A significant anniversary slipped past the racing community on Friday. It is now half a century since the much-missed Sir Henry Cecil saddled his very first runner and embarked on the training career that would lead him to greatness and, ultimately, Frankel.
The signs were not particularly promising when the unheralded 26-year-old sent Holyland to Ascot on 12 April 1969. Having drifted to 10-1, the three-year-old filly led at halfway but faded to be 12th of the 20 runners in the Merry Maiden Stakes, worth £770 to the winner.
A month and five days later, Cecil had his first winner. From our perspective, knowing what was to come, it seems a trifling delay but evidently it caused him agonies and he never forgot overhearing a stranger tell a friend at the races: “Don’t back that, it’s one of Cecil’s. He couldn’t train ivy up a wall.”
“When you’re a trainer, having runners, a month is a long time when you don’t know where your first winner is going to come from,” said his widow, Lady Cecil, as she reflected on the anniversary this week. She lives now in a rather grand old house close enough to the centre of Newmarket to hear the whinnys of yearlings as they are led into Tattersalls’ sales ring. Portraits of Frankel and his brother Noble Mission, who she trained to win the Champion Stakes the year after Cecil’s passing, face each other in the main room.
By coincidence rather than design, a new book full of insights into Cecil and his final years was published on Thursday, the work of Tony Rushmer, who was hired to revive the trainer’s website in 2006 and ended up seeing at first hand one of the most remarkable comebacks in all of sport. Poleaxed by the death from cancer of his twin brother, David, in 2000, Cecil found professional success ebbing away, to the point where he had just a dozen winners in 2005. The Triumph of Henry Cecil traces the trainer’s determined climb back to the top of the mountain. “Tony’s worked really hard on it and he’s been in touch with all the Warren Place team,” Lady Cecil said. “I hope everyone likes it.”
She recalls having great doubts about whether there would be any comeback. “I think Henry did stop believing, a bit. It’s hard not to when you’ve got nine horses out in the string. I think he did lose his confidence.” But Cecil made a determined effort to find horses that might help revive his stable’s fortunes; Rushmer recalls seeing him at a low-profile auction in late 2005, at a time when Newmarket’s other big names had jetted off in pursuit of sun. But just when it looked as though things might be turning around, the trainer got his own cancer diagnosis.
“I just didn’t think he would cope with it at all,” Lady Cecil recalls, “because he simply didn’t cope with David’s. He’d worked so hard and we were just building everything back up … I was thinking, it’s going to be doubly terrible. But he had such a different mindset for himself. He only told immediate family, the staff didn’t know. He didn’t want any fuss. He just got on with things.”
That was the adversity that Cecil overcame to produce a succession of star horses in his last seven years. It explains the joy that, as Rushmer relates, led his staff to gather in the road outside a Newmarket pub and stop Cecil’s car as he returned in triumph on the day of Light Shift’s Oaks success. “We swamped it,” Dee Deacon, head lass at the yard, says in the book. “You’d think he was a movie star. We were leaning through the window, giving him a kiss.”
And then came Frankel, who got the benefit of Cecil’s 40 years of accumulated knowledge. As John Gosden says in a foreword to Rushmer’s book: “He had the courage to train him. Henry made it very clear to the horse that he was the trainer and the horse was not going to be allowed to train itself.”
Now Lady Cecil is looking for the right charitable project connected to racing that might carry Cecil’s name in the future. “Life goes on,” she says. “I’m very lucky, I’ve got family and everything. But I miss him all the time.”
