The turf | 21 June 2018

On the famed Whitsbury gallops, as corn buntings and stonechats fluttered from the fence posts, a dozen of Marcus Tregoning’s team were stretching nicely. The sun reflected from the chestnut flanks of the filly Viva Bella. The handsome head of Moghram, a muscular Sir Percy colt owned by Hamdan Al Maktoum, stood out against the blue sky above the lush downland where horses have galloped since the 1880s. It called for poetry, not prose.

But at Whitsbury you are never very far away from history either. In the spacious main yard, with its thatched roof, riders used to get their orders from Sir Gordon Richards. In Major’s Yard, further down the hill, is the box that Desert Orchid occupied when the spectacular grey was collecting King Georges like postage stamps for David Elsworth. We drive through the restful paddocks of the Whitsbury Manor Stud — ‘it could be a little slice of Kentucky’ — and we stop at St Leonard’s parish church to see the grave of bookmaker William Hill, the man who bought and developed the estate when the previous owner, newspaper magnate Sir Charles Hyde, decided that Hitler would win the war and died fleeing to America.

Marcus is the right man to be training horses in this tranquil haven. An assistant for 14 years to the Turf titan Major Dick Hern, mostly after a hunting accident had confined his mentor to a wheelchair, he is a modern man imbued with the racing lore of the old days, when a few owners could fill a yard between them with the horses they had bred themselves and 15-year-olds were queuing up at Hern’s door asking for jobs in two years’ time. Hern’s predicament gave Marcus early experience in handling powerful owners — and examples of how fickle they could be.