DIDO: NOT THE SINGER.

​Baroness Harding of Winscombe has worked for McKinsey & Company, Thomas Cook, the Woolworths Group, Tesco, Sainsbury, was CEO at TalkTalk and is presently, I believe, chair of N.H.S. Improvement, hence the peerage. She also has served on the boards of British Land and, I say wryly with a hint of facetiousness, more respectfully, Cheltenham racecourse.
Things went, to use the vernacular, ‘tits up’, for the Baroness when TalkTalk suffered a ‘significant and sustained cyber-attack’, to which her response ‘The awful truth is that I don’t know’, was described as ‘naïve and by Marketing Magazine as ‘her utter ignorance is a lesson to us all’.
The whys and wherefores of her woes at TalkTalk need not trouble us, nor that she received her peerage for her work at N.H.S. Improvement, which some may laugh at given that the word ‘improvement’ is only ever attached to the N.H.S. by Government Ministers batting off criticism of our health care service. The Conservative Party, like the Labour Party, shamelessly looks after their own.
What’s all this got to do with racing, you may be thinking. Quite a lot, actually. The Baroness is none other than Dido Harding, forever famous for owning Cool Dawn, the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, and when she wrote her book ‘Cool Dawn. My National Velvet’, she had just starting out on what was to become a mega-rise to the top echelons of the world of high business. At TalkTalk she was being paid a cool £6-million quid a year. A far cry from the day she had to go to the bank to raise the £7,000 she needed to buy Cool Dawn.
Given her board-surfing path to wealth and influence – in 2014 she was 7th on the Woman’s Hour ten most influential women in the country – it would be easy to be snotty about her literary effort, especially the erroneous nature of the title, made wrong because National Velvet did not win the Grand National with Elisabeth Taylor in the saddle, whereas Cool Dawn did win the Gold Cup.
And that is really my only criticism of the book. In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone thinking of becoming a racehorse owner as within its pages are both the downs and the highs that come with owning thoroughbreds. Though it must be said that the highs experienced by Dido Harding are exceedingly rare.
She bought Cool Dawn to ride in point-to-points. Her highest ambition was to win a Ladies Open. At five-foot two she was at a real disadvantage when it came to riding, or riding to distinction, a horse with the size and strength of Cool Dawn and as she tells her readers she had many escapades both on the Alner gallops and in the hunting field. Say what you like about her privileged lifestyle but Dido Harding was one brave lady to keep getting in the saddle as there was no doubt she was rarely in command of Cool Dawn. Her bravest decision though was to heed Richard Alner’s advice and allow Andrew Thornton to ride her horse as without the assistance of a professional the horse would never achieve his potential.
What endears me to a book is when I learn stuff. Richard Alner did not want to jock the owner off her horse and to this end he arranged for her to have a week’s extensive schooling with Yogi Breisner, one of the world’s best trainers of horses and riders. He took one look at the way she sat a horse and basically told her everything she did in the saddle was wrong. He also explained, and this as someone who does not ride I found fascinating, was not to look for a stride going to a fence but to accelerate into it and allow the horse to find its own stride pattern. So when you hear a commentator saying that a jockey did not or did see a stride you know he is showing his ignorance on both counts. This also explains to me, at least, why Ruby Walsh and Bryony Frost do not seem to move going to a fence as they are allowing the horse to find its own stride pattern. Not that I am expecting to be hurtling toward a big black open ditch on top of an out-of-control racehorse anytime soon. But it brings a soupçon of comfort to know that I have the Yogi Breisner’s instruction in my head if I should ever need it.
When you finish a book and you wish there were more, what you have read was distinctly better than average and ‘Cool Dawn’ is one such book. Dido Harding, or Baroness Harding, as I suppose I ought refer to her, really should honour the life of her great horse – he died only a few months ago – by writing a sequel. Once retired we often lose track of horses, except when they occasionally appear in parades of old heroes, and it would be nice to know of her experiences hunting him for what I believe was fourteen consecutive seasons after he was retired from the racecourse. I am sure a good deal of interesting water has passed under the bridge of Dido Harding’s life since 1999. I just hope that she spent some of her £6-million quid salary on buying and racing racehorses. Not that she will ever have another Cool Dawn. He was that one-in-a-million chance that just happened to come the way of the Hon. Dido Harding. Lucky lucky lady that she is or was. Now there is a possible title of the sequel – Lucky Lucky Lady.