there will never be another.

​You know you have read a good book when at its close you are disappointed there are no more pages to turn. Some books are interesting, worth reading, but are fluffed out with flannel to achieve the agreed number of pages. ‘Born Lucky’ has no such flannel.
Of course, it has its faults. All books do. As already mentioned, at 150 pages it is too short. Way to short for someone as opinionated and amusing as John Francome. Published in 1985, which is another problem with this book as it is a reminder of how old we have become since the great man retired; the second volume is long overdue. The title is also not appropriate as the author was born smart, not lucky. Smart people make their own luck in life, which is why Francome was both as successful in the saddle as out of it.
As a pundit you, or I to be more accurate, did not always agree with what he said, but as with Ruby and A.P. he was always worth listening to. ‘Born Lucky’ is not a completely serious autobiography and he makes that abundantly clear in dedicating the book to his friends - ‘An autobiography is not the story of a car!’ As a jockey he had few peers, and certainly not during the best years of his career.
The oddity about his career as a jockey was the number of ‘run-ins’ and disagreements he had with racing’s powers-that-be because the attributes that best describe him, I suggest, are honesty and loyalty. He refused to continue as a pundit for Channel 4 in loyalty to the programme’s producer who was, and doubtless remains, a friend. For 16 years, the length of his career as a jockey, he worked for and rode as stable jockey to a man who could also be summed-up as honest and reliable, Fred Winter. Yet because of his friendship with the bookmaker John Banks the authorities had him labelled as ‘suspicious’. Of course, coming up with the phrase ‘cabbage-patch dolls’ to describe stewards perhaps did him no favours. I doubt if anyone with a sense of humour would have been elected a steward in those days. And making a stand about the use of surnames to summon jockeys from the weighing room possibly added the adjective ‘troublesome’ to his file of misdemeanours.
Francome, though, was always as loyal to his true self as he was to his friends. In his book, as he admits, there is little written about the horses he rode. He refers to them as ‘tools of the trade’, which does not sit well in this more enlightened era, though he goes on to write ‘from the moment I got on one in the paddock to when I dismounted from it after the race I thought of nothing else but their welfare’. With Francome, I suggest, there is no dichotomy between ‘tool of the trade’ and ‘I thought of nothing else but their welfare’. He doubtless looks after his electric drill, hammer and screwdriver with the same duty of care.
Towards the end of the book the intellectual exercise must have become tiresome as chapters 11 and 12, the final two chapters, are the shortest in the book. Whether his then wife read the manuscripts and casually mentioned that thus far she was little but a footnote to his life story but chapter 11 is a brief summary of his courtship and marriage to the said wife, Miriam. In a short passage that in hindsight is a bittersweet insight into the true character of the author, he declares that marrying Miriam was the best decision of his life ‘and after nine years I can put my hand on my heart and say I’d marry her again tomorrow’. A lesson for us all, at least to the young and perennially silly at heart!
As much as I admire John Francome and mourn his decision to turn his back on television, apart from his autobiography, which will be shelved between Ruby’s and A.P.’s autobiographies as I can award it no finer honour, I will never have amongst my library one of his ‘pot-boiling, liberty-bodice ripping, Dick Francis-esque, racing thrillers’, as I shall always avoid similar books by Richard Pitman, Jenny Pitman, A.P’s no doubt error of judgement or even Dick Francis himself, apart from his autobiography, that is. Francome is just too much a legend of the sport to belittle his talent with the tittle-tattle of fiction. He should sit down and write a second volume of his life. I am sure his life since 1985 has been as equally worth recording as the years covered by ‘Born Lucky’.