How Gavin Pritchard-Gordon became Spanker - and earned the disdain of the Princess Royal's gamekeeper

Racing likes to pride itself on the fact that it's a 'great leveller', a sport where lords and ladies mix happily with barrow boys and binmen. 'All men are equal on the turf and under it', so the saying goes, although as George Orwell would no doubt have told you, some are more equal than others.

As my privately educated wife likes to remind me, I'm still a "chippy ex-grammar school boy" at heart, so I came to Follow Your Leader with expectations that were quickly fulfilled. I thought the memoirs of Gavin Pritchard-Gordon might be a tale of privilege, peppered with anecdotes of public school, hunting, shooting and the right kind of hat, set in stately homes among chaps whose wives have eccentric names but cook damnably good suppers for their pals, who are often drunk and given to philandering, when they're not doing something rather crucial over lunch in the City.

I was right, of course, but then I would have felt cheated had the likes of 'Bonk' and 'Badger' not appeared, to rub shoulders with 'Tonk' and 'Spanker', alongside bombastic Jockey Club lords and deferential ordinary folk, in the butler's pantry with a bottle of port, like an exotic game of Cluedo played while reading Wind In The Willows.

If I ever, while reading, found myself drifting into innate chippiness at the other-worldly antics of a curious breed, I simply returned to Brough Scott's wise counsel in the foreword to a book he describes as "a vivid and unique chronicle of an age that is gone".

"That some of it may seem out of date or even order these days is not the point," he advises. "The assorted triumphs and disasters did actually happen . . . His is a tale of gratitude for the gifts he was given, a love letter to the game that enthused him, and especially to Newmarket . . ."

So – although personally I would have left out the jolly bits about the latterly disgraced Sir Clement Freud – unless you intend to spend the entire 270 pages railing needlessly against social injustice and drink-driving, it would be best to enter into the spirit of the age from the outset, where our hero blots his copybook at Radley by proving hopelessly inadequate to the task of beating (as in thrashing with a stick) a younger boy (who went on to be racing correspondent of the Daily Express) for the crime of being "absent from Evensong in Chapel without permission".

He thus earns himself the unwanted nickname of Spanker, but surely also a lifetime of personal satisfaction and the reward of coming across as a pretty decent fellow in his own story.

Follow Your Leader

Scott is right, this is very much a tale of bygone days – although they persist on the turf rather more doggedly than elsewhere – but the names of Pritchard-Gordon's best horses (the 1983 Lockinge and Sussex winner Noalcoholic being the pick of them) join the dots of an affectionate "walk up memory lane", while well-known racing figures are brought to life by a man who trained for, married, drank with and enjoyed the company of them throughout a colourful 50-year career that took him to all the right places.

Not that he likes to dwell on the glory days. There's nothing self-regarding about this tale, as we find when he recounts the ignominy of a day's shooting at Sandringham, where his rank incompetence earned the disdain of the Princess Royal's gamekeeper. Of course, the big moments aren't ignored, but the author's highlights are plainly the ones shared with family and friends, not always at the marquee meetings, such as the winners he saddled for his father, brother Giles and sons Rupert and Paddy.

Gavin Pritchard Gordon at the launch of Follow The Leader

In part, the book is a mournful one, lamenting the deterioration of his beloved Newmarket as an old-fashioned and characterful town, drifting lazily into an assault on the "wretched woke-mongers". But the lows don't last long. Divorces and deaths are given due respect but not dwelt upon, as he recalls with joy those he has loved and lost in his days as a trainer – from which vocation he retired, on the blunt advice of Giles, at the age of 50 – and also at the British Horseracing Board, Newmarket Trainers' Federation and Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, still surrounded by the sport's upper echelons.

Sometimes the great and good were neither, as we learn from tales like the one of lofty trainer Tom Jones, the worse for wear through drink and flummoxed so badly by an unannounced visit from Sheikh Hamdan that he ends up on his arse in a pile of shavings while his principal owner looks on in delight. GPAG, as he dubs himself, is under no illusions about the upstanding nature of his friends or patrons, it seems, but he rarely judges and seems to bear precious little ill will.

From his days following clumsily in the footsteps of his mentor, Newmarket trainer Harvey Leader (in case you were wondering where the title for the book came from), then through thick and thin at Shalfleet, Stanley House and Trillium Place stables, and into his second career, Pritchard-Gordon clearly relished the task and the world he moved in.

The fact it is a world inhabited and understood by only a tiny percentage of the rest of the world is neither here nor there for the purposes of the book, which should be picked up and taken for what it is: an affectionate romp by a thoroughly nice chap through an age that retains its obvious charms and still possesses the ability to entertain even a chippy ex-grammar school boy.

Follow Your Leader, by Gavin Pritchard-Gordon, is independently published and available on Amazon for £11.99

The remarkable story of a true local legend

Stories are still told at Fakenham of the exploits of the legendary Cool Roxy, and these have now been turned into a fascinating read by Aaron Gransby.

Gransby is best known as a writer of dystopian suburban fiction, but he is in somewhat happier territory with Cool Roxy, who caught his eye not when winning one of his record 11 races at the course but when running down the field as a 100-1 outsider in the 2005 Agfa Hurdle.

Taken by his front-running style, Gransby, a long-time jumps fan, vowed to find out more about the Fakenham specialist and his connections Alan and Pat Blackmore. He didn't have to go far, given they trained just down the road from him in Hertfordshire, and so began an association that continues to this day, with Alan back at his favourite track to help launch the book last month at the grand old age of 95.

As you would therefore expect, the Fakenham Favourite, is certainly not a dry, niche read packed with form book analysis. Instead, it really gets to the nub of the people behind the horse.

It is not an entirely happy tale as the story includes the dark days long before Cool Roxy when the Blackmores lost their son Michael in a tragic fall at Market Rasen in 1986 and briefly quit the game altogether. Other heartfelt moments include when they won the memorial race for their son at Warwick the following year.

Cool Roxy has also been lost now, dying of colic in 2017, but he made such a mark at Fakenham he has a bar named after him in the members' enclosure, one he opened himself in 2015, and his pictures are still on the wall. This book will also help to ensure his story is not forgotten.
David Milnes

The Fakenham Favourite – The Story of Cool Roxy and the Blackmores, by Aaron Gransby, is published by Gerard Books and available from aarongransby.com for £14.99

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