5th June 2009 - Reg Hollinshead 60 Years On - Brough Scott

There is a village in North Staffordshire which rejoices in the name of Loggerheads. A couple of miles north of it lies the site of the now defunct Woore racecourse where on May 12th 1949 Britain’s oldest current trainer saddled his first winner. His name is Reg Hollinshead. In six decades at Upper Longdon, 25 miles south west across the county, he has hardly ever been at Loggerheads with anyone.

Except that is for the heedless motorist who came creaming past the Hollinshead string one morning in the seventies. “Horse and lads were going in all directions,” remembers Kevin Darley, champion jockey in the year 2000 and the most successful of all the apprentices Reg handled. “The guvnor waved him down and blocked his path and when the bloke mistakenly wound his window down, the guvnor had him by the throat. It was such a shock for in all my time with him I never heard him swear or go ballistic. He was so meticulous in everything he did with the horses that we became disciplined too. We had so much respect for him.”

Last Saturday afternoon Reg sat at the kitchen table and smiled at his protégée’s recollection. He was born in this same red brick farm house way back in January 1924, a month before petrol was put up to two shillings (20p) a gallon “leading” said one commentator, “to fears of an end to the motoring boom.” A look at the traffic on the M6 or the gleaming cars in the neatly suburban houses as you turn off the A51 for Upper Longdon suggest that such doom laden prophecies have not been fulfilled and at the table Reg gives his crumpled smile at the fever of it all.

“It was a horse and cart if we wanted to get into Rugeley,” he remembers, the hair wispy and white but the mind still active as he takes us back to rural Staffordshire in the twenties and thirties. “We always had horses about,” he says, “and there were racehorses over with Tom Coulthwaite (who won three Grand Nationals) at Hednesford. But this was principally a dairy farm and we were milking a hundred cows when my father died in 1940.”

That bereavement meant that the young Reg’s military service confined to the “Dad’s Army” duties of minding the Home Guard machine gun, and post war austerity delayed any racing involvement until 4 years after the Armistice when he both trained and rode a former point to pointer called Shivalee to run out an 8 length winner of the £102 Betton Novice Hurdle (Division 2) as 2-1 favourite at what was always termed Woore Hunt.

Suggestions that the Hollinshead money might have been down are met with a canny shake of the head and a not entirely convincing, “I don’t remember.” But as he sits there with his daughter Sarah and one of his owners at the close of another busy morning supervising the 60 odd horses he trains with her and his son Andrew, there was no doubting a serene sense of satisfaction looking back down the years.

“Well there was Wild Honey,” he says when pressed for headline achievements. “He wasn’t gelded until he was eight and he was a real monkey when we got him. The first time we ran him he had 10 stone in a seller, three seasons later he had 12 stone 7lbs in handicapss. I think I won thirteen on him. I remember beating Brian Marshall one day - which was a bit of a feat as no one was supposed to best him in a finish - and him looking across at me. He couldn’t believe it.”

Soon after Shivalee got the ball rolling, what was then “Mr R Hollinshead” was summoned down to London to be told “you can’t afford to be an amateur” by the authorities and so it was as “R. Hollinshead” that he continued all the way into his forties in a career which included riding the last two winners of the final meeting at Woore on June 1st 1963. These were rougher, less regulated days. My very first ride was round the Woore two-circuits-for-two-miles helter-kelter with cork lining for skull caps and rails an optional and sometimes dangerous extra.

True to form there was never any griping about it from Reg Hollinshead although he does roll up his right trouser leg to reveal a horrendous looking scar below the knee. “It was from getting caught under the pig wire at Stratford,” he says, “the owner used to keep them in the centre of the course in the off season and on this day he had forgotten to take it down on the back straight. A horse of Syd Mercer’s called Shrimp’s Last turned over with me and skinned itself so bad it never ran again. Syd ran over and was most upset about her – but I was still stuck underneath.”

Then as now most of the 30-40 winner a season career has been played out away from the spotlight in the lesser arenas but there was a time in the 70’s when he placed both people and one particular horse into centre stage. The people were the apprentices – Steve Perks, Michael Wigham, Kevin Darley, Willie Ryan and Walter Swinburn – whom Reg groomed into successful jockeys as he picked up the mantle of Frenchy Nicholson from whom he actually inherited Swinburn on Nicholson’s retirement.

The horse was Remainder Man, the tall white faced chestnut whom Reg saddled in 1978 to be second in the Guineas and third in the Derby and then continue on to win the Ormonde Stakes at Chester as a four year old. He was the best horse that Hollinshead ever trained but still hailed from characteristically un-flash Hollinshead beginnings. “When I went to see him as a yearling,” remembers Reg, “he was a leggy thing half way up a mountain living on moss and wild grasses. We had trained a good mare for the owner but I told him he would have to feed this or it would starve.”

Kevin Darley was champion apprentice in 1978 with Willie Ryan as runner up but it was Tony Ives in the saddle at Newmarket and Epsom and the young tyros were not even allowed to ride the stable star at home. “Reg would marry a horse to his lad and that would be that,” remembers Kevin. “He didn’t scream and shout but he was very clear in his rules. For instance none of us apprentice were allowed to pick our sticks up in a race. If we did something stupid, there would be no huge bollocking, we just would not get any rides for a fortnight.”

It was the equivalent of a football manager leaving his erring striker on the bench and when tackled about it on Saturday there was no missing the smile of satisfaction. “What they want to do most is to ride,” says Reg, “and anyway I don’t like whip jockeys, never have. Kids need to learn and at one stage about this time we had something like 8 apprentices riding. We have a picture of them all lined up in front of Remainder Man.” They may look angelic but Sarah likes to tell the tales from out of school – like the day when Paul Eddery and Walter Swinburn were fighting like a tiny pair of ferrets in the back of the car and she only silenced them by saying “look there is Mr Stoute in that Merc.”

Satisfactions in training come in many forms but for Hollinshead there have been few sweeter than seeing two of his boys win the Derby, Willy Ryan on Shaamit in 1996 and Walter Swinburn on Shergar way back in 1980 one year after an hilarious tug of war for his services between Peter Walwyn and Michael Stoute which ended with painful consequences to the loser.

“Peter Walwyn thought he had it all signed and sealed,” says Reg as we munch our sandwiches and an old dog sleeps across the room. “But I had left myself a bit of room and when Michael Stoute came back in, Wally and I drove down to meet him half way to Newmarket. We finalised the deal and then I had to ring Peter. He didn’t take it very well. In fact I was told later that he was so annoyed that he broke his arm banging the table.”

Reg Hollinshead has always been more footnotes than front page in the racing story but at a time when the game is rushing off to the smart suits to try and get an easy fix to its latest crisis of confidence, there was something reassuring about spending time at Church Farm, Upper Longdon. For while we must welcome the public, albeit expensive reiteration of long time obvious needs like “Premierisation”, even the newest, slickest “Bens” who get attracted need to know that if they dig deep, there are some really solid roots at the core. In short we should be proud of what we have got.

The village of Loggerheads may never have proved appropriate through Reg Hollinshead’s 60 years with a training licence. And as you set off from the old red brick farm house, you trust there is still a bit of time before racing evoked the name of a little hamlet just a couple of deep, high hedged miles to the south. This one is called “ Farewell.”