It is an odd kind of retirement that leads one to say “I’ve never been as busy” at the age of 73 but that is the kind Henrietta Knight has chosen and it suits her perfectly. It is eight years since she gave up her training licence but, thanks to the various ventures she has taken on since, she is once more close to the beating heart of jump racing, her skills enormously in demand.
The most oft-repeated refrain in winner’s enclosures around the country this winter has been: “He’s done a bit of schooling with Hen.” Bidders at Cheltenham’s December sale were stunned to find themselves bested by Knight, who went to £450,000 for the top lot on behalf of a mystery owner, since revealed to be the north-west businessman Mike Grech. The next month, she was in Doncaster, signing a tab for £370,000 for the promising youngster everyone wanted.
She has also become one of the more prolific writers on horse racing, having published in the past four years an autobiography, a study of training methods that required a tour of stables in Britain and Ireland and a book about why anyone would want to be a jump jockey that drew on interviews with 83 of them. It is not just Knight who has never been this busy; very few people have ever been this busy.
“There’s something happening all the time and it’s exciting,” she says as we talk in her farmhouse, in the Oxfordshire village where she has always lived. This is a new life, one she began to build in early 2014, following the loss of her husband, Terry Biddlecombe, with whom she had shared the extraordinary career of Best Mate, the only triple Gold Cup winner since Arkle.
“I was really not quite with it after Terry died. I was just sort of wandering about. I managed to fall over by the duck pond, rounding up the geese, and broke a leg. It was the most inconvenient, stupid thing anybody has ever done and I spent 10 days in hospital.
“I came back fairly low and I had to do something because I like my days being full. They were very full when I was looking after Terry because he needed a lot of care but once he died there was nothing much to do.”
So she wrote Not Enough Time, the story of their years together, and decided to have some horses back on the premises. “I couldn’t bear to keep looking out of the window on empty boxes. Everything in the farmyard was empty. It was depressing.”
At first, any kind of horse in need of a home was enough. Things are different now; Knight’s 30 boxes are full and there is a queue of trainers wanting to send her their charges for the best foundation course in jumping this side of the Irish Sea.
The upcoming Cheltenham Festival will feature many of her former pupils, including Pentland Hills, a Champion Hurdle contender. She recalls phoning his trainer, Nicky Henderson, with an upbeat early report. “He wasn’t rated very high on the Flat,” replied the doubtful Henderson. “I think he’s going to rate a good bit higher over hurdles,” she assured him.
The Welsh National winner, Potters Corner, came here four days before his moment of glory at Chepstow for a session in Knight’s “loose school”, a tight little circuit where horses practice jumping without a rider. Such is the value placed on her work by Christian Williams, the Glamorgan-based trainer, that he made the six-hour round trip with Potters Corner and plans to do so again shortly before the Grand National in April.
The loose school, the only one of its kind in the area that Knight knows of, has attained semi‑legendary status. Gordon Elliott took careful note of its dimensions so he could replicate it at his hugely successful County Meath yard, where, to her amusement, a sign labels it “Hen’s ring”.
It is not enough, she points out quietly, to have the thing itself; you must also know how to use it for the benefit of this particular animal. “It’s no good just standing in the middle like a circus master, cracking a whip.”
Knight has little use for loud noises of any kind, reckoning that the best trainers are nearly always laid-back characters whose placidity is communicated to their horses. She cites the example of “my hero” Aidan O’Brien, whose four-by-four became hopelessly stuck in a muddy field last month while the pair were watching work at his Ballydoyle stable. “Lots of people would have ranted or flapped. He didn’t react. He was totally calm, which is typical of him.”
Beneath Knight’s cheerful calmness is a formidable drive and she deplores absence of drive in others. “Man in a car the other day, got to the edge of the flood in the village, saw other cars coming through it, panicked and tried to turn round in the flood and go back the other way because he thought he’d get stuck. Caused chaos because my girls were trying to go through the puddle on their horses at the same time. And this idiot was trying to reverse and got himself into a right pickle.
“He was a classic example of someone who’ll get nowhere in life. He went back home. He ventured no further. You’ve got to go forward.”
