'It took several months to get all the money on' - Barry Hills on the gamble which launched a legacy
ARCHIVE: Julian Muscat talks to the former trainer about the coup which sparked a glorious career
This interview was first published on August 4, 2020 and has been made free to read following the news of Barry Hills's death at the age of 88.
- Barry Hills, legendary trainer and head of a major racing dynasty, dies at the age of 88
- Barry Hills: a man with a razor-sharp sense of humour and a tongue that could make shrinking violets of the most robust
- Obituary: 'He did it all from scratch' - 'streetfighter' Barry Hills conquered racing's peaks and became a Lambourn legend
Given the significance, it is surprising to learn Barry Hills remembers very little about the coup that would change his life and set in motion a dynasty that lasts to this day.
On March 27, 1968, Hills trained his eyes down the straight mile at Doncaster to monitor Frankincense's progress in the Lincoln Handicap. Less than two minutes later he was a man of means.
Under Greville Starkey, Frankincense carried more weight to victory than any previous winner of the Lincoln, which was then one of the most hotly contested handicaps in the calendar. And as Hills lowered his binoculars he knew he had the resources to bring a long-cherished dream to life. He would never look back.
In the circumstances it's understandable he might have been too preoccupied to absorb the finer details. He can't remember where he watched the race from, or with whom. Just about the only thing he recalls with any clarity is that Frankincense came down the centre of the course, having departed from stall 31 in the 31-runner field.
"We'd planned it from November the previous year," relates Hills, who was then travelling head lad to the Newmarket trainer John Oxley. "We'd backed the horse from 66-1 all the way down to 5-1 favourite, although he drifted [to 100-8] on the day."
Hills and his cohorts had executed a proper touch. He himself netted more than £60,000 from winning bets, which equates to almost £1 million in today's values. At the time he earned less than £1,000 per year.
Some days later, after all the winnings had been collected from every point of Britain's compass, Hills turned his thoughts to the future.
"I'd always wanted to train and this was my opportunity," he recalls. "The following year [1969] I gave Keith Piggott [Lester's father] £16,000 for South Bank stables [in Lambourn]. I was on my way."
It would prove quite a journey. From South Bank, Hills later transferred to Robert Sangster's private training estate at Manton in 1986. He stayed for four years until he returned to Lambourn and built Faringdon Place stables, a state-of-the-art complex with room for 150 horses.
"It was bloody hard work but it was fun," Hills reflects of his career. "At one point I almost bought Manton, but that's another story."
On his retirement in 2011 Hills had trained more than 3,200 winners, among them ten Classic winners in Britain and Ireland to sit alongside Rheingold's victory in the 1973 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
He handed over the reins of a flourishing enterprise to Charlie, the fourth of his five sons. A family dynasty is now taking shape. At some point in the future, when Charlie Hills sits his grandson on his knee, he will tell him the tale of how Frankincense started it all on that murky afternoon on Town Moor.
"We knew Frankincense was going to win a long time before the race," Hills says of that game-changing Lincoln triumph. "He was the right type of horse for it and his work in the build-up gave us plenty of confidence."
The same couldn't be said of Starkey, who had been booked to ride. Also in Oxley's Newmarket stable was Copper's Evidence, who had been sent there specifically to win the Lincoln by Syd Mercer, an owner and ex-trainer who had made the game pay by his betting prowess.
Mercer had convinced himself Copper's Evidence was as good as past the post. He made no secret of it; so much so that Starkey, well aware of Mercer's reputation, frequently questioned whether he was on the right horse. But Hills entertained no doubts, especially after he saw Frankincense breeze past Copper's Evidence on the Newmarket gallops when giving him two stone.
Hills had also built up a sizeable betting pot from backing some big-priced winners of prestigious handicaps. To that end he was on good terms with others in key positions within Newmarket stables, including the head lads for Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, Jack Watts and Harry Wragg.
That's how he came to back the Watts-trained Ovaltine, winner of the 1967 Ebor at 100-8, and the Wragg-trained Lacquer, a 20-1 Cambridgeshire winner that same year.
On those occasions the stakes were small but the winnings plentiful. They were supplemented by Frankincense's victory in the 1967 William Hill Gold Cup at Redcar. And as Frankincense continued to thrive in the opening months of 1968, Hills needed no further prompting. It was time to roll the dice.
Back then, the betting canvas was unrecognisable from what passes today.
"There were professionals who put the money on when other people couldn't," says Hills. "You didn't pay them commission; they had the information and used it for their own purposes. You learned as you went along who you could trust, and that was very important. It's only a secret when one person knows. When two people know it's no longer a secret."
In essence, that was why the Frankincense gamble was so successful. The men who placed Hills's bets were seasoned practitioners who knew their trade inside-out. People like Arthur French, who operated on the London circuit, Harold Dixon from Harrogate and Bill Carter from Stoke-on-Trent.
Bets were placed right across the country in small stakes to avoid tripping the alarm. And Hills's cause was aided by Mercer's parallel gamble on Copper's Evidence, which helped to throw bookmakers off the scent.
"I contacted people all over the place," Hills recalls. "It took several months to get all the money on but they were proper bookmakers in those days, not public companies. Most of it was done on credit. If it got beat you paid; if it won you got paid. There were bookmakers who laid a book on their own opinions and they stuck to them. There was none of this knocking back of bets."
A significant part of the commission was placed with the London credit betting firm run by Max Parker, who was always happy to lay a bet. Some years earlier Parker had teamed up with his nephew, Cyril Stein, to take over Ladbrokes, an ailing business they would transform into the bookmaking behemoth.
Stein, the chairman of Ladbrokes for 27 years until his retirement in 1993, must have been impressed by the Frankincense coup. Soon after Hills started training, Stein sent him Dragonara Palace, a grey two-year-old whom Hills saddled to win the Richmond Stakes and July Stakes in 1973.
But that was all in the future when Hills travelled to Doncaster for the Lincoln on that grey March day. Hills was unconcerned that no horse had ever won the race carrying the sort of weight Frankincense had been allocated. After all, the horse had won the previous year's Ouse Bridge Handicap at York on the bridle when shouldering 9st 2lb.
As for Starkey, he returned to the winner's enclosure to say that he never had an anxious moment. Having tracked Sunderton down the stands' side early on, Starkey switched Frankincense towards the centre of the course, where the action was unfolding.
Frankincense was travelling kindly. Starkey held on to him for as long as he could before unleashing his mount approaching the final furlong. The response from Frankincense was both immediate and decisive.
Starkey quickly seized the advantage, albeit a little earlier than he had been instructed, and his mount galloped straight and true to resist a late lunge from Waterloo Place by half a length, with Norton Priory a further two lengths adrift. Copper's Evidence finished an honourable fifth but the prize was in the bag.
Frankincense's victory was highly acclaimed, yet while the Lincoln was immensely competitive back then, he cut little ice when raised in class, even if he did finish fourth in the same year's Eclipse Stakes behind Royal Palace. More pertinently, Frankincense was a horse for that specific day at Doncaster, as Hills had always believed.
Hills pulled off a number of notable gambles throughout his training career, although none of the same significance. It became harder as the years unfurled: the installation of patrol cameras on racecourses and more vigilant stewarding precluded the tried-and-trusted formula of repeatedly running a horse down the field to contrive a favourable handicap mark. Yet Hills was undeterred.
"As time passed there became a much greater onus for horses to run on their merits, so you had to find one that was improving fast," he says. Nor was he discouraged by the unrelenting evolution of bookmakers from turfistes to accountants.
"They certainly don't like losing," he says, "but I think racing needs a little bit of skulduggery. It needs that fascination. To an extent I would say it is a bit over-policed, but now you also need a friend who loses plenty of money so he can get your bets on for you. I have to say that landing a bit of a coup is tremendously satisfying."
Retirement was always going to be a difficult transition for Hills, who has a constantly inquisitive mind. He says that, while his experience was unparalleled, he lacked the energy to continue.
"I'd love to start again with the energy of youth already knowing what I know now," he says wistfully. He still goes out on the gallops in the morning, when his all-embracing eye constantly scans the horizons for the next betting vehicle. He bets very rarely these days, although he'd like to engineer one more notable coup.
"I'm still on the lookout, although I haven't pulled anything off for a while now," he says. "It's a game of waiting. It takes a long time to come across the right type of horse, because you cannot make these horses. They just come along every now and then."
If there is one currently in training at Faringdon Place, you can bet your money that Hills will be first to alight upon it.
The legacy
Charlie Hills may be the only one of father Barry's four surviving sons to train racehorses, but all are profoundly immersed in the game and have made their mark.
The twins, Richard and Michael, were both successful jockeys who remain in the thick of it, while George, the youngest, lives in Kentucky, where he is making his name in the field of bloodstock insurance.
"It makes me proud to see all my sons involved in the game," Barry Hills says. "Charlie has some nice owners and horses, while George is doing well over in the US, where he has been in lockdown because of the coronavirus.
"Michael keeps himself very busy. He rides out with William Haggas and Hugo Palmer in the mornings before he coaches jockeys and lectures at the British Racing School. And Richard is very involved with Sheikh Hamdan, having ridden for him for nearly 20 years."
It remains to be seen which of Hills's grandsons – or indeed how many – pick up the baton, although he says two of them are already showing a keen interest. However, only one of them can take over Faringdon Place, which stands as a monument to the man responsible for not just the stables but the landlords who will train there for many years hence.
Hills's father, Bill, trained horses for a spell between the wars, although they weren't thoroughbreds. In 1934, three years before Barry was born, Bill won the Pony Derby at now-defunct Northolt Park with Mountain Cloud. Bill returned to the thoroughbred fold after the war when he joined George Colling's Newmarket stable as head lad.
But the training dynasty really starts with Barry, courtesy of his Frankincense coup. He started with nothing before accumulating a small fortune in a sport that had changed beyond recognition by the time he retired nine years ago.
However, there has been one constant within the sea change. "It's as true today as it was back then," Hills says. "Anyone backing bad horses will go skint."
Barry Hills 1937-2025:
Barry Hills, legendary trainer and head of a major racing dynasty, dies at the age of 88
Obituary: Five stars: Arc hero Rheingold heads the list of the best horses Barry Hills trained
Published on inBarry Hills 1937-2025
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