All in a day’s work Polo club chairman Jamie Morrison

The Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club’s Jamie Morrison on running a top club, hosting International Day (28 July) and his passion for music

My father Bryan Morrison acquired the polo club in 1985,

so I grew up with it. From my early teens onwards, he would encourage me to learn how to paint the boards or help the groundsmen, so I’d learn the business from the ground up. When I was 30, Dad had a polo accident and was in a coma for a few years before he passed away. That’s when I took over the club.

My father didn’t start playing until he was in his 30s

— I don’t think he’d seen a horse really before then. He was an East End guy done good, so when a friend invited him to a polo match at Ham, in Richmond Park, he didn’t think it would be his scene. He did go, though, and as soon as he saw these eight guys riding around the field like lunatics, he just fell in love with it. The next day he booked his first polo lesson, and that was it.

I think if I wasn’t running the club, I’d be involved in music.

That was my father’s business [Bryan Morrison worked with names including Pink Floyd, George Michael, The Bee Gees and The Jam]. The polo club was always a passion first and foremost — it wasn’t anything he wanted to make money out of. Frankly, it’s difficult to make money out of a polo club anyway. We still have a music label up in town, so I’m involved in that quite a bit and, if an exceedingly good artist came along, of course, we’d go for them.

Polo for me is a passion.

It is a real commitment, having the horses and so on, but when you’re out there on the pitch, you forget about all your problems and just focus. It’s something I’ll never give up unless I’m dead or broke. It’s always great fun — I’m lucky that the club is on the doorstep and that I can squeeze it in around my work.

When I was 18 or 19, I won the Eduardo Moore Trophy with my dad.

It was pretty special to be able to do something like that with the old man. I also won the Prince of Wales trophy with a group of friends back in 2003, so there have been some amazing times. I don’t think there have been any low times really in polo, as it’s just such a fantastic sport.

As soon as we heard that the contract for International Day

[formerly the Cartier International] might be coming up for renewal, we said we’d love to have a crack at it. The years between 2007 and 2010 were the heady days when there were 30,000 people attending. We’d love to get back to those days and make an event that everyone can be proud of. It helps push polo as a sport to have a showpiece event with our national team.

We all know that polo is a social sport, and we have to embrace that.

If we can turn some of those social fans into polo fans — whether as players or spectators — that’s even better.

My plan is to make International Day more of a celebration of the horse.

We are trying to introduce other equestrian pursuits, and to attract fans of other equestrian sports. This year, we’ve got Charlotte Dujardin doing a masterclass on the day and to have her at the club is special for us. Maybe, in the future, we could have showjumping classes here.

The job does take over my life, but we do it because we love it;

it doesn’t feel like work to be honest. If we sold this place tomorrow, we’d be sitting here twiddling our thumbs, wondering what we were going to do

next.

‘When you’re out there on the pitch, you forget about all your problems

and just focus’