Captain Charles Radclyffe
Equine expert who broke in the Queen Mother’s horses and schooled Grand National winners
CAPTAIN CHARLES RADCLYFFE, who has died aged 97, played a pivotal, if largely unseen, role in the careers of some of jump racing’s star horses – among them, winners of the Grand National, the Champion Hurdle and the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Radclyffe broke in, schooled and reschooled jumpers from across the country. For 25 years he broke in horses for the Queen Mother, who would visit his Oxfordshire farm annually, invariably arriving by RollsRoyce at noon and enjoying a slap-up lunch prepared by Raymond Blanc – drafted in specially from Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons – before checking on the progress of her young horses. On one occasion she was accompanied by the Queen, having asked: “Would it be all right if I brought my daughter?”
Each year Radclyffe would attend the sales in Ireland, buying several yearlings which he would later sell on. He was a superb judge of an animal, and when Corbiere first arrived at his stables Patrick Foley, his head lad, asked: “Why have you bought a plough horse?” Radclyffe replied serenely: “Foley, my boy, in a few years’ time this horse will win a Grand National.” Corbiere would win the National for Jenny Pitman in 1983.
Other big winners to pass through his hands were The Dikler (Cheltenham Gold Cup, 1973); Morley Street (Champion Hurdle, 1991); State of Play (Hennessy Gold Cup, 2006); Baron Blakeney (Triumph Hurdle, 1981); and Foinavon, which, albeit freakishly, won the 1967 Grand National. But Radclyffe missed out on one of the greatest steeplechasers in the history of the sport when his bid in the Ballsbridge sales ring for Arkle fell 100 guineas short of the 1,150 offered by Anne, Duchess of Westminster.
Although Radclyffe’s overriding interest was in National Hunt racing, at one stage he also used to break in and school all the Aga Khan’s two-year-olds.
Radclyffe’s bread and butter was the reschooling and rejuvenation of horses that were proving difficult in the training yard, and his services were called upon by many of the leading trainers, among them Fulke Walwyn, Fred Winter and Martin Pipe. Occasionally the chosen “therapy” would involve herding the cattle on his 500-acre farm at Lew, near Witney.
Charles Raymond Radclyffe was born in Dorset on March 7 1919, the son of Raymond and Grace Radclyffe, and was brought up on a farm in Staffordshire and, later, at Lew. In 1924 his mother earned a place in the annals of fly fishing as the only woman to catch two salmon weighing more than 40lb on a British river on the same day.
In his teenage years Charles was already dealing in horses (in 1935 he sold a grey mare for £115, yielding a £25 profit), and on leaving Eton he went up to University College, Oxford, to read Agriculture. The Second World War interrupted his studies, which do not seem to have been onerous – years later, when his daughter was working at the Bodleian Library, she was surprised to discover that he had no idea it was located in Oxford.
Commissioned into the Royal Scots Greys, Radclyffe served as a tank commander in the North African desert, and in 1942 was fortunate to escape with his life when his tank took a direct hit; his crew were killed, and he was so severely burned that he spent nearly a year receiving specialist treatment at a hospital in Johannesburg.
He returned to his regiment in time to fight in the Salerno landings and the Italian campaign, and later took part in the D-Day landings. He was mentioned in despatches.
After the war Radclyffe served as an instructor at Sandhurst, but in 1946 he left the Army to take over the farm at Lew, his father having died of influenza four years earlier.
Radclyffe never lost his soldierly demeanour, and even in his eighties rose at 7am each day to inspect his horses. A true countryman, he hunted with the Old Berks, the Heythrop and the Vale of the White Horse, and kept horses in Leicestershire for the Quorn and the Belvoir. He enjoyed surfing in Cornwall (disdaining to wear a wetsuit) and waterskiing on the gravel pits at Standlake – he taught the young Camilla Shand, now the Duchess of Cornwall, to waterski.
Radclyffe was a senior steward at Chepstow racecourse, and served as High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1968. He was appointed LVO in 2002.
Charles Radclyffe married, in 1948, Helen Viola Egerton Cotton (known as “Dusé”), the widow of Captain Sir John Pigott-Brown, 2nd Bt, who had been killed in action in Tunisia in 1942. Radclyffe thereby became stepfather to her son, the former jockey Sir William Pigott-Brown, 3rd Bt. Helen Radclyffe died in 2010, and he is survived by their daughter, Sarah Radclyffe, the producer and cofounder of Working Title Films.