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No Teeth but Easterby Still Takes A Bite Out Of Life


The Times

10 July 2004

VARIOUS health warnings apply to an interview with Mick Easterby. He may take against you. He will certainly try to sell you a horse. He will swear and spit copiously, and quite possibly lead you into knee-deep mud in his endless acreage of fields and farms. Overcome all this and the secrets of a true Yorkshire legend may begin to unfold.

It was not a propitious start. Easterby stood in his office, hands on hips and jaw jutting challengingly. "Whenever you fellas come before a big race, you're a bloody jinx." With that, he marched out, clamping a cap on to his head. A few solitary moments passed before I realised I was intended to follow him, rather than leave the premises.

Easterby carries the local flag in today's John Smith's Cup with Blue Spinnaker.

York is the closest racecourse to the Easterby estate, more commonly known as Ryedale, and this most Yorkshire of races is close to his heart. Remarkably, despite training for 44 of the race's 45-year history, he has never won it. We are to view his latest runner but, as ever with M. W. Easterby, there are diversions along the way.

He has just returned from Newmarket Sales, affronted at one more attempt to frisk him of the hard-earned. "Silly money, they were asking. I don't know what's gone wrong with the world." So he came away empty-handed? "No, I bought three. Do you want a share in one?" Well, at least that's out of the way.

Does he regard himself as a farmer or a trainer? "I'm a dealer," he said. "I love it." He rubs his hands in mock relish. "There's no money in training horses - that's a waste of time. And if I only trained, it might drive me insane."

Easterby barges through a wooden gate into a pen with a small sand circle and proceeds to chase a young horse over an improvised obstacle of upturned oil barrels. He uses a hunting crop, alternately waving it in the air and whacking it against a spare barrel.

He has red braces holding up voluminous trousers and it presents an arresting spectacle. Easterby, however, is a skilled stockman and his way of loose schooling self-evidently works. Amid the bedlam, he is trying to hold a conversation on his mobile phone.

Technology and Mick Easterby are not natural bedfellows but he looks satisfied enough. "Useful things for keeping on top of the staff," he declared, pressing more buttons on his phone and preparing a barrage of instructions. "Oh, wrong number," he said instead.

A cheerful 14-year-old completing a canter is introduced as his granddaughter, whose name he finally recalls as Joanne. "She'll ride out five lots this morning.

And that's Paul (Mulrennan), who rides Blue Spinnaker. He'll ride seven or eight every day. They all get practice here and I try to make jockeys of them...but I'm very critical of jockeys."

A luxurious spit followed this dark remark, followed by a mop of his brow with an immense handkerchief of uncertain history. "Do you know," he says suddenly, "I'm 73 and I've no teeth. It's why I like soup so much." With this apparently unconnected information imparted, we are summoned into a Land Rover, as if he has decided we merit the grand tour.

His farms and fields surround the trim village of Sheriff Hutton and Easterby gets anecdotal. He moved here 50 years ago, having been born in Huddersfield but brought up in Great Habton, the village where his brother, Peter, was to train.

"My brother's the oldest, he pushed me out so I had to go elsewhere. Put that in, will you, it's a good 'un," he orders.

The brothers, whose swaths of land are neatly divided by Castle Howard, are actually two peas in a pod. "We should have been twins," Mick says. "Don't believe in falling out -never been a wrong word between us.

"There are very few Easterbys about, you know, but I had a call one Sunday afternoon from someone, said he was my cousin Josh. I'd never heard of him but he said he was doing the family tree and could go back to the 1800s. There'd been a split, he said, and one side of the family were well-to-do and the other were horse smugglers. I rang my brother and told him I'd just found out our pedigree. Peter said to ring the fellow back and say nothing's changed."

Blue Spinnaker is in a roomy corner box at one of three yards, among which Easterby disperses more horses than he has ever counted. He is a typical horse for this trainer, bought cheaply at the sales and cured of persistent lameness. "He only cost two grand and he's a perfect gentleman to train. It would be nice to win this race, I've always wanted to, but I do think he prefers faster ground."

The trainer's money is unlikely to be down. "I'm the world's worst punter," he announced, launching into a reminiscence of Lochnager, his 1976 Royal Ascot winner. "First time out as a three-year-old, I thought it was a question of how far he'd win. I decided I'd have a right bet, two grand on. I stayed at Haydock the night before and pinned the money inside my jacket pocket.

"I woke up in the night with sweat pouring off me. I dreamt he'd got beat on soft ground. I thought I'd halve my bet. When I woke up again it was still raining and I decided I was off my head betting a grand. I'd have £500 instead. At the races, I heard various trainers fancied their horses and thought I'd better not waste so much. I ended up betting fifty quid and he won by 30 lengths. That's how bad a punter I am." It is lashing with rain now, and cold with it, but Easterby is in and out of the jeep every other minute. "I get bored very quick," he explains. "The only way I can do a job is if I've got another one lined up."

So we look at his herd of Charolais cattle, examine his pig pens, even a house conversion he calls "my spare-time job". Finally, we visit horses in old barns, with chickens for company and electric wire keeping them apart, and he chuckles: "I wonder what Sheikh Mohammed would think if he saw this. He'd have a fit."

As with everything that Easterby does, though, there is sound stockman's theory behind it. "Horses naturally herd together and they don't worry about the wire. A horse needs to relax at home if he's to win races -too many are trained regimentally."

Not here, they aren't, and nor is it ever likely. Easterby, who says his life is run by his secretary, Wendy, will hand over to his son, David, "whenever he wishes", but this is not a man for quiet retirement. He enjoys his life too much for that. "I've decided I don't want to be cremated," he declared. "I'm going to be buried, there's a slight chance I might get out again."












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