TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/974613
get up for breakfast at eight, go and play golf, come back in and have two bottles of champagne. Or three. Go to the races, have lunch, drink all the afternoon—and then come back to the house, and carry on. It was an endurance test. But a good one." At other times Hills has always stayed at the smart downtown hotel, the Grosvenor. The horses themselves used to be lodged in a yard in the town, and were led through the streets as the police stopped the traffic—a nostalgic scene preserved in a pair of paintings presented to Hills by the track management on his retirement. But all the horsemen can still enjoy walking down to the track among the chattering crowds, through the old city gate, to be berated by religious preachers with placards. Certainly there was never much danger of Sangster and friends being discouraged from the more enjoyable vices. "They all used to bet, of course," Hills said. "Robert couldn't not. If he didn't know what to back, he had an arrangement with a bookmaker to have an even £3,000 odd or even numbers. Just for an interest. We were all at dinner there one night, about 20-odd people, and Benson had to get up and apologise to Bobby—who was his host—that he'd forgotten to put the bets on. They'd thought they'd won a lot of money. You should have seen Bobby's face. But the rest of us thought it was a great joke." McAlpine presided over the track's evolution to the point where Hills reckons its facilities are matched, in Britain, perhaps only by York. Both are incredulous, and grateful, that the course manager Richard Thomas has not been lured elsewhere. But one trend over recent years he has found less convenient—and that is the increased conviction of Aidan O'Brien that Chester, with its twin demands of agility and commitment, is the perfect place to educate an Epsom horse. "That didn't please me very much," Hills grinned. "Didn't want him over there!" Of course, he knows perfectly well that the revival of the May meeting as a source of Derby and Oaks winners