Naming Faming and Gaming

When an aspiring racehorse owner acquires his first horse he looks forward to exchanging views with the trainer as to how best to train and enter this runner. He is almost certainly making a big mistake. For a start the trainer has all the evidence emerging through daily inspection of the horse whereas the owner is hardly ever at the stables and, even if he were, he would be a poor judge of what is going on. So all the owner can do with any undeniable authority is to give his horse a name.

Some owners are quite good at this task. For instance, the late queen was rated very successful. Others are less readily so. For instance I alighted upon a horse by Beat Hollow out of Ordained and decided on Bible Basher. When this was put to the British Horseracing Authority for clearance they decided it might upset somebody. Quite how, I have no idea. So, eventually, I alighted upon Parsons Punch which was accepted. This horse opened at 33/1 on its first outing and started at 5/1. It finished third. I immediately sold it and did not get my money back until its new yard, north of the border, got it home.

Elsewhere I bought a rig, which is a colt where only one testicle has descended. So, eventually, I chose Having A Ball, only by the time it first ran it had been entirely castrated. It ran on a wet day at Leicester and finished half a length second. I had backed it outright to win £60,000. But they do not pay out on win bets which finish second.

My first horse was to be called Triumph And Disaster from Kipling's poem IF. Unfortunately the maximum number of letters allowed was eighteen. Thus I adopted Iffy. My wife thought that this ownership was rather iffy and therefore appropriate. I won £135,000 on Iffy at Ascot. Indeed all my horses were trained by Peter Cundell at Compton and prize money (a snivelling sum) and betting winnings paid for the entire operation. I learnt a lot from this exercise which ran for several years.

Peter is now retired but he knew what he was doing - unlike some trainers who strike me as close to hopeless. I never used them to see if they could do any better. That would have been an expensive enquiry.