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On the gallops and in the yard there was plenty to enjoy, not least a strong-looking Bahamian Bounty two-year-old which still needs a part-owner. Bethlehem, an Oratorio colt with potential, probably won’t run until the autumn and Formulation, a big Danehill Dancer colt who really stands over some ground, will probably take time, too. Hughie doesn’t rush his horses and has no qualms about giving them runs to improve their education. But Pastoral Player is naturally forward and should have the speed to win early over five furlongs. The three-year-old State Banquet, winner of his only race at two, looks to have wintered well and should win staying races. Palace Moon, a four-year-old by Fantastic Light who has to wear ‘slippers’ at home for his tender feet, was never out of the frame last year and should have opportunities too.
Prematurely grey, Hughie exudes restless energy combined with reflective intelligence. If he were a school headmaster you would instinctively trust your kids to him. No surprise then that a growing number of owners now do that with their horses. An extra yard has been built; without the recession there would have been another horse-walker this year. And notices on many box doors proclaiming ‘Steamed hay’ confirmed the innovatory search for new solutions.
‘It’s all about the “ay”,’ he says in a passable imitation of John Francome’s Wiltshire vowels and, following the experience of his friend Tom George, whose jumpers have been on fire this season, Hughie has installed some steamers. You put the bale of hay into a cabinet and irradiate it with steam through probes. The theory is that that removes the dust and spores which can increase mucus and cause respiratory problems.
‘Here you are, smell this and you’ll want it for breakfast,’ said Hughie, with the enthusiasm of ‘Q’ demonstrating the latest knock-out gadget to Bond. He was right. It smelled beguilingly rich, ripe and fruity. But I still stuck with Mary Morrison’s croissants.
You need more than machinery, though, to produce horses fast enough to win races tended by stable staff who are stayers and Hughie, who comes from the estate-owning Morrison clan that has long provided backbone and back-up to the Tory party, has delivered results. There have been sprinting Group Ones with horses like Pastoral Pursuits and Sakhee’s Secret, long-distance victories at the same level with horses like the stout-hearted but fragile Alcazar. He has long ago shrugged into irrelevance any suggestion that, coming from the family which bred Classic winners like Julio Mariner, he started with liberal dollops from a silver spoon.
Hard work and horse sense have seen him build his yard over ten years from 30 to 90 horses (‘I’ll be lucky if I have 80 next year’) but he was still surprised when I put him in the top bracket. He sees himself as in the equine middle classes. He doesn’t go off to the sales, he insists, with huge wads of other people’s cheques stuffed in his wallet. But the country sports enthusiast with the conservative pedigree still seems a rancorous radical to some of racing’s Establishment.
Hughie is famous for impatience with what he sees as misguided racing authorities. He resents, for example, the chaotic pattern of watering on racecourses which makes life harder for handlers and punters alike as the going is changed artificially but the descriptions don’t always match. The result, says Hughie, is that the form book becomes inaccurate. ‘If I misled the public as often as racecourses do, I wouldn’t still have a licence.’ Stewards gang together and protect officials, he says.
And why, he wonders, does the British Horseracing Authority have to have expensive offices in central London when there are plenty of racecourses with admin blocks unfilled?
But if he is impatient with officialdom he is equally well-known for his patience with horses (he won with Tom Paddington after an injury layoff of nearly four years, with Alcazar after two broken pelvises which enforced off-games periods of 1,035 and 556 days). He has, too, the crucial quality of ‘feel’. Hughie went through the last recession as a businessman and knows what it is to hand out redundancy notices. But as racing faces its testing period he is likely to be handing out fewer P45s than most.
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