A moving, not-to-be-missed interview with Noel Martin, owner of Jacqueline Quest

Published in the Racing Post on May 9, 2010

It's ten o'clock in the morning and I'm showered and shaved and about to leave the house for a lunchtime meeting with Noel Martin. I'm in London and he's in Birmingham, but things are going smoothly and I'm anticipating a trouble-free run as I shut the front door behind me. One hundred and twenty five miles away, Noel is already two hours into his preparations for my visit and the complications are as familiar as they are inevitable.

While the rest of us have to ponder little more than the choice between skimmed and semi-skimmed at this time of day, Noel must endure an entire military campaign, orchestrated by a small army of carers and nurses, if he is to engage with the outside world.

Not that he'll be going outside. He went out on Sunday, to Newmarket, and again on Tuesday, to Bath, and now he's paying the price. For the next month, his life will tick away, second by uncomfortable second, between the four dull, yellow walls of a dimly lit room on the ground floor of a quiet Victorian house in an uneventful Midlands suburb, which is where I find him.

A carer opens the front door and I can see the 50-year-old lying on his side on a hospital bed in the gloom ahead of me. At least, I can see his head; a brown head with neat, braided hair, resting on a beige towel on an orange pillowcase. The rest of him is covered by a light-blue cotton sheet, pulled all the way up to his neck. A large gas fire a few feet away pumps out a parching heat. A flat-screen television in the corner of the room is showing At The Races. The only movement comes from a whirring fan that ruffles the lower reaches of the sheet.

Noel has been washed and massaged and readied for a day that will contain little more than this. Once, he was a fit, athletic, questing man who developed property, loved to ride horses and spend time with his wife, Jacqueline. Then, on June 16, 1996, while he was employed as a plasterer in Mahlow, in East Germany, two young neo-Nazis threw a lump of concrete through the windscreen of his car, he swerved off the road, hit a tree and woke up to his new existence as a quadriplegic.

His attackers were sentenced to five and eight years in custody and have long since been freed, but Noel remains in his prison, deprived of all meaningful bodily functions and condemned to deteriorate slowly while the world goes on without him.

Jacqueline died of cancer in 2000, but he will never be alone, no matter how much he wants to be – the 24-hour demands of his helplessness make sure of that.

"That's my life, really," he says, gesturing with his eyes at the TV, while what one imagines to be his right arm, the only remotely functional part of his body below the neck, moves haphazardly beneath the sheet.

"I've got the whole house and I can't go into it. For the last four years, all I do is stay in bed. I went racing twice this week and I'll be in bed now until Royal Ascot. Most of the time I go to bed thinking of death and I wake up thinking of death. The only thing that stops me thinking of death is the horses, because they're special to me."

'To have the race taken away from her was a big blow'

The horses are what bring Noel out of his exile these days. Last Sunday he was on the Rowley Mile to see 66-1 shot Jacqueline Quest, trained by Henry Cecil, pass the post first in the 1,000 Guineas, only to be demoted to second place for causing interference. Two days later, he saw the eight-year-old Baddam finish fifth in a Class 4 handicap, an effort some way below the two he posted in one memorable week in 2006, when he won both the Ascot Stakes and the Queen Alexandra Stakes at Royal Ascot, and his Glorious Goodwood success two years later.

Baddam's place in history is already assured, but it cuts the owner deep that the horse named in memory of his wife has been denied hers for the time being. He veers between indignation, despair and philosophical acceptance of the outcome of the Guineas, but the one plain thing is that racing continues to inspire passion in him, keeps him truly alive, whatever the physical cost of a day at the track.

"I have to get up five hours before I want to leave, to get ready," says Noel, "and then drive two hours, so that's a whole day already by the time I arrive. I came back from Newmarket and I was saturated with sweat. My body doesn't work like normal any more – if it's cold I sweat, if it's hot I'm fine. I thought it was going to be cold, so I had a vest underneath, a shirt and a jumper and a jacket, and I sweated that much it went through to the jacket and the jumper and dyed the shirt underneath. Even my tie was soaking wet.

"Then to have the race taken away from her was a big blow. It's in the rule book if you look, but it's not clear and over the last ten or 20 years I've seen horses bump 20 times worse than that and not get thrown out. When I heard there was a stewards' inquiry, I even thought maybe it's not us.

"She might go and do it again, she could do, she's a good horse regardless, but when I bought her I had a dream to win two or three Group 1s. If you have ten pence today and you lose it, then you win a million pounds tomorrow, you're still short of ten pence, that's the way I'm looking at it. But I don't like to live in the past, time is the master, so I just have to be humble about it, move on and hope she can prove at Royal Ascot that she's the class horse."

While many of us book our holidays around the racing calendar, for Noel it's a more pressing matter. Ten years after the crash that left him paralysed, he declared his intention to go to Switzerland to commit suicide, and while the trip has been postponed, initially for him to organise his financial legacy to the educational and anti-racism charities he champions, the intention to take his life remains. This year would be the right time, if his health permitted him to travel, which turns the rest of Jacqueline Quest's season into a memorial, a shrine and a vehicle for his few remaining hopes.

'We were supposed to take morphine and go to sleep'

Had Noel's first plan not been wrecked by cruel circumstance, Baddam and Jacqueline Quest would never have come to pass. He had agreed a suicide pact with his wife when she fell ill, with the couple intending to die together once they had married after 18 years of life together.

"While everyone was enjoying the garden party, we were supposed to take morphine and go to sleep," he remembers. "But she got rushed into hospital, we had to bring the wedding forward, we got married for 36 hours, then they had to dose her with morphine and she died two days later, although you couldn't speak to her because she was sleeping all the time.

"She always said to me if I couldn't die too, I should do her proud, chase my dreams until I couldn't cope any more. So last night, when they wanted to take me to hospital at three in the morning to operate on me, when my temperature was 39 degrees and they had to keep washing me down with cold water, I had to think. I knew if I went with them, I might be in there for a long time.

"Perhaps I don't know when to give up, but I thought no, what about the horse, what's going to happen to Ascot? No way.

"If it meant turning up at Ascot in my bed, as long as they'll let me through the gate, I'm not going to miss that showdown. I want to see the horse come back and claim her rightful place, and I'm going to see it no matter what. She's a special horse to me. There's not a morning that comes that I don't think about Jacqueline, and this filly could be my last roll of the dice."

A bead of sweat inches its way across Noel's forehead towards his pillow and he calls for a carer to mop his brow with a towel. Later, he'll call for a glass of ice water that will be raised to his mouth for him to sip it through a straw. Three times, he'll ask for a cigarette to be lit and placed between his lips for him to draw on. The dry crackle of the burning tobacco interrupts his quiet but rich Edgbaston-Caribbean voice as he retraces the life that led him to this room and these final months of mortality.

He was born in Jamaica into a life of relative plenty, hard work and strict discipline. He was taken to England at the age of ten, remembers his first bet, a winning one on Bill Marshall's My Swanee, at around the same time, recalls his fascination with the well-dressed, fun-loving people on the racetrack and his early dream of being a jockey.

He ran away, slept in parks, left home at 14, did odd jobs and then went into property development, abandoned plans to learn to fly because it would detract from his ability to own racehorses, learned to ride, nurtured an ambition to compete in the Grand National, bought himself a racehorse, went to Germany, came back in a wheelchair.

In the meantime, he met Jacqueline in a bookie's on the Dudley Road.

"She was working for Joe Coral and it was my best payday in a betting shop."

He recounts all this with the confidence and boldness of a spirited man who once had the physicality to break free from the shackles of his immigrant roots. In the West Indies, his family had been "comfortable", in Birmingham they were "poor as church mice", but by the time he reached his mid-30s he was a black man whose horses, wearing the colours of the Jamaican flag, were winning trophies in front of the Queen at one of the last great bastions of the British class system.

'There ain't enough black people on the racecourse'

Then, as now, however, his pride in his achievements, at picking his own horses and pursuing his dreams is tempered by his frustration at the unwillingness of others in his position to follow his pioneering lead. He speaks with fondness of people in racing, of his trainers, John Dunlop, Mick Channon, Ian Williams, Dandy Nicholls, but isn't blind to the exclusive nature of the sport.

"People used to laugh at me when I came back in my boots from riding," he says, "and when I told them I was going to buy a horse and win a race at Royal Ascot. A lot of people I know, black and white, think they can't afford to do it. If you go in in great numbers, it can be done, but they are too afraid to take the chance. Eventually, they wished they had.

"Even now, when you go on to the racecourse, there ain't enough black people and it's because they feel like they're not wanted there and they're not sure how they'll be treated. Not that it matters that much to me, but that's the reason. They'd rather stop in the betting shop and spend their money there on gambling.

"There will be more as black people become more wealthy, but you don't have to be wealthy, you just have to be a lover of the game and take a chance."

Noel's racing quest began in earnest after Jacqueline died, but it had been in his mind for far longer. He has dreams, he says, and he lives by them, and one of them concerned Baddam. "I dreamt of seeing Baddam 35 years ago," he says. "I dreamt of seeing a place called Six Mile Bottom that I'd never heard of, and I remember the shock of driving to Newmarket and seeing it all those years later.

"I knew what was going to happen to me in Germany before it happened, too. When I told people about it, everybody laughed, but it came true. I don't know where they come from, but I get these crazy dreams that aren't crazy at all. I've had out-of-body experiences, died twice, people came for me to go with them and I refused to go.

"I've seen ghosts, and I had a dream about Jacqueline Quest long before I even bought her, that she was going to win. Ninety per cent of the time, they come true."

Even now, the dream is still alive, but Noel is nearing the end of his resistance. It's more weariness than self-pity that makes him want to die, more acceptance than bitterness, and there is still unfinished business on this earth that will drive him until the day comes when he draws his final breath in a Swiss clinic.

"When I look back, I'm quite proud and chuffed of what I've done for myself through life," he says, "but if I choose to die tomorrow, it's not because I'm depressed, it's because I want to die. It's what I choose. Some people choose to go abroad, I choose to die. It's no different, but it's the part people don't understand.

"I don't know how long I'll be racing for. It could be the end of the year. There's nothing I enjoy now apart from this one thing, and I'm spending 360 days in bed for five days of pleasure. I've done it for the last four years and I don't think I can face another.

"I haven't bought a yearling for two seasons and I'm not even thinking about next year, but I'm certainly not going to lie here and dream nothing. My dream was to win a couple of Classics and earn enough to go back to Jamaica one last time, but that was taken away from me. Now, I'm hoping I can hang in there for Ascot, maybe another Group 1, put her away until the backend of the season and then Breeders' Cup here we come.

"But if we don't go any further, I'm happy, I've run my 100 metres and it's time for someone else to take the baton. In life, you don't just come and go, you put something down in history – that way you can't die. I've been down in history in Ascot and Goodwood and Newmarket and Germany, and maybe this horse will still take me back to Jamaica before I die."

Martin on . . .

Picking a horse People ask how I know what to do. But how do you know what to do when you buy bananas or apples? If you see a bad apple, you ain't gonna buy it, and you don't know what's internal until you get it home. You have the pedigree to guide you, and if you see a good, strong horse that you can afford, you buy it.

Buying a horse I'll know what kind of horse I'm looking for, I'll pick a horse out of the catalogue, wait for him to come through the ring and in ten minutes I'll be on my way home. Mick [Channon] will ring and say: 'I thought you was going to buy a horse today, where are you?' And I'll say: 'I'm on my way home. Just take it home for me, can you?'

Choosing Baddam I knew his grandfather Ela-Mana-Mou, because I lost a hundred quid on him the last time he ran!

Choosing a trainer I found a lot of trainers were a bit scared, which I could understand. I'm a mad man going into a different field and wanting to spend 10p and win the Derby five times over. There's nothing wrong with that if you can do it, but they're a bit worried and scared to run their horses in different races.

Racism I didn't know what racism was about when I came here. I didn't know what colour a person was back home. We didn't look at things that way. Mr Wong was Mr Wong, he was Jamaican. Harry Singh was Harry Singh, he was Jamaican. But when I came here I was chased by people with bicycle chains and I didn't know why. They tried to beat you and you had to retaliate.

A sense of proportion My main problem in life is not being able to walk from the age of 36, and watching my wife die and not being able to touch her or hug her. The other things are nothing. Losing a horserace is trivial and I know what reality is. If you settle for reality and the truth, you'll be all right. Nothing can reach you or hurt you.

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