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Trainer Barry Hills, who sent out more than 3,000 winners including five British Classics throughout his career, has died aged 88.
Along with those five British Classics, Hills achieved Stayers’ Hurdle success with Nomadic Way in 1992 while a Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe trophy came in 1973 with Rheingold.
Entirely self-made, Hills retired from training in 2011 and passed on the licence to his son Charlie.
One of my favourite trainers and, by all accounts, a top bloke.
My most sincere condolences to his family and friends.
Here’s my favourite Barry Hills horse. Maybe we could all post a video of ours?
Sad news indeed. He was one of the top trainers when I was growing up and getting into the sport along with the likes of Cecil, Hern, Walwyn, O’Brien, Harwood etc.
His biography Frankincense and More by Robin Oakley is a good read if you want to find out more about him. Pretty ferocious and determined character which I think were key traits in taking him from stable lad to Arc winning trainer.
Thinking of his family and friends for whom he’ll be an irreplaceable loss.
It has to be Further Flight. I saw him win a handicap at Chester before he went on to be such a popular stayer.
RIP Mr Hills. I believe he was a very astute punter as well as trainer.
Gildoran was one sticks in my mind as was in early years of my interest in the sport, also like Sure Blade ridden by Kiwi jockey Brent Thomson for some of his time on the track . .
Probably my favourite Barry Hill’s horse was Nomadic Way , very good both codes and very tough .The head of a true racing dynasty with his sons (riders and trainers alike) carrying on his legacy in the sport.
He had a whole host of great horses through his hands that many others will no doubt recount their own individual memories of and he was one of the great raft of trainers (Cecil, Stoute, Hern, Dunlop, Harwood, Walwyn & Balding etc) that were the cornerstones of the racing that I grew up watching and loving.
With that all being said, to me Barry Hills (along with his wife Penny) will always be remembered as the man that was a fundamental part of nuturing a fresh off the boat 18 year old superstar down on his luck US Triple Crown winning jockey by the name of Steve Cauthen who under Barry’s mentorship/guidance went on to revolutionise not only the way jockeys rode in the UK but also the sport in general.
Condolences to the Hills family and friends at this difficult time and a personal thank you to Barry Hills for his long and undeniable contribution to horse racing.
The obituary in the “Racing Post”:
And some wise advice from the man himself:
“Never bet odds-on. If you could buy money they’d sell it at the shop down the road. And don’t be frightened of a long price – under those circumstances always have more on!”
Very sad to hear this even though he lived to be 88 years old. May he rest in peace and my sincere condolences to his family.
One of my absolute favourites on YT, describing how it didn’t work out for him at Manton. Great footage including a very young Robert Sangster.
My fav horse was unbeaten 2-yo old Royal Applause who won a decent Newbury Maiden, the Coventry, the Gimcrack and the Middle Park Stakes. You rarely find a 2-yo nowadays with such fine CV.
Peter Easterby, Kevin Prendergast, Barry Hills. Racing has lost some seriously big names this year.
CAS, you can add Jonathan Neesom to that list. Though he never trained a racehorse, he knew a lot more than most trainers know about their own horses. And he was a joy to listen to.
Correct me, if I’m wrong, but despite being involved with Sangster (and also Magnier to some certain extent), Barry Hills never hyped up any of his horses. That’s what made him such a class act and he also won the best turned out award numerous times, if you look at HIS wardrobe.
A nice tribute by Julian Muscat:
Maybe Mr Hills was right to say:
“The bookies don’t like losing but landing a coup is tremendously satisfying. I think racing needs a little bit of skulduggery; it needs a bit of fascination but it has become over-policed to an extent.”
Great point on Cauthen , be fair to say Hills definitely took advantage of his skills before Cecil brought him on board , rightly Piggott is seen as the ultimate flat jockey but I’d have Steve just below him , no better judge of pace
Piggott would at times manhandle horses , Cauthan didn’t , his talent on relaxing horses was another of his talents
This great gent first really came to my notice when he engaged a youthful Steve Cauthen to ride for him.What a talent both men were.To my mind they made a perfect combination and Barry Hills will leave a lasting legacy through his family.Although many have imitated none have equalled this quiet unassuming gent of British racing.
Condolences to his family and friends.
good luck to allObituary in the Sunday Telegraph:
“Barry Hills, who has died aged 88, had one of the most remarkable careers in British horse racing.
Having started out as a head lad in Newmarket, Hills pulled off a spectacular racecourse gamble that earned him the funds to set up as a trainer on his own account. He went on to send out more than 3,000 winners, among them victories in five English Classics and a Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
The occasion for Hill’s betting coup was the 1968 Lincoln Handicap at Doncaster. At the time he was travelling head lad for the trainer John Oxley, whose horse Frankincense, owned by Lady Halifax, won the race by half a length. Hills, who was then 30, had already had his successes as a gambler (the year before he had made a packet backing the 50-1 winner of the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood), accumulating a substantial pot of betting money.
Throughout the winter he and a group of friends had backed Frankincense for the Lincoln down from 66-1, placing a multitude of relatively small bets at different bookmakers. When the horse duly obliged, Hills’s share of the winnings was said to be more than £60,000, a huge sum at that time and more than enough to purchase the South Bank yard in Lambourn from Lester Piggott’s father Keith.
Hills continued to enjoy a punt long after establishing his reputation as one of the country’s leading trainers, often staking several thousand pounds on a horse. In the 1990s he said that he aimed to augment his income by around £50,000 a year from his betting.
He told Pacemaker magazine in 2006: “I have maybe 10 decent bets a year, in handicaps mainly, but it depends on the odds. I like value for money, so I don’t back at short odds.” Indeed, one of his axioms was: “Never bet odds-on. If you could buy money, they would sell it at a shop down the road.”
Among his best touches were his Ebor winners Further Flight, in 1990, and Sanmartino, in 1995, when he won £35,000. Another was his Cambridgeshire winner Risen Moon (1990), on which the owner, his great friend and patron Robert Sangster, was said to have won £300,000.
Almost exclusively, Hills backed his own runners, for the obvious reason that he knew more about them than about anyone else’s. Sometimes, when he had two horses in a race, to achieve a good price he would book a more illustrious jockey for the one less favoured. “At heart this is a game of intrigue and fascination,” he once told the Racing Post. “It is respectable skulduggery.”
Barrington William Hills was born in Worcester on April 2 1937. His father, Bill, was head lad to the Worcestershire trainer Tom Rimell; his mother, Phyllis (née Biddle), was from a family of hay and coal merchants.
When Bill contracted the tuberculosis that would cut short his life, the family moved to Phyllis’s home town of Upton-upon-Severn, and Barry was sent to school in Worcester at Mr Whittaker’s (known locally as “Mr Whittaker’s Academy for Backward Young Gentlemen”). He seems to have spent less time studying than getting to know the horses at Fred Rimell’s yard at Kinnersley, where he was taken on as an apprentice in 1952. He also enjoyed hunting.
After moving to George Colling’s yard at Newmarket, he rode his first winner in 1954, and three years later was called up for National Service. He served little more than six months before being released on compassionate grounds because of his father’s illness. Having grown too heavy to prosper as a jockey, he became Colling’s travelling head lad, remaining in the role when John Oxley took over after Colling’s death in 1959.
Hills started his training career at South Bank in 1969, and within only three years was proving himself a powerful force. In 1972 he won the Dante at York with Rheingold, which a few weeks later came within a nose of winning the Derby when it was touched off by Roberto.
Hills was not alone in regarding Rheingold as an unlucky loser: its jockey, Ernie Johnson, elected not to pick up his whip in the closing stages for fear that he could not keep his horse straight: “As Lester [Piggott, Roberto’s jockey] said to Ernie afterwards, he should have just hit him and argued it out in the stewards’ room,” Hills observed many years later. It was a source of great frustration to Hills that he never won the Derby, despite training the second horse on four occasions, twice losing in a photo-finish.
By the end of the 1972 season, however, he was already one of England’s top 10 trainers, with 55 winners. And in 1973 Rheingold presented Hills with the greatest win of his career when, partnered by Piggott, it prevailed by two and a half lengths over the great filly Allez France in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Ten days before the race Hills had backed the horse with £1,000 at 12-1. Rheingold, which also twice won the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud, ran under the name of Henry Zeisel, a London nightclub owner who paid Hills the training fees with bundles of cash in a Marks & Spencer carrier bag.
Hills had his first Classic winner – Dibidale, in the Irish Oaks – in 1974, and was soon supervising the largest string of Flat horses in the country. In 1975 he sent out 81 winners, 13 of them with the sprinter Nagwa and nine with Duboff. In 1978 he won the English 1,000 Guineas with Enstone Spark, and in 1979 the 2,000 Guineas with Tap On Wood.
His long association with Robert Sangster led to his being installed, in 1986, at Manton, the 2,300-acre estate on the Wiltshire Downs developed by Sangster at a cost, it was said, of £14 million. This was training on an industrial scale, with facilities that included 20 houses and two hostels, cricket and football pitches, and a pub. Among the 90-odd employees were three assistant trainers, three head lads and more than 50 stable staff.
Sangster had originally hired the brilliant National Hunt trainer Michael Dickinson, but after the first season had yielded a mere £14,000 in prize money Sangster sacked him in favour of Hills, who in 1987 sent out 101 winners – 73 of them for his patron. Among them was Sir Harry Lewis, winner of the Irish Derby.
Hills was to remain at Manton for four years, during which he trained some 400 winners. When Sangster considered selling the yard, Hills sought to raise the money to buy it as a base for three separate trainers, approaching figures such as Sheikh Hamdan al-Maktoum, but was unable to secure a workable deal. “I loved the place,” he later said. “In the end I was less than half a million short of raising the money.”
Returning to Lambourn, Hills spent more than £3 million designing and building Faringdon Place, which in 2011 he would pass on to Charlie Hills, one of his five sons, all of whom became involved in racing.
Hills continued to send out winners until he was in his seventies. His other three English Classic victories came with Moonax (St Leger, 1994); Haafhd (2,000 Guineas, 2004, ridden by his son Richard); and Ghanaati (1,000 Guineas, 2009). He also won the Irish 1,000 Guineas in 1993 with Nicer and in 1999 with Hula Angel; the 1994 Irish Oaks with Bolas; the 1988 Prix de l’ Abbaye with Handsome Sailor; and two runnings of the Champion Stakes, with Cormorant Wood (1983) and Storming Home (2001). He won two Ascot Gold Cups with Gildoran.
Perhaps his favourite horse, however, was the grey Further Flight, which won the Jockey Club Cup five times in succession between 1991 and 1995; as well as the Ebor at York, it collected two Goodwood Cups, ending its career with 24 victories from 70 starts.
As for his frustrating record in the Derby after Rheingold, Hawaiian Sound lost in a photo-finish to Shirley Heights in 1978, and Hills again had to be content with the runner-up spot when Glacial Storm was beaten by Kahyasi in 1988, and Blue Stag by Quest For Fame two years later.
Apart from Sangster, Hills’s patrons included Sheikh Hamdan al-Maktoum, Prince Khalid Abdullah and Alan Clore. Among those who rode for him regularly over the years were his twin sons, Michael and Richard; Steve Cauthen; Ernie Johnson; Willie Carson; Brent Thomson; Cash Asmussen; Darryl Holland; and Ray Cochrane.
Hills retired in 2011 after undergoing gruelling treatment for throat cancer, passing on his string to his son Charlie. He briefly resumed training in 2014 after his eldest boy, John, who trained horses for Sheikh Hamdan, died from cancer at the age of 53. He finally gave up his licence in 2015.
A famously natty dresser who counted hunting, shooting, golf and gardening among his interests, Hills was methodical with his horses, and equally methodical when it came to business. His temper was not the mildest: one of his owners, Dick Bonnycastle, named his horse Mr Combustible after its trainer.
He married first, in 1959, Maureen Newson. Their children were John, and the twins Michael and Richard, both very successful jockeys. He married secondly, in 1977, Penny Woodhouse, with whom he had two more sons, George, who went into the bloodstock insurance business in Kentucky, and the trainer Charlie Hills.
Barry Hills, born April 2 1937, death announced June 28 2025”
R.I.P. Barry
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