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The Telegraph is reporting ‘live’ from the trial:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/29/men-accused-of-firebombing-starmers-home-in-court/
Reply from Ex RubyLight:
10 out of the 11 horses mentioned were born 2019 or later. I wonder what happened to Lascar Du Mathan, he was so promising
RIP to all of themBitofajokelike, Buachaill Deas, Golden Goose, I Am Mimi (FR), Kaptain Bay, Lascar Du Mathan (FR), Miracle Knights, Noticebox (GB), Slaney Drive, Snegurochka, Young Lucy.
RIP all.
Cabaret Prince (GB), Cotai Island, Eastern Mystic, Elle Klassycco, Kansas City Star, Only One Plan, So Scottish (FR).
RIP.
HRI List 18/09/2025
Bow Knot, Catch The Paddy, Dream Escape (GB), Top Spin Lob (GB), Weather Alert.
RIP.
Obituary from The Telegraph:
Geoff Lewis, who has died aged 89, reached the pinnacle of his career as a jockey in 1971, when he rode Mill Reef to win the Derby, Eclipse, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
Owned by Paul Mellon and trained by Ian Balding, Mill Reef suffered just two defeats in 14 outings, one of them to Brigadier Gerard in the 1971 2,000 Guineas. “That was over a mile,” Lewis recalled. “Mill Reef would always have beaten The Brigadier over a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half.” He added modestly: “To be honest, anybody could have got on him and won.”
Four weeks before the 1971 Derby, Lewis had injured his neck in a fall from a horse: “The doctor wanted me in a collar for six months,” he recalled. “I had to sign a letter taking all the responsibility to discharge myself from hospital. The doctor told me that if I fell again it could be curtains for me. A lot of trainers wouldn’t have risked me, because they knew the owners wouldn’t want to take the risk. But Ian Balding was absolutely magnificent. He asked me if I was fine to ride Mill Reef. I said yes, and that was it, he never mentioned it again.”
The horse won the Epsom race by an easy two lengths from Linden Tree. That October, again with Lewis in the saddle, Mill Reef won the Arc at Longchamp by three lengths from Pistol Packer in a record time. The plan was to race in the Arc the following season; but, having won the Prix Ganay by 10 lengths and the Coronation Cup, Mill Reef shattered his foreleg on the training gallops, ending his racing career. The vets managed to save him, and he lived until 1986.
One of 13 children of a labourer, Geoffrey Lewis was born on December 21 1935 at Talgarth in Breconshire. In 2007 he recalled of his childhood in Wales: “I remember that we had a lot of freedom. During the summer holidays our parents let us go off in the morning, and we wouldn’t return before supper time. We would go down to the river or go scrumping. It was such a lovely place, and of course you felt very safe. I also remember having to go potato-picking in the spring to get some extra money for the family.” On Sunday mornings the children were packed off to church, and then to chapel in the evening.
In 1946, after Geoff’s father had moved to London to find work, the family joined him. Geoff left school at 15 to take a job as a bellboy at the Waldorf Hotel in the West End. He stood only 5ft tall and weighed just over four stone, and when the champion jump jockey Tim Maloney visited the hotel one day he told the young man that he was the right build for a jockey: “He contacted my parents, and I was apprenticed as a jockey with Ron Smyth.”
When he arrived at Smyth’s stables at Epsom for the start of a six-year apprenticeship, Lewis had never even sat on a horse. He went on to ride for some of the leading trainers of the era, among them Noel Murless and Bruce Hobbs.
Lewis won the 2,000 Guineas, on Right Tack (1969); the 1,000 Guineas on Mysterious (1973); and the Coronation Cup on Lupe (1971). He twice won the Oaks, on Altesse Royale (1971) and Mysterious (1973), both for Noel Murless. In Ireland he took the 2,000 Guineas on Right Tack, the Irish Oaks on Altesse Royale, and the Irish Derby on Prince Regent (1969). He retired as a jockey in 1979, having ridden more than 1,800 winners, and set up as a trainer at Thirty Acre Barn near Epsom.
Among his best horses during this second career were Silver Wisp, which finished third to Dr Devious in the 1992 Derby; Rough Pearl, which won the Italian St Leger in 1984; Lake Coniston, Europe’s champion sprinter in 1995; and Yawa, which won the 1983 Grand Prix de Paris.
Lewis retired in 1999, having trained more than 500 winners, and went to live in Marbella, where he continued to take an active interest in racing. He often returned to Britain to be present on Derby Day.
Geoff Lewis married an Australian, Noelene, whose father was a Melbourne Cup-winning jockey, and in 2014 he moved back to England to be near their daughter.
Geoff Lewis, born December 21 1935, death announced August 27 2025
Nice article in The Telegraph written by Marcus Armytage:
“It is fair to say that in Derek Thompson, who hung up his binoculars after his final call at Wolverhampton this week bringing an end to 60 years as a commentator, racing didn’t appreciate what it had until it was gone.
Like a long list of people, he has wrestled for years with picking the right moment to ‘retire’ – although he will still commentate in Jersey, continue race-day presentations and, I dare say, open a betting shop for a fat fee if one ever opens again.
‘Tommo’ has also surprised himself by feeling nothing but quiet relief since calling home Space Bear in the It’s A Photo – Big Fella Maiden Fillies Stakes (a race title concocted from Tommo-isms).
At the end of the month, Tommo, who like his greatest friend Bob Champion survived cancer (2012) and, three years ago, had a stroke, will be 75, old enough to hang up his bins but just too young to have been a true pioneer of radio and television sports coverage, although he presided over plenty of firsts.
Nevertheless, he has worked with some of the greats and there were three decades when, in racing at least, he was ubiquitous, a staple on mainstream terrestrial racing coverage. If a difficult question needed asking, perhaps of a trainer whose horse had just been pipped in the Derby, all the other presenters looked to him.
If you added up all the hours he has spent on live television it would come to years, so it is no wonder there have been a few gaffes along the way.
These include the one which makes every compilation of television bloopers ever made when, from the At The Races studio where he was presenting, the camera cut to Ludlow where Robert Cooper was waiting to interview someone with very blonde hair, an assistant groundsperson, about the state of the ground.
If you added up all the hours he has spent on live television it would come to years, so it is no wonder there have been a few gaffes along the way.
These include the one which makes every compilation of television bloopers ever made when, from the At The Races studio where he was presenting, the camera cut to Ludlow where Robert Cooper was waiting to interview someone with very blonde hair, an assistant groundsperson, about the state of the ground.
“Oh, you’ve been joined by a beautiful lady,” said Tommo, interrupting himself.
“It’s actually a man, Derek,” replied the extremely dry Cooper.
“Oh,” whispers a defeated Tommo.
If, as is probably the case, half the population remember Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew more for their ‘leg-over’ commentary on TMS during the 1993 Edgbaston Test than all the serious stuff they did together, then maybe it is no bad accolade to be best remembered for unintentionally amusing the masses.
For Thompson it all began up in North Yorkshire. After the War his dad, Stanley, a flight-sergeant who flew 40 sorties in Wellington bombers, set up a steel business which evidently went well enough to pay for Tommo and his brother Howard to have riding lessons.
They had a pony each, joined the Cleveland Hunt where they met a young Bob Champion, whose father hunted the hounds and, as a sideline, drove the knacker wagon at Redcar, which enabled the three boys to get into the races for free.
Devoid of anyone to interview one day, John Rickman of ITV racing fame, put a microphone under their noses and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“I said I wanted to be a TV interviewer,” recalls Tommo of the prescient moment. “Bob said he wanted to win the Grand National, and Howard said he wanted to go into the family steel business which he still does. We were probably only 11.”
His father was one of the first point-to-point commentators but halfway through a race at Great Ayton he turned off his mic briefly, turned to his 15-year-old son, told him he could no longer see the runners clearly enough in the back straight and said ‘you take over’ before handing him the microphone. He has had one in his hand ever since.
He did his first racecourse commentary at Market Rasen in 1967, covered Redcar for BBC Radio Teesside and, aged 21, a full-time job at the BBC in London came up to take over from John Motson who was going to Match of the Day.
He spent the next nine years learning the art and discipline of broadcasting alongside Des Lynam, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Bryon Butler, Alan Parry, Jim Rosenthal and Peter Jones. He was on the David Hamilton show and started a daily racing slot on the Today programme.
“I remember one morning describing something as ‘quite unique’ on the 6.25am slot,” he recalls. “Ten minutes later, Cliff Morgan, the late, great head of sport, rang up and said: ‘Something is either unique or not unique – it can’t be quite unique.’ I’ve never forgotten that!”
In 1973 he commentated on his first Grand National alongside Michael Seth-Smith, Michael O’Hehir and Peter Bromley. Stationed at Valentines, when he handed over to Bromley as they crossed the Melling Road with two to jump, Crisp was still 30 lengths clear of Red Rum. “I think Peter’s description from the last to the line was the best I ever heard,” he remembers.
Ironically by 1981, when his great friend Champion won on Aldaniti, he was already at World of Sport on ITV.
“I’d been to see him during his cancer treatment. He was lying in bed, unable to get out, throwing up every 30 seconds,” he recalls. “I came out, sat in the car and cried my eyes out. Shortly after the race he rang me from the weighing room and said ‘I’ve been watching you on television, you need to keep improving to keep your job. Got to go now – I’ve got the presentation.’ It was so Bob.”
In 1987 Tommo joined the newly formed Channel 4 Racing as a presenter until, in 2012, he and John McCririck were both sacked. Tommo got the 40-second call telling him his contract was not being renewed while in a car in his pyjamas on his way to hospital for his cancer treatment. “It’s a cruel world sometimes,” he reflects.But if McCririck went somewhat bitterly, Tommo just got his head down and kept working. Of course there were other downs. No one’s reputation came off worse in the infamous Top Cees libel case in 1998 than Tommo when trainer Lynda Ramsden and jockey Kieren Fallon sued The Sporting Life after accusations that they had ‘cheated’ with the horse three years earlier.
Having passed on what Fallon had allegedly told him in a pub at a pre-Channel 4 production meeting the following morning, rightly assuming it was all off the record, he was shocked that it later appeared in the ‘Life.’
When the judge disbelieved Thompson, it nearly destroyed him and his career. “It was not a very good moment,” he recalls. “Horrible. I remember going home, getting in the bath and crying. A number of jockeys wouldn’t talk to me but I just told the truth and, actually, though everyone presumes we hate each other, I get on well with Kieren.”
He had sort of made the decision to quit commentating at the end of this year but after a cock-up at Ayr in early January, he brought that forward to July.
After two general anaesthetics in December, he had refused to stay in a hotel (by his own admission he is too tight with money) so got up at stupid o’clock to drive from Yorkshire to the west-coast course where, tired, he had got his horses in a muddle in the concluding bumper two furlongs out. He had rectified it a furlong later but the damage was done.
“I couldn’t believe the abuse I got on social media,” he says. “Much of it said I should have retired ages ago and I was very down about it. I got muddled but I was getting a bit erratic. Caroline [his wife] said I should go on social media the next day and put the story from my point of view – that got nearly a million views. (Few 74-year-olds have embraced social media quite like Tommo.)
“Having a stroke three years ago has made it a bit more difficult. It hasn’t been as easy as it used to be so we brought it forward six months. I like working and I like making money – my nickname at school was ‘Dosh’ – but I didn’t want people saying I should have packed up years ago. I think I’ve packed up somewhere near the top, although I’ve only put my bins down – I’ve still got the microphone.”
A true professional, the voice of Dubai racing from 1994 to 2000, unstintingly genial, infectiously enthusiastic, the man who famously did not get the memo and beat Prince Charles in a charity race at Plumpton in 1980; someone who outwardly appears to have the skin of a rhino but is, according to his wife, a ‘big softie inside’ and ‘Marmite’ to some. It is doubtful Tommo will ever fully retire.Caroline, whom he married two years ago, says: “It takes him three days to switch off.’ Either way, the commentators’ box has lost someone who remains ‘quite unique’.”
Obituary 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
Obituary in todays Telegraph:
Kevin Prendergast, the Irish trainer, who has died shortly before his 93rd birthday, won nine Classics in Britain and Ireland; in the sunset of his career he nearly added the Derby to his haul, saddling Madhmoon, who lost by just half a length to the Aidan O’Brien-trained Anthony Van Dyck in 2019.
The Derby had been the only English classic to elude the grasp of his father, the great JP “Darkie” Prendergast, three-times British flat-racing champion (1963, 1964 and 1965), and the first Irish trainer to take that title; only the all-conquering Vincent O’Brien and Aidan O’Brien have succeeded since.
In its 1980 obituary The Daily Telegraph described Paddy Prendergast as “the trainer who first made Irish Flat racers a force to be feared in major international races”.
He was trying his luck as a jockey in Australia when Kevin Prendergast, the eldest of his four children, was born on July 5 1932. The family returned to the British Isles the following year, where Paddy worked for a period at Epsom before moving home to Co Kildare.“We were bred with horses,” Kevin recalled. The dark-haired Paddy, renowned on the Turf for his ability to “buy swans for the price of geese”, had inherited his supreme eye for juvenile horseflesh from his own father (also Paddy), a canny dealer. Kevin and his younger brother Paddy Jnr (known as “Long Paddy”) recalled having to run around all night in bare feet, trying to keep out of ditches the 22 unruly donkeys that their grandfather had brought home from Castledermot to sell at Manchester.
Kevin was expelled from the Dominicans’ Newbridge College, Co Kildare, but proved such a capable hooker and flanker that he continued his education at the formidable rugby establishment Rockwell College, Co Tipperary, adding Munster medals to his Leinster haul.
After a spell in Australia as head lad at Frank Dalton’s yard outside Sydney, he became his father’s assistant (1956-62) at Rossmore Lodge on the Curragh while making a name as an amateur jockey, riding some 200 winners. He took out his training licence in 1963 and almost immediately rode his own first winner, Zara, at Phoenix Park. By 1966 he had acquired Ireland’s president, Eamon de Valera, as a client.
He first tasted Classic success at the Irish 1,000 Guineas in 1972 with the filly Pidget, who also won him the Irish St Leger later that year. That race would prove a lucky one for Prendergast, who retained the Irish St Leger with Conor Pass (1973) and later won it twice in a row with Nijinsky’s mighty grandson Oscar Schindler (1996, 1997).
Prendergast won the Irish 1,000 Guineas again in 1976 with Northern Treasure, and the Irish 2,000 Guineas twice, in 1981 with Arctique Royale, and a late flourish with Awtaad in 2016, when Prendergast was 83.
His greatest pride, however, was following in his father’s footsteps to win an English classic, the 1977 2,000 Guineas, with Nebbiolo, a bargain who had failed to meet his reserve at the yearling sales. The colt’s value became apparent when Prendergast saddled him at York to win the 1976 Gimcrack Stakes – a race his father, the undisputed two-year-old specialist, had once dominated. In his father’s final illness Kevin Prendergast also helped him train his final classic winner, Nikoli, to win the Irish 2,000 Guineas in 1980.
Kevin Prendergast’s Royal Ascot winners included Ore (Queen’s Vase, 1981; Queen Alexandra Stakes, 1982), Oscar Schindler (Hardwicke Stakes, 1996) and Verglas (Coventry Stakes, 1996). He sent out more than 2,000 winners and never turned in his licence, observing: “Prendergasts don’t retire. They die.” His final runner, Glory To Be, finished second at Cork a week before his death.
Like his father, once described as “the Irish volcano”, Prendergast could be bracingly direct in his feedback, both to the handicappers and to his own jockeys, but he earned their respect (as well as the mysterious nickname “Spot”). Kieren Fallon and Charlie Swan were among the top-class riders who cut their teeth at his Curragh yard.
Kevin Prendergast married Lesley Daly in 1957. She died in 2010, and he is survived by their seven daughters.
Kevin Prendergast, born July 5 1932, died June 20 2025
I certainly do BigG.
I am very “catholic” in my tastes – always, willing to listen to a track that I have never heard of.
If I like what I hear I then go and search for more of the bands/individuals output.
Robin
Nice obituary in The Telegraph:
On Betfair this morning:
Trump 1.74
Harris 2.34I am surprised the price for Harris has not “shortened” more.
