two or three. I think a lot of trainers would have done so, and she might never have won a race. But Sir Henry had a lot of faith in her, took his time – and she won first time out, as a four-year-old, very well."
The Warren Place team also dispatches two daughters of Galileo to Newbury. Phaenomena and Rajaratna represent one of Cecil's most faithful patrons, the Niarchos family.
A private funeral will be held in Newmarket on Monday week, with a memorial service to follow at a later date. It meanwhile remains to be seen what arrangements will be made at Warren Place in the longer term, but Mike Marshall is considered eligible for any responsibility after impressing as assistant trainer since his arrival from Godolphin in 2007.
Cecil's loss will be felt anew next week at Royal Ascot, where his career record of 75 wins is the best in its history.
Sir Henry Cecil's yard chases memorial win
Five Warren Place horses run on Thursday, with Frankel's half-brother Morpheus in a maiden at Nottingham
Chris McGrath independent.co.uk
Wednesday 12 June 2013
If his horses are unwitting in their own loss, their unceasing demands may yet prove as useful as any words of consolation for those who were closest to Sir Henry Cecil. The trainer's grieving staff have had no choice but to maintain the daily routine, filling mangers and mucking out and all the rest of it; and his widow, Jane, has been given a temporary licence to ensure that all this activity retains some kind of purpose – precisely when it must seem most futile. Even in the broader Turf community, it is hard enough to face up to life without him. But the horses insist upon it. And, by slow degrees, each broken heart will ultimately see the wisdom implied in their animal ignorance.
So it is that Lady Cecil is today listed as trainer of five runners from Warren Place – including one who will poignantly evoke the consummation Cecil contrived, even as he fought the disease that finally claimed him on Tuesday morning. Morpheus, a half-brother to the great Frankel, has yet to learn how to channel his own energies but the form he showed when second at Goodwood last time qualifies him as the one to beat in a maiden at Nottingham.
The stable jockey, Tom Queally, returns to his native Ireland to partner Tickled Pink in a Group Three sprint at Leopardstown this evening. Her success in a similar contest at the Craven meeting, in her first start outside maiden company, reiterated her trainer's particular dexterity with fillies.
Likewise the belated but spectacular debut at Salisbury last month of Songbird, who makes a rather shorter journey for a handicap at Yarmouth in the colours of Sir Robert Ogden. The owner's racing manager, Barry Simpson, considers this filly a fitting symbol of Cecil's gifts. "I think Songbird typifies Sir Henry's great understanding and patience with his horses," he said. "She was very backward and Sir Henry didn't want to run her at two or three. I think a lot of trainers would have done so, and she might never have won a race. But Sir Henry had a lot of faith in her, took his time – and she won first time out, as a four-year-old, very well."
The Warren Place team also dispatches two daughters of Galileo to Newbury. Phaenomena and Rajaratna represent one of Cecil's most faithful patrons, the Niarchos family.
A private funeral will be held in Newmarket on Monday week, with a memorial service to follow at a later date. It meanwhile remains to be seen what arrangements will be made at Warren Place in the longer term, but Mike Marshall is considered eligible for any responsibility after impressing as assistant trainer since his arrival from Godolphin in 2007.
Cecil's loss will be felt anew next week at Royal Ascot, where his career record of 75 wins is the best in its history.
Just endorsing what many others have scribed on this wonderful thread.The Alister Down article has moved me to tears.
Fantastic thread, in such a sport as this, and indeed a forum such as this that can be spiteful and mean, this man has commanded Love, respect and admiration.
Its an astonishing deed when ive never heard the mans integrity questioned when virtually all around him have, life indeed is just that bit emptier..
Its an astonishing deed when ive never heard the mans integrity questioned when virtually all around him have, life indeed is just that bit emptier..
ATR feature on Sir Henry Cecil
running time 1 hour 34min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0exmy__iZFU
running time 1 hour 34min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0exmy__iZFU
Many trainers have been liked and respected, but no one has ever transcended the real affection that the racing public had for Henry Cecil. Definitely in pole position in the pantheon of trainers past and present.
Royal Ascot to name race in honour of Sir Henry next week. The Queen's Vase, which Cecil won a record eight times, will be run as The Queen's Vase In Memory of Sir Henry Cecil and all jockeys will wear black armbands. A minute's silence will also be held after Tuesday's royal procession
I didn't know Henry very well, like a good many people, but I did play darts against his brother in the early 70's and I did get an email from him in Feb. The only word I can think of that sums him up is 'class'. He will be sadly missed but I hope his legacy is that other trainers see what can be achieved by being honest, hard working and forthcoming.
I see some saying in the press ''Because ordinary people love an underdog'' because of his comeback after sheik mo. That's a load of nonsense people loved Sir Henry long before that when Joe Mercer, Steve Cauthen etc rode for him. He's always been liked by the public from day one.
That's great news AD I hope they change the race title permanently.
Brigust - it's a totally different climate now squire...those attributes are gone forever
I hope they change the race title permanently.Brigust - it's a totally different climate now squire...those attributes are gone forever
I really think that Royal Ascot should have a minute's applause for Sir Henry in celebration of his life and achievements... With respect I'm sure HRAC would consider a minute's silence far too gloomy.
I did enjoy Matt Chapman's ATR Interview with the great man ... It was fascinating to hear his views on various aspects of training/racing/life.
Possibly thousands of people applauding would upset the horses, don't you think FFF?
I'm delighted that the Queen's Vase will be run in memory of Sir Henry next week. He loved his staying races, winning this one 8 times in total, and it is a most fitting tribute.
VIDEO: Following the death of Sir Henry Cecil, Racing UK remembers some of the greatest horses trained at his famous Warren Place establishment in Newmarket.
http://www.racinguk.com/news/article/20566/cecil-greats
http://www.racinguk.com/news/article/20566/cecil-greats
Post Your Reply
Please login to post a reply.
Wonder
Instance ID: 13539