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The house that Jack built

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The Injured Jockeys Fund has provided care and financial help for hundreds of riders since it was founded 50 years ago. One of the most dedicated workers for the fund since the early days has been former jockey Jack Berry, a Yorkshireman who moved to Lancashire to train more than 1,600 winners. A new rehabilitation centre in being built at Malton and will be named after him. HAROLD HEYS tells his colourful story.

JACK BERRY was barely 12 when he packed a bag full of dreams and left home to make his way in the daunting world of horse racing.

Even at that age, he had no illusions. It was a hard game, especially for a young lad, working in stables morning and evening and managing to get some schooling in between.

After National Service he tried to make his living as a freelance National Hunt jockey in the North, dreaming of winning the Grand National. It was a tough life of farms and small stables, hitching lifts to out-of-the-way courses, living from hand to mouth and riding some of the roughest nags ever to look through a bridle.

When he became a jockey he would never turn down a spare ride – however dodgy. He explained with a shrug and a grin: ‘If a trainer had a horse that was a bit of a bone cruncher, he wouldn’t want his own jockey on it, so, being a freelance, I’d get to ride it. It was a bit like being a kamikaze pilot.’

When Jack finally threw in the towel on Boxing Day, 1969, to try his hand as a full-time trainer with wife Jo’s help, he could look back to close on 50 winners – and almost as many broken bones.

He reckons he was lucky. Several of his good pals weren’t – and his concern for them and their families led to the launch of what became the Injured Jockeys’ Fund which this year can look back of 50 wonderful years of care for the lads – and lasses – who help to make National Hunt racing such an enthralling spectacle.

Top jockey Tim Brookshaw had been badly injured in a fall at Aintree in December 1963 and was left to a large degree paralysed. Slowly he triumphed over adversity and became a trainer. There was worse to come in the Grand National three months later when a similar fate overtook Jack’s great mate, Paddy Farrell.

I was there that day and I’ll never forget the sight of Farrell, married and with four little children, lying motionless in the wreckage of the Chair fence just in front of the stands. His mount, the nine-year-old Border Flight had somersaulted at the biggest obstacle on the course and after the field had raced on Paddy’s maroon and yellow colours stood out starkly against the dull green of spruce and turf. Most falls are down the straight or out in the country, a long way from the crowds; this was sickeningly different.

On the Tuesday following the National, Jack Berry and a few other jockeys were riding at Wetherby and they went round with buckets, collecting from bookies and punters to raise money for the devastated family.

Jack recalled: ‘Everyone was really generous. It was a wonderful display of affection and understanding and I suppose this was the nucleus of the IJF.’

Paddy was confined to a wheelchair till his death in November 1999. Writer and broadcaster Brough Scott, a trustee of the IJF said: ‘Paddy was a kind, brave and honest man, and an extremely appropriate symbol of the need to care for others.’

Within days Clifford Nicholson, who retained Farrell, Border Flight’s owner-trainer Edward Courage and others started a fund for the two jockeys and, at their request, it was widened to cover all National Hunt jockeys who were inactive through injury. It grew into the National Hunt Jockeys Fund and finally, in 1971, as some of the Flat lads needed help, it became the Injured Jockeys Fund.

The IJF is funded through donations and bequests, and the sale of Christmas cards, calendars and memorabilia which are sold by volunteers at race meeting and events throughout the country.

Jack Berry has worked tirelessly for his fellow riders and hundreds of them have been beneficiaries under the scheme. Sadly, one of those injured jockeys is his younger son

Sam who was permanently disabled in a fall from one of Jack’s horses at Sedgefield in 1985.

Jack’s original plan, some 15 years ago, was for a retirement home for injured jockeys. Oaksey House, named in honour of another resolute worker for the fund, the late Lord Oaksey, the former amateur rider John Lawrence, became the culmination of this vision when it opened in Lambourn, Berkshire, in 2009.

Oaksey House is not only a home for retired jockeys but also provides physiotherapy, rehabilitation treatment, medical consultations and a fully equipped gym to help aid and speed recovery. Since being officially opened by the Princess Royal in 2009, many jockeys, current, retired and disabled, have benefited enormously from the specialist treatment available.

And now work is well under way in Yorkshire for a Northern centre to complement Oaksey House. As vice-president of the IJF, Jack has been supervising the £3.5 million project to build a gym, hydrotherapy pool, treatment clinics and respite bedrooms close to the Yorkshire training centre of Malton. It is fitting that the new venture will be known as Jack Berry House when it is opened in the late autumn.

Said Jack, who is now 76: ‘I’ve always wanted better facilities for jockeys. What has happened with Oaksey House has been so exciting and revealing. Both the local and the wider community got right behind it and I’m sure this will happen at Malton as well.’

As a little lad, one of eight kids born to an Army family in Leeds, Jack would have had a lot of dreams. But even in his wildest thoughts he wouldn’t have imagined himself giving a Royal princess a leg up at Newmarket, training a record 127 winners in a season, and being known far and wide in racing circles for his dedication, determination and tireless charity work. Oh, and his trademark red shirts.

Success and fame must have looked far away when, as a lad, he was mucking out and mucking in at little yards in remote corners of Yorkshire. When his riding career finally got under way it was a shaky start with just three winners from 137 rides in the first two seasons.

It was a different game in those days. Unlike their modern counterparts, jockeys in the 1960s hadn’t the benefit of back and body protectors. National Hunt riders’ helmets were cork; Flat jockeys wore silk caps. Running rails were not plastic and hollow, as now, but wood boards on heavy concrete pillars. Fences were more daunting. Physiotherapy was some way off. I can’t remember ambulances and a doctor’s car following the field, watching for a faller, in those days as they do now.

Jack recalled: ‘You couldn’t get any proper insurance cover. After you’d had two or three claims, you were a bad risk.’

It was a hard, often grim, game. He recalled coming down in a hurdle race at Haydock and finding an anxious St John Ambulance Brigade lad peering down at him, most concerned. ‘Are you all right?’ asked the youngster. ‘Give us a fag,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve broken my leg so drag me under that rail before they come round again.’ Which he did. Jack had actually broken the leg in five places and was soon cursing, not with the pain but because he had a ride in the last.

I first came across Jack in the summer of 1972. He had a small string of horses at Almholme, just to the north of Doncaster, and I heard that he was planning to move over to Lancashire, to the village of Cockerham on the Fylde coast. I was working for the Sunday People in those days and I did a piece about the unusual move.

Jack and his backers were impressed with the 100 acres, although not the farm buildings which they quickly flattened. He told me: ‘If I can’t train winners here, I can’t train ’em anywhere.’ And so it proved. He went on to prepare more than 1,600 winners on the soft peat moss over the next 30 colourful years.

One of those victories came in the Ayr Gold Cup in September, 1988, with a horse called So Careful. He had wanted to win the race on his favourite course for nearly 40 years. ‘It was the ultimate,’ he recalled. ‘The greatest day of my life.’

It’s a safe bet that when the new Jack Berry House opens at Malton later this year he might just rethink that line…


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