MERCY MERCY ME!

​It is odd how during life you form affinities with people you have no physical association with, whilst other people equally unknown to you are considered ‘the other side’. To my shame, the Rimells fell into the latter category, as certain modern trainers do now.
For reasons I now consider illogical, I always favoured a Fulke Walwyn horse over a Fred Rimell trained horse. I suspect this support for someone from a different sphere of society to my council house upbringing was due entirely to my childhood ignorance in favouring Mill House, Walwyn’s greatest horse, over the Irish intruder, Arkle. At the time, though I most likely was unaware of it, Rimell and Walwyn were the great adversaries of National Hunt racing, as it is today with Henderson and Nicholls.
When Fred Rimell died and his wife Mercy took over the licence, to continue to turn out big race winners from Kinnersley, she came over through the media as self-opinionated and perhaps domineering. After reading ‘Mercy Rimell: Reflections on Racing’ edited by Ivor Herbert and published as long ago as 1990, I have altered my opinion of her.
As someone whose love of horse racing and respect for the horse is all-consuming yet falls short of born-in-the-saddle and raised-in-the-stable life experiences of true horseman and women, I am in awe of people with the reputation of Mercy Rimell. I fear that one-by-one racing is losing these indomitable characters, men and women whose life from cradle to grave was determined by equine activity, who could hunt one day, show a pony in hand the next, judge at a horse show in the morning and buy expensive yearlings for millionaire clients in the afternoon. Not too soon into the future we will notice the hole this calibre of horseman has left in the fabric of our sport and we will regret the passing of their kind. It is why, for one thing, that hunting, though not the wanton killing of foxes, is so necessary. Pony racing is a great benefit when it comes to giving experience to budding young riders but it should not exist in isolation as the main form of teaching young adults to ride. On that, if little else, I would hope, Mercy Rimell would agree with me.
In all honesty I was expecting her views to be more strident than they were. Perhaps Ivor Herbert edited her more scandalous opinions. She was generally favourable to the stewarding of her day, believing it was better ‘to have bungling amateurs than crooked professionals’, and was mildly complimentary towards stipendiary stewards. I was surprised to the extent that she liked the jockeys employed by both herself and Fred, though I suspected that no matter how skilful a jockey was he had to be liked by the Rimells to be employed by them. She liked Peter Scudamore and apart from his party lifestyle she had nothing but praise for Terry Biddlecombe. For reasons unstated she seemed to prefer John Francome to Fred Winter. She got on well with Richard Linley, though she thought him not forceful enough riding into the last fence. Sam Morshead, ‘a bit wild’, was brave but got horses ‘unbalanced’ and was not one of their best jockeys. John Burke, though, was, ‘a different league altogether’, and a close second to Terry Biddlecombe as the best stable jockey Kinnersley ever employed. Mercy said he had too much success too soon, winning the Gold Cup and Grand National when he was only twenty-one and drink soon destroyed his great talent. Bobby Beasley was not a great horseman but a great jockey blighted by temperament and bouts of depression and took ‘far more controlling than any owner’.
As someone who believes the on-going future of our sport depends on greater opportunities for women I was disappointed by her views on ‘females’. ‘There are a lot of things females can’t do’ is a statement that is becoming ever more challenged in this present decade and though, having proved the point herself, she was a hundred-per-cent behind women training she was less supportive of female jockeys. ‘The only thing they shouldn’t be doing is riding in professional open races. They are not strong enough’. Tellingly, the chapter on women is the shortest in the book.
When you are shy or have little in the way of communication skills, when small-talk is as hard to achieve as a foreign language poorly learned, answers to question tend to be more honest and less reflective than from someone with a more open personality. It is why, I believe, people like Boris Johnson engage their tongue before their brain has time to rise from its slumber to exercise discretion. Mercy Rimell, I feel from this book, fell into this category. People who knew her might be of a different opinion. It was Fred who dealt with owners because he ‘was good at that sort of thing’, finding good in everyone and never having a bad word. That he left to his wife.
I suspect Mercy could pour scorn on an angel one minute and by the next would be engaged in being charitable to a sinner. I like that in a person. It is character, if infuriating to the outsider. She could walk the walk even if she could not talk the talk. Some people achieve success with horses by being their master whilst the select few achieve success for no other reason than horses like them and respond to them accordingly. Mercy Rimell could communicate with horses and was a horsewoman to her core; a compliment she would accept as her due.