The day Prince Charles helped break a pub ban
Vincent Kilkenny, a legend in the racing and hunting world, lived a rich and colourful life
Vincent Kilkenny, undoubtedly one of the great racing and hunting characters of recent years, passed away last week at the age of 80. His biggest winner as an owner was Billycan in the 1977 Irish Grand National. Trained by Adrian Maxwell, the horse was ridden by Mouse Morris and, but for being baulked at the last fence, might also have won that season’s RSA Chase at Cheltenham but finished third behind Gay Spartan.
Kilkenny also had horses with his business partner Roy Strudwick, of Ballygallon Stud fame, and together they were among Lambourn trainer Paul Cole’s first owners.
“He was a big punter and I remember we landed a gamble for him at Salisbury one day, but he had lost it all and more by the second last race,” recalled Cole.
The trainer also recalled having a day out hunting with the pair. It was nearly dark and they were stuck in a field unable to get out, so Kilkenny and Strudwick decided to jump a hedge on to a road.
Cole said: “I really thought ‘this is it’. I made a pact with myself that if I survived I would never go hunting again. Halfway over the hedge I looked down and saw four strands of barbed wire. We all survived but, as promised, it was the last day I ever hunted.”
Kilkenny was from a Galway farming family but made his fortune in construction in Britain, specialising in ground work.
On one occasion when he had a runner at a point-to-point in Ireland he got wind his jockey had backed another horse so he asked the stewards if there was any reason he could not ride it himself. He then thumped the jockey before winning on the horse.
Until the turn of the century he would return to Ireland to go hunting for a week every year, staying at the Dunraven Arms. He would have a pint of Guinness and a sirloin steak for breakfast, hunt with a different pack each day and never sleep.
Once, when out with his local
hunt in England, he became separated from the action so stopped a train at Poundon, on the Bicester-marylebone line, to ask the driver if he had seen the hounds – he had not – then offered him a tenner for his trouble.
It was the sort of thing that might have happened in one of RS Surtees’s Jorrocks novels, but rarely in real life.
In Oxfordshire he was banned from most pubs and regarded it as a challenge to get back in to them for a drink. Despite his reputation as a wild Irishman, he always chaperoned the Prince of Wales when he hunted with the Bicester.
One foggy day they were lost near Kidlington, so Kilkenny knocked on the door of the Nut Tree Inn to ask to borrow the phone with Prince Charles out of sight around the corner holding the horses. “You’re barred, Kilkenny,” said the landlord.
“But I have someone very important with me,” he replied.
“I don’t care if it is the future King of England,” said the landlord.
Eventually he was allowed in while they waited for the Prince’s horsebox to arrive. Keen to mark the visit, the landlord asked the Prince if he would pose for a photograph but without Kilkenny, in it. The Prince obliged – on the condition that Kilkenny was in the shot.
Richard Hannon’s Open Day last week raised £10,000 in aid of Wiltshire Air Ambulance and Greatwood Charity.
His wife Jemima’s terrific idea to attract the young was to hire Sharky & George, the popular brand of children’s entertainers who are well known to mothers in Chelsea and Berkshire for amusing young Jimmy and his friends at birthday parties.
Of course, the trainer had never heard of them and, a bit like calling M&S, Spencer and Marks, insisted on name-checking them at every opportunity as George & Sharky. It is just as well Jemima is in charge of entertainment for his own children.