A charming toff of the turf
Stoker Hartington
MINCE PIE FOR STARTERS by John Oaksey Headline, £18.99, pp. 278, ISBN 0755310667 John Oaksey is the archetypal English gentleman. He is a sweetheart, a star, the bravest of the brave, funny and kind: the only person who will disagree with this is himself. His modesty is complete, his successes are never his, the credit always goes elsewhere, to the horses mostly, or to his friends, his colleagues, his wives, his parents, his opponents, to luck. Wherever, but never to him.
Through these lenses so tinted with generosity as to make them sometimes almost opaque, we are treated to an account of his life, which has been a series of successes, triumphs over adversity and victories in many fields. He tries to pretend otherwise, but this is a rare failure.
Horse-racing dominates the story as it has dominated Oaksey's life. The horses come first, indeed his affection for them is almost anthropomorphic, but not quite. After all, he entrusted so many of them with his safety, and they rewarded him time after time and with, by the standards of the crazy sport he followed for so long, comparatively minor long-term damage to his body. Oaksey is fulsome in his praise for the animals that gave him such excitement and he has repaid that debt several times over, to them and to racing and perhaps most importantly to his co-riders. His contribution to the welfare of jockeys through his non-stop campaigning and fund-raising for the Injured Jockeys Fund deserves public recognition, but of course the author gives all the credit elsewhere, Certainly he was born with at least a silver toothpick in his mouth, but spoilt he wasn't. He was brought up to compete, and this he has done all his life with an enthusiasm which is inspiring. I would have loved to read more of the rigours that such enthusiasm entailed, the fasting and training. He ran the London Marathon in well under four hours aged 54, having only started to train in January that year. This achievement is dismissed in two short paragraphs. Typically for Oaksey he did it for one of the many good causes that he has supported throughout his life, in this case the campaign to save the Grand National.
We hear very little of the hardships he must have endured, nor are there complaints of any sort, with a few wonderful exceptions such as his furious disdain for the then vicar of Oaksey, Canon Brian Phillips, who announced that he would not allow our hero to marry (for the second time) in his local church. Oaksey had never asked if he could.
I have only one complaint about this charming book: the index is a bad joke and not worthy of its name. Otherwise I loved it: old-fashioned the standards may be, modest to an almost ridiculous degree the style, but shining through it all is a man in love with life, with sport, tradition and competition. How lucky the sport of racing has been to have him as its leading writer and advocate for so many years.
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