BYGONE FLASHES OF ECCENTRICITY.

​The oddness about me, or one of the oddnesses, is if I had a hundred-quid on a horse involved in a photo-finish with a 100/1 outsider trained by an eccentric who rarely has a winner, I would not be overly-disappointed to lose my money. I am, I suppose, too romantically inclined for my own good.
Not that either part of the fantasy is likely to come true as I am by nature far too parsimonious to wager such a huge amount of money on a horse race and there are, unfortunately, no eccentrics in racing these days. Not dyed-in-the-wool individualists with no concept of the normal, anyway. Oh, I do not label Sir Mark Prescott as eccentric as he is a trainer who knows the time of the day. Indeed, I would go as far to say that Sir Mark is one of racing’s all-time great characters and the day he turns up his toes racing will gain a grave worth visiting but will suffer a loss as earth-shattering as the injury that brought about the retirement of Arkle.
Two names from my youth that regularly flicker across my memory, and who I dare say Sir Mark could give chapter and verse about, are John Meacock and Peter Poston, especially the latter as there are many houses named Homefield, the name of one of his better horses.
If I recall correctly John Meacock served in the army out in the Middle-East and may have had the rank of major or captain. He named his horses after short passages to be found in the works of Shakespeare, translating the Bard’s great prose into Persian, as if doing him a favour, as any dedicated eccentric would do. It is widely believed that winners were as rare as hen’s teeth, yet Meacock did train the occasionally winner, though his horses seemed to do a little better once they were sold into the stables of more orthodox trainers.
His best horse, though ‘best’ perhaps should be qualified as ‘least worst’, was Qualibashi who won him several races. Strangely, and for someone with as poor a memory as mine it is difficult to know why, the horse of Meacock’s that remains most vivid is Asad-ul-Mulk, a horse that I believe did not win a race and was rarely ever placed.
I am ashamed to say I know little else about John Meacock’s racing career, except that he also wrote excruciating poetry and owned a travel agency. I wish I knew more but then perhaps there is little else to learn about him. I suspect his training methods were as eccentric as he was and as I cannot recall his horses looking in sparkling condition I suspect his stable husbandry was not of the highest quality. My abiding memory of him is that he believed in tilting at windmills and I especially remember his runners at Royal Ascot finishing a long-way last. I just wish there were a few John Meacock’s around today to give flat racing a soupçon of romance and interesting post-race interviews.
Peter Poston was an eccentric of a different hue to John Meacock. There was method to Poston’s individual take on horse racing. He trained first at Newmarket and latterly at Ingatestone in Essex yet campaigned his horses almost exclusively in the North of England and Scotland. Like Meacock, it is wrong to assume he never trained winners. He did, a good few, and for someone who always paid rock-bottom prices for his horses you could almost praise him for the moderate success he did enjoy.
In Poston’s day there was a scheme where trainers were encouraged to take their horses far afield and it was this travelling allowance where Poston made the sport pay. The allowance, £20 per horse, was not enough at the time to make it profitable to send one horse, say, to Lanark or Hamilton, though six horses did make it pay. Indeed, Poston believed in the Race and Rest method of training, somewhat like Mark Johnstone, and he rented a yard near Lanark racecourse and would ship six horses at a time up there to race at more than one meeting, while another horse box would bring home those in need of rest.
In his way Poston was quite ingenious. He bought cheap, knew full well that he was buying horses with imperfect conformations and to compensate he fed them good grub, used good tack and turned them out on good grass. Poston worked to a plan, so perhaps that made him less of an eccentric than Meacock, but it was a plan individual to himself and given that I cannot recall either Meacock or Poston being in any kind of trouble with the Jockey Club it can be argued the sport was not diminished by their presence.
I suspect in this day and age neither would be granted a licence to train, which would be a pity as high levels of orthodoxy can lead to events becoming ‘the same old story’. It is those people who think outside of the box who innovate, invent and propel the sport forward.