Steve Dennis looks back on the achievements of the self-made man who died last month at the age of 88
One race that forever eluded Barry Hills, who died last month at 88, was the Derby at Epsom, in which he trained the runner-up four times. Hills was one of the pre-eminent trainers in Britain from the early 1970s onwards and accumulated a vast treasury of big-race success at home and abroad, but the jigsaw’s missing piece always captures the eye first.
‘Nothing is impossible’ was one of Hills’s mantras, apt enough for a man who completely reinvented himself at the age of 30 on the back of one winning bet, but the Derby proved the exception. Impossibly frustrating, really, as his four silver-medal colts were beaten less than five lengths in total.
The first was the closest, Rheingold going under by a short-head to Roberto in 1972, beaten more by the rival jockey than the horse with Lester Piggott in full force majeure mode. Six years later Hills thought the front-running Hawaiian Sound – ridden by US legend Bill Shoemaker – had won him the great race, only for Shirley Heights to spoil the party with a late surge to prevail by a head.
Hills even told the colt’s owner Robert Sangster that they had won; Sangster, watching from a more reliable vantage point, told him they had not. The defeat, after the initial elation, was hard for Hills to take. Glacial Storm (1988, beaten a length and a half) and Blue Stag (1990, three lengths) completed the quartet of near-misses, but to linger too long on what might have been risks diminishing a remarkable career.
Barry Hills was a self-made man, the famous story of how a travelling head groom won enough on one lavish long-range bet to set up as a trainer has become part of racing lore.
He trousered more than £60,000 (around a cool million at today’s rates) when Frankincense – trained by his boss John Oxley – won the 1968 Lincoln Handicap at Doncaster, having backed the four-year-old at 66-1 the previous November before continuing to play at all odds down to raceday favouritism. His annual salary at that time was less than £1,000.
It takes a substantial degree of sangfroid to go for the life-changing bet of a lifetime in a 31-runner handicap. Hills was that sort of man.
Plenty of confidence
“We knew Frankincense was going to win a long time before the race,” he told Julian Muscat, in the Racing Post. “His work in the build-up gave us plenty of confidence.”
Hills became renowned as an extremely shrewd bettor, landing well-planned gambles on his horses throughout a storied career, but without Frankincense there might have been no career.
The following year Hills bought a yard in the training centre of Lambourn and began his swift ascent through the ranks. He established himself somewhere near the top when the aforementioned Rheingold – this time with Piggott’s assistance in the saddle – won the 1973 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
“To win the Derby would mean an awful lot,” he told the Independent newspaper in 2001, a year he saddled four of the dozen Derby runners but finished no closer than fourth. “When I won the Arc with Rheingold it was the greatest day of my life, but it could be nothing like winning the Derby.”
He sounded almost wistful, but there was never anything ethereal about the irascible Hills’s demeanour. A fellow doesn’t earn the sobriquets ‘Mr Grumpy’ and ‘Mr Combustible’ for spouting sweet nothings, and Hills’s explosive nature and sharp tongue were famed and feared. Woe betide the interviewer who had skimped on research, the groom who hadn’t left his horse immaculate, the assistant trainer who failed to offer the required assistance.
“I learned a hell of a lot from him, not least how to swear,” said trainer Chris Wall, who studied at the old school run by Hills for three years.
Dressing-downs
“I had the misfortune of being on the receiving end of one or two dressing-downs, but that’s how you learned. When the cork popped it was fairly spectacular, but he didn’t hold grudges.”
Even the Kentucky Kid wasn’t immune to the wrath of the master. In 1979, Hills – together with Sangster – was instrumental in bringing the teenage prodigy Steve Cauthen from the US to Britain, where he would attain superstar status as a jockey. Cauthen had already won the Triple Crown on Affirmed but nevertheless found his new boss hard to impress, as he told the Racing Post.
“When I landed at the airport I said to Barry, ‘Do you want me to put my case in the trunk?’.
“He replied, ‘It’s not called a f+++ing trunk over here, it’s a boot!’.
“I thought, ‘What the hell have I got myself into?’, but it didn’t take long for us to understand each other.”
Other car-related issues cropped up occasionally, as outlined by writer Robin Oakley in his well-named biography of Hills, Frankincense and More. One morning, it seems, Cauthen was asked to drive his boss to Nottingham races while the great man smoked a cigar and perused the newspaper in the back seat.
“I had very little experience of smaller English roads,” related Cauthen. “I kept pulling out to get by trucks and swerving back in again. I didn’t quite know how to kick the Mercedes in the belly.
“There wasn’t a word from Barry. That was saved for when we got to the track. He climbed out and said: ‘I hope you give my horses a better f+++ing ride than you’ve just given me!’”
Cauthen gave Tap On Wood that better ride to win the 2,000 Guineas in his first year in the UK and went on to partner plenty of big-race winners for Hills, notably Gildoran in the first of his two victories in the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot. The pair developed a strong bond, and Cauthen returned to pay a heartfelt tribute at Hills’s memorial service.
“Barry started with nothing, but he wanted to be a leader in his profession,” he said. “He wanted to be the best there could be, and he wanted everyone around him to be the best too.
Highest compliment
“That’s the highest compliment I can give him because when I came here I was only 18 and I wasn’t a man yet, but he sorted me out and got me re-motivated.”
The career of Tap On Wood opened a window into Hills’s philosophy of training, that of hard work being its own reward. He chose the colt’s two-year-old campaign, during which he ran 13 times and won seven races, as his entry in the book My Greatest Training Triumph (1982), commenting: “I thought the best policy was to send him up the Great North Road [the route to several minor racecourses in the north of England] every week to harden him up; that’s the main reason he ran so often.”
Tap On Wood thrived on this unusually searching schedule and the 1979 2,000 Guineas was the 16th race of his life, which would be unheard of nowadays. The self-made man expected his horses to have a similar attitude; in 1975 he trained the two-year-old filly Nagwa to win 13 races (of 20) and Duboff, a three-year-old, to win all her nine starts.
Hills transformed Gildoran – described by then-assistant Peter Chapple-Hyam as “the slowest horse I’d ever seen, but Barry grafted that horse, he knew that’s what he needed” – into a staying champion and dual Ascot Gold Cup winner. He upgraded the sprinter Handsome Sailor from a moderate handicapper into a dual G1 winner; and even found time to win the Stayers’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival with the stud prospect Nomadic Way.
"Wherever he went and whatever he did, he was going to do it well, and he was going to do it properly,” said his friend and fellow Lambourn trainer Nicky Henderson. “He had his standards and he expected them to be adhered to. He instilled that into everyone and there was always that element of discipline.
“He was brought up in quite a tough world, so to get where he did was extraordinary. It’s why everyone respected him so much.”
Satisfying triumph
Perhaps Hills’s most satisfying triumph, on many levels, came in the twilight of his career. He had been seriously ill in hospital in the spring of 2009, but his son Charlie stepped into the breach to oversee preparations for Royal Ascot and another son Richard rode Ghanaati to an emotional family victory there in the G1 Coronation Stakes.
His five sons were the great delight of his life. His eldest, John, was a successful trainer until his sorrowfully early death at the age of 53; the twins Michael and Richard were both Classic-winning jockeys; Charlie has maintained the yard’s high standing since taking over the training licence on his father’s retirement, and George is a bloodstock insurer in Britain and the US.
With a racing dynasty any patriarch would envy, an enduring legacy that sits alongside the 3,181 winners, the five Classic wins, the great horses, and an origin story that will echo down the ages, Barry Hills made a success of himself and of everything he worked so hard for. And the Derby is, after all, only one race.
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