A NOBLE MISSION
Sir Henry Cecil was a legend and for his widow Lady Jane keeping his name alive is …
LADY CECIL has not been clothes shopping since Sir Henry died almost a year ago. It was always her husband who would 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.
‘He loved Newmarket, he loved York but he adored Ascot,’ says Lady Cecil. ‘Everything about it, the top-class racing, he loved all the fashion. He just had really great style. I’d go into a shop and say: “Oh no, there’s nothing here” and he’d pick something off the rail … and it’d be just right.
‘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 Sir Henry’s death on June 11, 2013. ‘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,’ adds Lady Cecil, her voice faltering and eyes welling up.
‘I don’t know whether it’s because now the training operation is not as allconsuming as it was. I just miss him more. I just do.’
In the kitchen at Warren Place, the home Sir Henry 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. Lady Cecil proudly shows me the front page of the Newmarket Journal, her local paper.
The main picture is of the Warren Place team — her team — celebrating the victory of Noble Mission in the Tattersalls Gold Cup at The Curragh last Sunday.
We all thought he was invincible . . . and he was for so long STRIKING
GOLD: (from l-r) James Doyle wins on Noble Mission and gets a hug from Lady Cecil, pictured with Sir Henry at Royal Ascot in 2009
It was a first Group One success since Sir Henry’s death. He trained 114 in his 44-year training career. This was Lady Cecil’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, Lady Cecil’s daughter Carina — a trained solicitor who works as her secretary — proudly hoisted the aged colours up the flagpole at Warren Place.
‘I flew back on Sunday night,’ says Lady Cecil. ‘We all met in the bar upstairs at Dublin airport. Lord Grimthorpe [racing manager for Noble Mission’s owner Prince Khalid], his wife Emma, James [Doyle, jockey] George [Scott, assistant trainer] and I. James showed me his phone and my nephew, Charles, had put a picture of the flag on Twitter.
‘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. Lady Cecil 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 Lady Cecil, Warren Place equals Sir 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 Lady Cecil, who married Sir Henry in 2008, feels closest to him.
‘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. I still have people write to me and say he touched their lives. You can never tell me enough things about Henry.’
Lady 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. You cannot teach that.’