The achievements as a racehorse trainer of Dick Hern, who died on May 22nd aged 81, speak for themselves. He was British champion trainer four times; won 16 classic races, including the Derby three times, with Troy, Henbit and Nashwan; and trained one undoubted world-beater, Brigadier Gerard, winner of the 2000 Guineas, the King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, and 17 of his 18 races. He won all five Irish classics, including the 1979 Derby with Troy and the Oaks three times.
Only a great trainer, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, could have a record to compare with it. But these achievements tell only part of Dick Hern's story. He was a man of heroic stature, who, time and again, overcame crises and difficulties, any one of which would have floored a less single-minded, determined and courageous character.
Born on January 20th, 1921, he was a Somerset boy, and lived in that pastoral county, except during war service with the North Irish Horse in North Africa and Italy, until he was 30. He loved hunting, and went out with many west country packs; after the war, he was an instructor at the Porlock Riding School, attaining Olympic standard as a horseman before turning his hand to training relatively late in life.
Once he had made the change, there was no looking back. He had an amazing eye for a horse, and all its quirks. He could pick up an incipient lameness or ailment long before it was apparent to anyone else.
Dick Hern's first independent training job was as private trainer at Newmarket to Major Lionel Holliday, an irascible Yorkshireman well known as one of the hardest men in racing to please. However, Holliday was a hunting man and a horseman, and he and Dick Hern got on remarkably well. Dick Hern trained Hethersett to win the St Leger for him, and was very unlucky not to win the Derby, as Hethersett was brought down in a seven-horse pile-up on the descent to Tattenham Corner when travelling extremely well.
From Newmarket, Dick Hern moved to West Ilsley in 1962, and lived there for the rest of his life, also training in that Berkshire village until he moved his operation to Kingwood, Lambourn, for the last few years before retirement. West Ilsley brought him his greatest training triumphs, besides the success that brought him, perhaps, the greatest pleasure of all, winning the French Oaks for Queen Elizabeth with Highclere.
On December 7th, 1984, he was out with the famous Leicestershire pack, the Quorn, when he broke his neck in a fall. He survived, largely through his invincible will, but he spent the rest of his life as a tetraplegic, training from a wheelchair.
He was not the only man to have trained under a similar disability, but no one else defied the handicap to the extent of keeping his place at the peak of his profession.
There were other major reverses with which he had to contend. In June 1988, he was found to be suffering from a leaking heart valve.
For weeks, he was at death's door; the queen's racing manager, Lord Carnarvon, concluded that he was unfit to continue training, and refused to renew his lease at West llsley, where he was a tenant of the queen.
But Carnarvon reckoned without Dick Hern's unquenchable spirit and, by the end of the year, he was well on the way to recovery. There was an extraordinary wave of public sympathy for his predicament, and much indignation was expressed at the way he had been treated. In the end, he was allowed to train at West Ilsley for another year, and then share the stables with William Hastings-Bass for another season before finding new training quarters at Kingwood.
Dick Hern and his devoted wife Sheilah, who predeceased him by four years, were enormously popular in the racing community. He had a great love of life, and revelled in a party, especially if he had the chance to take part in a sing-song and exercise his repertoire of songs both bawdy and profane.
He was a trainer of the old school, for whom the welfare of the horse meant everything. He always considered that a horse's progress was a confidential matter between trainer and owner, and he liked to keep the press at arm's length. To some extent, he would have been out of tune with the 21st-century racing world. But he kept his enthusiasm for the racing game to the end.
William Richard (Dick) Hern: born 1921; died, May 2002