The trainer who is still defying the odds aged 82
After landing a 1,121-1 treble this week, Milton Bradley will not be retiring any time soon, writes Marcus Armytage
His trademark was to win up to £100,000 with horses that cost no more than £3,000
My father’s motto for old age was “ease up, seize up” and after sending out a 1,121-1 treble at Lingfield on Tuesday, Milton Bradley was offering advice along similar lines. “Don’t retire,” he said. “You die when you retire. Don’t rest out, wear out.”
Bradley, who trains horses a mile from Chepstow, still gets up at 5am every morning to feed his string of 25 horses. On Tuesday he drove four runners the 3½-hour, 150-mile, journey to Lingfield and back. He is 82.
He is old enough to remember German planes attacking Bristol, the fifth most bombed city in Britain, in the Second World War. It was an easy target because the pilots could follow the moonlight reflecting off the River Avon to the middle of the city and between November 1940 and April 1941 it was not just the docks that were heavily raided six times; 1,299 people were killed and nearly 82,000 houses destroyed. The planes would then often swing in a big arc over Bradley’s home town Chepstow before beginning another run, chased by British fighters which “peppered them in some form”.
If you had 100 acres or more you stayed at home to farm rather than go off to fight, and some brothers, who had made good money in the City and were not that keen on putting on uniform, offered Milton’s father Jack a “stupid price” for the 400-acre family farm, so he sold up.
“Of course without a farm he got his call-up papers a fortnight later, which was a bit of a shock,” explained Bradley. “But he applied for the job of agricultural officer for Gloucester, got it and was given 50 tractors, 100 tractor drivers and 200 prisoners of war and told to grow as much food as he could to counteract the damage being done by U-boats in the Atlantic.”
Having fed the county, when Jack Bradley finally retired he gave Milton 150 acres. He later added to them and his own son now farms 800 acres. But horses have never been very far from Bradley’s heart. He rode in local gymkhanas as a child before turning his attention to point-topointing and flapping – illegal racing.
It was because of the latter that the Jockey Club made him wait three years for his first licence nearly 50 years ago. He once got up to 90 horses and the Bradley trademark was to win multiple races and up to £100,000 in prize-money with horses that typically cost no more than £3,000.
Grey Dolphin won 10 jump races in the 1978-79 season, Yangtze-kiang was another popular chaser and although there is still time, The Tatling, a horse he bought for £15,000 out of a Folkestone claimer, was his horse of a lifetime. He raced 176 times, won 18 including the King’s Stand Stakes at Royal Ascot, was second 28 times and third 25 times.
With Bradley in 2003 and 2004, he was one of the pre-eminent sprinters in Europe. It was his 176th and last race which was the most romantic, however. Bradley had announced that he had “lost a bit of sparkle” and that, three weeks shy of his 15th birthday – in horse terms older than Bradley – a five-furlong handicap at Wolverhampton would be his last race. Sent off the 16-1 outsider, he got up to win after a threeway photo.
“He’s one of those horses you drop on by mistake and spend the rest of your life looking for one half as good,” he said.
Bradley is not the oldest trainer – that honour belongs to Mick Easterby who is 86 – but if actions speak louder than words then his purchase of 10 horses at the sales this autumn, four of them yearlings, suggests he means it about not retiring.
A bit like the Queen Mother buying young potential chasers in her late nineties, it is not how old you are, it is how you are old.