'reflections in a silver spoon'.

​The older reader will be aware that Paul Mellon owned and bred Mill Reef, along with many other great horses this side of the channel and back in the good old U.S.. Horse racing is what I best know him. He also acquired honorary degrees from five universities, Oxford, Carnegie Institute, Yale, Cambridge and the Royal Veterinary College, London. Amongst sixteen other honorary awards and memberships he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
During his lifetime, in both his own name and the Old Dominion Foundation, his educational and charitable contributions were truly staggering. For instance: $638,000 to the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, its existence in Stratford, Connecticut was a surprise to me. $1,500,000 to the Buffalo Bill Historical Centre in Cody, Wyoming. A mouth-watering $142, 741,000 to the National Gallery of Art, founded by his father, in Washington, D.C. $510,000 to the National Horseracing Museum at Newmarket. $2,277,000 to the National Museum of Racing, Saratoga. $846,000 to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. $1,738,000 to Clare College, Cambridge. $8,115,000 to Yale University.
I could go on. Briefly, I will. In all, encompassing science, psychiatry and religion, conservation and preservation, education and the arts, directly and indirectly, Paul Mellon contributed to 65 organisations and institutions in Great Britain and the U.S., and that does not include smaller donations to charities local to where he lived. The total amount is beyond my expertise to calculate but the aforementioned examples are just the tip of a very large dollar bill iceberg.
I suspect anyone privileged to know him personally will vouch for the kindness and loyalty of his character. Oh, and by the way, his sister Ailsa had her own charitable foundation, Avalon, and she too gave away large amounts of the Mellon inheritance. As it is with fabulously wealthy families, there are many books on the Mellons’, including ‘The Chronicle of America’s Richest Family by David Koskoff and Richard Hersh’ ‘The Mellon Family: A Fortune in History.
‘Reflections in a Silver Spoon’ was co-written by John Baskett, an art dealer who lived in London.
But to get back on topic. He owned the winners of the Maryland Hunt Cup (1937), The Grand National Point-to-Point (1935) and the Grand National Steeplechase, both at Belmont Park and Far Hills (1948 & 1990). He won the Carolina Cup 7 times, The Middleburg Hunt Cup 7 times and the Deep Run Hunt Cup 8 times.
Drinmore Lad, winner of the Carolina Cup and the Deep Run in 1935 and the year before the winner of the Middleburg and the Deep Run, was shipped to England and won the Valentines Chase at Aintree and once dead-heated with Golden Miller at Gatwick.
Mellon also won the Stanley Chase at Aintree with Blakely Grove and the Topham Trophy with Red Tide.
Without mentioning years or horses, he also won the Belmont, Jockey Club Gold Cup, Futurity, Travers, the Handicap triple crown, the Brooklyn, Metropolitan and Suburban. The Man O’ War and Washington International also came his way, as well as 3 Horse of the Year accolades – Arts and Letters, Fort Marcy and Key to the Mint.
Oddly, though in a footnote he reminded his reader that Blakely Grove and Red Tide won for him at Aintree, ‘Reflections in a Silver Spoon’ has no record of his big race winners on the flat in this country, which given he owned Mill Reef, arguably the best horse he ever owned and bred, is quite an oversight. But then perhaps the editor was of the opinion that the British reader would undoubtedly be interested in Mellon’s U.S. conquests but the U.S. reader would have little interest in his British and European successes.
Now, in case I have wetted the readers’ curiosity in Paul Mellon’s memoir, I must warn you, as I have informed the National Equestrian Book Club,’ that ‘Reflections in a Silver Spoon’ is not a racing book. It is so very much more an arts book, with only a small number of its pages dedicated to racing. The book has appeal, and given my diet of racing books in the past year, it made for a pleasant diversion, but I must admit when I ordered the book I was expecting chapters on his American and British jumping interests, as well similar chapters on Mill Reef, Fort Marcy, Arts and Letters, and even anecdotes on that old-stager Morris Dancer, the Balding family and the establishment of his Rokeby Stables. Alas, that was not to me. Having said that, it will sit comfortably next to Brough Scott’s ‘Churchill at the Gallop’, another book to be marketed as a racing book, which for all its excellence and the number of equines mentioned, is also not a book on horse racing.
Paul Mellon inherited more money than any man has a right to expect and I suspect the privilege lay pretty heavy at his heart and soul and after turning his back on the source of the family wealth he set about dedicating his life to the arts, his love of horse racing and giving away as much money as his financial advisors would allow. I think his greatest achievement in life, though, and I hope those who knew him would agree, is that he was a very good human being.