A NOBLE MISSION
Henry Cecil was a legend and for his widow Jane the process of keeping his name alive is …
JANE CECIL has not been clothes shopping since he husband Henry died almost a year ago. He would always pop down to a local boutique in Newmarket and choose a new dress for Jane, something special for her when he had a fancied runner. He would urge her to try it on. Almost always it was perfect.
To go shopping without him would be too painful right now, particularly with Royal Ascot just around the corner.
‘A good week before Ascot he’d be laying out his outfit. His tie, his handkerchief, socks and shoes, everything co-ordinated. He just really looked forward to it.’
Last year’s Royal Ascot was just a week after Henry’s death on June 11. ‘It’s going to be just as difficult this year without him. Everyone says time’s a great healer. The strange thing is, I miss him more and more not less and less.
‘I don’t know whether it’s because now the training operation is not as all-consuming as it was. I just miss him more,’ she says.
In the kitchen at Warren Place, the home he had lived in since the Seventies, reminders of him are everywhere. Photographs of him with his grandchildren are displayed on the dresser, books about him and Frankel the wonder horse lay on the table. The fruit bowl bears his name.
But there is also evidence of rebirth. Jane Cecil proudly shows me the front page of the Newmarket Journal, her local paper.
The main picture i s of the Warren Place team – her team – celebrating the victory of Noble Mission in the Tattersalls Gold Cup at The Curragh last Sunday.
It was a first Group One success since his death. He trained 114 in his 44-year training career. This was Jane’s first.
It was Sir Henry’s habit to fly the Horn of Leys flag, bearing the coat of arms of his Scottish aristocratic family, every time he trained a Group One winner. And so, last Sunday, Jane’s daughter Carina – a trained solicitor who works as her secretary – proudly hoisted the aged colours up the flagpole at Warren Place.
‘That was our main target when I took up the licence last year so it was very special to be able to get the flag up for Henry.’
When Noble Mission arrived home on Monday, the team assembled under the flagpole with a glass of champagne. Jane calls them her extended family.
There had been scepticism when she took over the training operation after her husband’s death. Some thought the yard would wither away without his magic. Several owners removed their horses.
‘I believe there was [some negativity] but nobody says it to your face, do they?’ she says.
‘I suppose some people thought we were mad and I woke up sometimes myself thinking I was mad but we just had so much going for us here.
‘It would have been so hard for my staff if I’d given up and those horses, their horses, had gone somewhere else.
‘It was also a welcome distraction. When you’ve got 100 horses and 60 staff as we did at the time, you can’t just hide away.’
CRUCIALLY, Prince Khalid and the Niarchos family left their horses with her and she has justified their faith, with 35 winners from 156 runners, an enviable 22.45 per cent strike rate. Perhaps it would have been easy to give up but for Jane Cecil, Warren Place equals Henry. The vegetable garden, which he designed in the grounds, remains unaltered. The figs he loved to eat continue to grow and the scent from the pink and yellow roses that he loved tending to hangs thick in the air.
It is when she stands on top of the heath watching her third lot of the day walk down the hill and canter back up that she, feels closest to Henry.
‘Sometimes I’m on my own and that’s a very special place because I think of all the hundreds and hundreds of hours that Henry stood out there probably standing on the same spot,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it all seems to the other trainers that it’s not the same without him and I’m sure it will be a long time before everyone gets used to it, really.
‘But the warmth everybody felt from Henry has been partly transferred on to me. Often people are just out on the heath watching the horses and they tell me about meeting Henry 15 years ago, and it’s just so vivid in their memory.
‘He didn’t know who they were, he just saw that they were up for the day. They were standing at the fence and he made them come across to
him. You can never tell me enough things about Henry.’
Jane Cecil was granted a temporary licence and did a course at the British Racing School to get her full licence. Much of it she had already learned subconsciously from Henry. ‘George [Scott] must get sick to death of me saying, “Henry would have done this or Henry would have done that”. On the whole, we try to keep it as much the same as Henry would have had it. But, of course, it’s impossible because with him it was instinct. Lots of people say he was a genius — and he was.’
Even in the week before his death, Henry would be instructing his wife from his hospital bed on pairing riders with horses.
‘He couldn’t contemplate not being around,’ she says. ‘He just wanted to live. It wasn’t something that even occurred to him until the last couple of days and it was so important to him to think that he could have got better. He just did so well for so long that we just thought he was invincible.’
She keeps his legacy alive with every winner and she is keen to nurture more horses to the winning post. ‘You always want to build on what you’ve got,’ she says. ‘We went down in numbers but it would be lovely if people saw what we were doing and said, “Oh, they’re doing quite well at Warren Place again”.
‘But I’m just so lucky to be doing something that I love. It’s a huge responsibility but there are these huge rewards and every day, rain or shine, it’s still lovely out there.’