'An extraordinary man and a major influence on my life'

I spent three very happy years with Fred Rimell in the mid-1970s, and during the time I was there he won the Gold Cup with Royal Frolic and the Grand National with Rag Trade. I had been working for Tim Forster and I got headhunted to become Fred's assistant.

He was an extraordinary man and a major influence on my life. He had great intuition about horses, whereas his wife Mercy had great skill when it came to entering horses, so the combination of those two was pretty dynamic.

I learned an awful lot there: Mercy used to make me do my own entries – I used to go in every Sunday morning bringing a list of my entries from the old-fashioned entry book, which usually resulted in half an hour of ear-twicking as she pointed out that Folkestone might not be the place owners wanted to run their horse if they were based in Scotland.