'Everyone was asking how I stayed on - it was the fear of another bollocking from The Duke!'

When Richard Johnson started out in the saddle, his ambitions were rather modest. There were no outlandish dreams or grand plans, he just wanted to quench his thirst to ride competitively. The thought of mixing it in points was enough to set his pulse racing.

So when Space Mariner got him off the mark at the age of 16 at the now defunct Brampton Bryan point-to-point on April 9, 1994, no-one could have foreseen the 3,819 winners under rules in Britain and Ireland that would follow over the next 27 years.

Johnson was a farmer’s boy, his roots set deep in the Herefordshire soil, but he was also a third-generation jockey following his grandfather Ivor and father Keith. And just three weeks after Space Mariner's success, he knocked off the first of those winners under rules on a horse as much a part of the family as he himself was.