The turf: A yard on the up

Lambourn trainer Sylvester Kirk retains the distinctive tones of his native Donegal/Tyrone. There was just one moment during his eight years as assistant to Richard Hannon, a period which coincided with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when he wondered if the accent was going to leave him alive.

Deputed to drive the Hannons to Windsor for lunch with the Queen, Sylvester became confused driving out of the castle premises. Suddenly he was brought abruptly to a halt, the stable-spattered car surrounded by armed men with weapons cocked which definitely weren’t loaded for pheasant. ‘At that point,’ he says, demonstrating an impressively anodyne mumble, ‘I feared I might get shot simply for opening my mouth.’

Fortunately, nobody fired, his explanations were accepted and he lived to set up as a trainer in his own right in Upper Lambourn, where he and wife Fanny, one of Hannon’s six children, bring up their own two sons in the friendly Cedar Lodge yard, where you can watch the horses having a pick from the kitchen window.

Before becoming assistant to Richard Hannon, Sylvester worked at the Irish National Stud and as a stallion man for Coolmore, travelling horses to Australia. His father Syl was a small-time Irish trainer — ‘It was a winner a month if we were lucky’— but he never had any doubts about wanting to follow him. ‘I was too big to get into racing any other way.’

He remains full of admiration for Hannon, both for his instinctive training skills and for his sociability. Sylvester spoke in tones of incredulity about a trainer who complained recently of being ‘peopled out’. Like most in a profession working ever harder for its share of the leisure dollar, he knows that getting on with potential owners is as important as training the horses.