'Jack of His Own trade'.

​The title of this piece is also the title, with the added subtitle, ‘The Life and Times of Jack Colling’, of Susan Colling’s book about the career of her husband.
I am reasonably sure that the author set out to write a biography of her husband, the trainer Jack Colling, and in her own mind that was what she achieved. The book, though, is less of a biography and more a memoir of her life as the wife of a successful trainer. The narrative is random, heading south and north in one chapter and then east and west in the next. That is not to condemn the book as amateurish or of no value. In fact, the less than professional approach is what gives it the charm of a loving wife wishing to send her husband off into the hereafter with good and honest references should he meet anyone of importance in the spiritual realm. That’s how the book came across to me, anyhow.
The book is self-published. Deliberately self-published or as a result of the author being unable to find a publishing house willing to take the book on, I cannot say. No book is made worse for being self-published. In fact, it takes greater effort to self-publish than to have an agent and publisher take the strain. I should know. I have been that soldier. You must undertake the task of proof-reading at a time when, as the author, you are pretty sick and tired of the ’baby’ you have conceived and nurtured, dressed as well as your ability will allow, and given to the world as a gift of your soul. The author is also his/her own editor and to appreciate the work of a professional editor just read a self-published book. But I digress.
The preface to the book was dated 1993, with the place of composition Monterana, Italy. Susan Colling does not inform the reader if she moved to Italy after Jack’s death or whether she was on holiday or merely visiting friends. Perhaps it is to her credit she omitted to tell us anything about her life after her husband passed-on as ‘Jack of His Own Trade’ is a book about her husband, his career as a jockey and trainer, and not about her, as interesting and entertaining as she might have been.
Jack Colling died in 1981. The sport held him in enough esteem for there to be an apprentice race run in his honour at Newbury for a good while, though not anymore, I believe. Colling was apprenticed to his father and rode his first winner in 1912, when only eleven-years-old. Times have changed since then. It wasn’t many years before Jack’s birth that kids of eleven and less were being thrust up chimneys with a broom and absolutely no P.P.E., even before the fire was dead in the hearth. Weight beat him as a flat jockey just as he was on the verge of moving into the big time as first jockey to a major yard.
The book, if I recall correctly, does not give the number of winners he rode as a jockey, though when he retired from training his winning total was 1,532, the highest in many a long year. The record was not his for long, though, as Sir Jack Jarvis out achieved him by two.
As Susan Colling writes in the preface, ‘It’s rather interesting that the horse who gave Henry (Cecil) his first big success, Wolver Hollow’ was originally bought by Jack on behalf of Henry’s stepfather, Sir Cecil Boyd Rochfort. The book has a good many interesting facts dotted throughout, though the majority are now dated, the characters long dead. Jack, for instance, trained Trelawny, a great favourite of mine, before George Todd took over the training of one of the most popular long-distance horses of his time.
I mention the above to give evidence to any reader too young to recall Jack Colling that he was during his lifetime a ‘someone’ in the sport, a top man, with a racing lineage to be proud about.
As Susan Colling is honest enough to admit, the narrative lacks cohesion as one story leads her to not always seamlessly to another and as memory is neither numerical nor ordered an anecdote from 1914 may be followed in the same paragraph by an incident set in 1935 and concluded in 1944. That is not an exact description of the text but it holds true as a warning to anyone who has the good fortune to come across a copy of the book and who has a hankering for structure, that this a competent attempt at biography though by a long chalk not a mirror-image of a professional one. That is not criticism, by the way, but the observation of a writer who after long suffering at the keyboard is yet to produce a literary offering as worthwhile as ‘Jack of His Own Trade’.