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Rolf Johnson

Protesting, kicking and screaming, I was dragged by my parents to my first race meeting, locally at Doncaster. The first race was won by Goldhill, trained by the late great M H Easterby, owned by a Mr R Johnson. That was it - hooked.

After university, thesis ‘Rudyard Kipling and Horseracing in India’, Phil Bull gave me a job at Timeform, alongside Howard Wright on the Racing Week magazine – hence the attraction of Racing Ahead.

An economic ‘winter’ closed the ‘Week’ in the mid 1960s. Howard went on to bigger things while I veered off to social work - in India where I unwisely told Marlon Brando we couldn’t accept his helicopters for relief because we could barely service a rickshaw.

He stomped off and made The Godfather – we had several of them in Bihar: they’re everywhere.

In West Riding Social Services I wrote and edited the department’s magazine but upset the oligarchy, insisting social workers were “nothing more than society’s under arm deodorant”.

Helicopters wouldn’t have worked in Huddersfield and Batley, but political commitment from above might have helped.

Enough, obviously I wasn’t up to saving mankind so I quit and I flew horses to India, winning the Sunday Times travel writer’s competition describing the journey.

The pilot told me to put the stallion down when he got bolshy, over the Persian Gulf. I said I hadn’t got a standing bolt. He said what I have you got? I said, plaintively as I remember, a fire extinguisher. Try that he said.

Back in the UK, Captain Ryan Price took me on to run his office at Soldier’s Field Findon in 1976, and I look back in satisfaction, for once, at the Captain’s most successful year. Then he sacked me with the words, “Out of loyalty will you teach the next feller the job?” What a man!

I can’t recall being unemployed (unemployable perhaps) and moved straight on to two more ‘giants’, Toby Balding and David Elsworth.

If ever anybody tells you there have been better trainers than these three men – or more mercurial characters – then they never knew them. They’ll never be replicated.

Five enviable years with Toby; a similar year with Elzee (six mentions, name spelled wrong every time in Richard Burridge’s biography of Desert Orchid) to that with Ryan Price (one mention in Peter Bromley’s book), then India again, to run the Palace Stud at Bangalore in India for an old Englishman, Sam Hill.

First trainer in the world to go through the card - at Ootacamund.

Sam Hill’s feat was in 1969. Sam was a hero. So was Ronnie Beggan – he was disgusted that I hadn’t mentioned the year ’85 when he won the Arkle on Oregon Trail. He’d made me his agent (never met him before) and then sacked me at the end of his big season.
I got my own back – made him godfather to my son so he had to shell out for the next twenty one year’s birthdays.

We’re still best mates.

I returned from India - so many friends which I visit regularly - to 27 years on the Daily Express. My first day was Peter O’Sullevan’s last – and the paper’s last year in Fleet Street; the beginning of the end.

I lost the last Sporting Life naps table by thirty-nine pence.

For the past dozen years or so I’ve done consultation (multitude of sins) work at Highclere Thoroughbred Racing – the paradigm for syndicate ownership (I would say that wouldn’t I: it happens to be true). And writing for, among others, Racing Ahead; the Racing Pulse website in India; Highclere Newsletter and Milo Corbett’s Bloodstock Notebook, established as the non pareil racing annual; again, I would say that, but even if there were contenders they’d have to be special.

Some lame-brained time-serving lackey sneered, “You’ve never had a responsible job running racing” to which I replied, “That’s down to twots like you wasting your time ensuring I didn’t.”

Like anybody else in racing, I’ve got all the answers.

News By Rolf Johnson

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