BIDDLES.

​I recently wrote a piece about Timmy Murphy and how he had to admit to being an alcoholic before going on to enjoy the best years of his career. Alcohol nearly destroyed his career and ruined him as a man and he only just saved himself from becoming yet another victim of its brain-addling addiction.
Timmy Murphy was a gifted jockey, yet possessing a talent millions of others would pay fortunes for is no guarantee of happiness and success. Arguably Terry Biddlecombe was an even better jockey than Timmy Murphy, certainly he was more successful, becoming champion jockey three times, as well as winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup, yet the demon drink held him in its vice-like grip too.
Like all teetotallers, I suspect, I rather look down my nose at people who allow their lives to be dominated by alcohol or any other addiction. Subconsciously I also envy the always-inebriated as fun seems to come so easily to them. But I digress.
In ‘Winner’s Disclosure’, Terry’s autobiography, he charts his career from farmer’s son through his highly successful time as Fred Rimell’s stable jockey, to marriage, fatherhood and retirement. It is about the horses and trainers who got him going, the big winners, Turkish baths (there are many paragraphs about Turkish baths) and tales of silly pranks and derring-do. It is a typical jockey’s biography. Highly readable yet also somehow lacking.
And it is not only the drink that Terry had in common with Timmy Murphy. Both of their autobiographies end before the really interesting part of their lives get going. Timmy won a Grand National and metamorphosised into a flat jockey after his book was published. Terry left for Australia, suffered from depression, became a serious alcoholic, divorced his second wife, and was saved from drinking himself to death at the eleventh hour and yet went on to become a living legend alongside his final wife, Henrietta Knight (no relation, she will be pleased to know).
Now, I have a tenuous connection to the lives and loves of Terry Biddlecombe as during the time of his brush with death and admitting to being an alcoholic, I was working as a herdsman for his brother Tony on the family farm in Gloucestershire. I was told by someone of sound reputation, by the way, that Tony was the better jockey of the two brothers and was certainly the better built for such a profession. He gave up riding – he was champion amateur in his day – to run the family farm.
If I remember the facts correctly, it was Tony’s wife who found Terry unconscious and with little sign of him wanting to fend-off the Grim Reaper and got him to hospital in the nick of time. As with alcoholics, they found bottles of alcohol, miniature and regular-size, in every nook and cranny, in coat pockets, down the sides of furniture, in the airing closet and so on. It seems greater the man, the greater the disgrace.
He is, and always will remain, one of the legends of the sport, the last of the cavalier jockeys, almost the antithesis of today’s more sober, more professional, jockey. Life for Terry and his peers was for living. He lived for racing, riding, women, champagne and keeping his middle-weight boxer’s physique lithe and supple enough for him to ride at around 11st and a few pounds. He may be considered as the last of the cavaliers but his dedication to keeping in trim would have few equals today. And, of course, it is said he broke every bone in his body during his career. No wonder one of his best and longest friends was his doctor.
‘Winner’s Disclosure’ was published in 1982. How things have changed since then. At the time no National Hunt jockey had ridden a hundred winners in two successive seasons and few had exceeded his lifetime total of 905 winners. By the standards of today Terry and his colleagues could not have been trying very hard. His final total can be better appreciated if you take into account that before him Fred Winter, Josh Gifford and jockeys of the calibre of Dick Francis, Tim Brookshaw and Tim Molony finished their careers with fewer winners than Terry.
Where in the pantheon of great National Hunt jockeys Terry Biddlecombe should be placed is neither here nor there. The sporting gods, even if occasionally they deserted him, had his back, they healed him when he was broken and allowed him a pathway back to the front pages of the racing press when they had Henrietta Knight introduced to him. He may have even achieved the holy grail of life– he might have died happier than he had lived as alcoholics hide the ravages of their lives behind a mask of false jollity.
He died in 2014 after a long illness that had at its root the many injuries he endured as a jockey. He was married to Henrietta for 19 years and were best mates for all of that time.