Birtles a ‘Royal’ poet in motion
ASCOT: Fashion may share the spotlight with racing at Royal Ascot but a nice literary touch is added by Henry Birtles who has written a poem dedicated to the showpiece event. The engaging 51-year-old-whose day to day job is his horse racing television rights business which includes the Melbourne Cup and Breeder’s Cup — has penned ‘A World Like Nowhere Else’ for probably the most glamorous race meeting in the world.
The poem-the third he has been commissioned by Ascot to write-runs to 16 lines concluding with: “A blazing beacon to the most majestic sport of all where heroes rise and heroes fall, And Royal Ascot’s world stands tallest of the tall.”
Self deprecatory to a fault-he says his mercenary instincts in writing commissioned poems would have dead poets spinning in their graves-he still puzzles over how he came to become a poet.
“My love of racing came first,” he told AFP before racing got underway yesterday. “I don’t know how the poetry part really happened as I was probably closer to the bottom than the top of my English class!
“I suppose it started when I visited the Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia, and looked at Phar Lap their greatest horse who a taxidermist back in the 30’s had done a great job on and there he is in all his glory. “This Australian lady came in with her child and remarked ‘nice horsey’ I thought to myself that is not a horse it is a piece of your history. “I was a bike courier at the time in Sydney and the next day when I got on my bike I came up with a line for Phar Lap ‘He ran for a country struck down by depression.’ and wrote a poem about him.”
Others followed including one on the extraordinary grey steeplechaser Desert Orchid winning the 1987 Cheltenham Gold Cup. He has now penned 45 — “some of the lesser ones should be hidden at the back”which he hopes to turn into a book and the proceeds given to charity with prostate cancer and the Injured Jockeys Fund favoured.
‘HONEST FARE’
Birtles, who saw his tricky relationship with his English master at Stowe Public School brought to a premature end and was sent thousands of miles away to Canada to finish his schooling, says his poetry would not trouble the pantheon of greats like William Wordsworth or John Keats. “They do rhyme which is good and I think that they are just not complicated you can read them,” he said.
“I would describe it as honest fare like a friend of my mother’s who isn’t a good cook would say ‘come round to my house for dinner you can expect honest fare’.
“You don’t have to dig deep to understand what my poems are about.” Birtles is not just a racing poet. He had a poem read by ‘Homeland’ actor Damian Lewis at Westminster Abbey, and was asked by the BBC to write and film one for the 2014 football World Cup.
In the film he included “the vicar, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker” from the local town as well as Lewis and Hugh Grant. “I said to my two youngest Alec and Scarlett do you want to be part of the BBC film and they said yes.
“Alec kicked a football into the back of the net and Scarlett let go a bunch of red, white and blue balloons up into the sky. “I asked (eldest son) Jack who was 16 at the time and he said ‘no I bloody well don’t want to be part of your film’ which was the answer I wanted. “Good on him!”