Royal Ascot is not the same without Henry Cecil

For a moment it seemed incongruous reading obituaries in the same week of Sir Henry Cecil and of Esther Williams, the Hollywood star whom most of us only ever remember seeing in a swimsuit amid whirling patterns of leggy lovelies in water ballets. Then I recalled her comment that the only thing Hollywood’s moguls ever changed in her series of films were her leading men and the water in the pool and I realised there was something of a parallel. Esther Williams did her thing so exquisitely that all people ever wanted to see was a repeat. Those whom she did it with became irrelevant, and there was something of that about the master trainer too.

He did his thing superbly and he did it in a highly personal style that nobody else will ever be able to match. His instinct for training racehorses, particularly fillies, was sublime — and instinct is what it was down to. But he was showbiz too and he knew it. The only time I ever spoke to Henry Cecil off the racecourse was on Newmarket’s Limekilns one morning and I will never forget the sight.

He was sitting astride his then wife Natalie’s skewbald hack Poteen wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt, monogrammed blue suede riding boots with tassels and a blue velvet riding hat. Effectively Cecil was holding court to a covey of owners and stud managers, a visiting racing tour party and assorted correspondents. The tall, elegant and authoritative figure, I reflected, was the nearest equivalent to a King of Newmarket there had been since Charles II frequented the gallops with his hawking friends. And he had a real sense of history. We were standing, he told me, on the oldest piece of cultivated grassland in the world, unploughed since Carolingian days, one of the largest mown grass areas in the world.