ON Tuesday this week I travelled to Kelso racecourse in Scotland to auction at a fundraising dinner for a couple of charities, including the Injured Jockeys Fund, and I was delighted to sit next to the guest speaker Jack Berry.

Younger readers of this column (if they exist) might not be familiar with the name, but Jack was a major training force in the 1990s, specialising in two-year-olds and sprinters including Mind Games, Bolshoi, Paris House and Distinctly North.

Jack was always a great customer at Doncaster Sales, now operating as Goffs UK, and he recalled that the first item ever auctioned by Henry Beeby was one of the famous red shirts that Jack always wears.

The first time Jack wore one, while still a jockey, it was considered as “extraordinary as wearing a dress”, but a few years later a second shirt was found and nowadays it is undoubtedly the best known trademark item of clothing in the racing world.

Prior to training, Berry was a jump jockey, even using two days leave from his National Service in the Kings Troop to hitch-hike from London to Kelso (350 miles) for a ride.

In the 1964 Grand National Berry was profoundly affected by the fall of his friend and fellow jockey Paddy Farrell (a native of Grangecon, Co Wicklow).

“As soon as Paddy was taken away from the track, us jockeys knew he would never walk again,” said Berry. “He had a wife and four kids, and we felt we had to do everything we could to help him out.”

The Paddy Farrell Fund grew into the National Hunt Jockeys Fund and subsequently the Injured Jockeys Fund that exists today. In 2009 the IJF built a rehabilitation centre in Lambourn, which was named after the Fund’s most celebrated supporter, Lord Oaksey.

In April 2015, the northern equivalent was opened in Malton, appropriately named Jack Berry House after the man who so tirelessly drove its fundraising campaign.

ADMIRATION

Having heard first-hand the story of his determination to get it built, my admiration for Jack Berry the man eclipsed the great regard that I already had for Jack Berry the trainer.

Happily, the bronze statue of Jack outside the centre has managed to keep the shirt the right colour.

In addition to serious business of the Injured Jockeys Fund, Berry told an amusing story about a leading jockey who had gone to see a dietician in the hope of losing some pounds. Prescribed a couple of suppositories, the jockey had not properly listened to the instructions and took them orally. Two days later the desired effect had not materialised and he remarked in all seriousness, “For all the good they did me I might as well have stuck them up my arse.”

charity

I’ll be back in the UK for another charity auction tonight (Saturday), this one in aid of the Manchester Children’s Hospital.

Such charities are close to my heart and I am excited by the last lot for sale this evening, an opportunity to play a nine-a-side match against the Manchester United Class of 92 (Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Phil Neville etc.).

That must surely be football’s equivalent to a Wildenstein pedigree.