Not Enough Time

by Henrietta Knight

  Basically, I hated the whole thing. I was quite backward socially and shy at crowded parties, so I continued to pine for the country and for my horses. I had always been blissfully happy at Pony Club camps and rallies. I worked hard to pass my Pony Club ‘A’ Test and then helped Ce to get hers, with honours, a few years later. My school days had been at Didcot Girls’ Grammar School – a wonderful school where we were made to work hard. I wanted to have a career from an early age. I never liked the idea of a boarding school and leaving my animals for any length of time. I did go to a weekly boarding school when I was nine years old, but I was unbelievably homesick.

  Parties and dances in London, as well as balls held in beautiful stately homes throughout the country never appealed to me, spectacular though a number of them were. Up until I was twenty-one, I never had any success with, or interest in, the opposite sex. I spent a lot of my time at dances sitting with my girlfriends, waiting for the breakfast to be served around 2 a.m. – and delicious it was too. The men known as ‘debs’ delights’ never appealed to me. I was the original wallflower, but I suppose it did me some good, in that I had to discipline myself to do something I did not enjoy. I regarded my months in London, mostly spent in a dingy basement flat in Montagu Square, as a duty to Mum. I had been excused boarding school and now I had to go along with her wishes, even though I remember telling her she was wasting her money. I would have been far happier if my parents had bought me a new horse instead of lavishing their savings on yet another ballgown.

  Fortunately, my spell in London did not last very long, and after the months of torture I enrolled in a four-year course at Westminster College in Oxford. This was a teacher training college, and it was here I obtained my Bachelor of Education degree. I was happy again – especially as I was able to commute from home. The London scene had not been for me. I do not like many towns or cities, except maybe those in Italy, such as Rome, Florence and Venice, which do not give me the same claustrophobic feeling. I also enjoyed Paris, where I was sent for six months after leaving school in order to improve my French.

  But London? That was entirely different. I even have bad childhood memories of the place.

  Before Ce and I were ten years old, we were regularly taken to a special dentist, Mr Endicott in Cavendish Square, close to Harley Street. We travelled up on the train from Didcot to Paddington and were then taken in a taxi to be tortured by this man who, I remember, had hairs on the back of his hand that tickled the roofs of our mouths. We were fitted with painful plates and wires to help realign our teeth and make them grow straight.

  Other childhood days in London remain indelibly printed on my mind for other reasons. We used to get dragged to the Adelphi Theatre every two years to perform in a special children’s dancing matinée in aid of the NSPCC. From the ages of six and seven, Ce and I went weekly on Friday afternoons to Donnington Castle House, near Newbury, to have dancing lessons from Miss Violet Ballantyne. She was a very famous dancing teacher at that time: a perky, hearty individual who dressed herself in short, brightly coloured ballet-type dresses with frilly square collars and matching hairbands. Donnington was the home of the Parker Bowles family – Dad was Derek Parker Bowles’s second cousin – and here we were drilled and regimented in all sorts of dances, while another powerful lady loudly played the grand piano in the corner of the ballroom. I was a poor dancer. I have never been very musical and I was usually feeling sick, as I was also a bad car-traveller. I remember that I always missed lunch on Friday and was given a ‘quell’ or some similar pill to counteract the effects of the bumpy car ride to Newbury.

  On one occasion in the London matinée, I played the huntsman and my sister one of the hounds. My best friend, Mary Ann Parker Bowles (now Hanbury), was one of the followers. The costumes were excellent and we were plastered in red lipstick. The performances made good money for charity and I suppose it was fun when we got there, but I used to worry about the journey to London – more travelling in the car. There were no motorways in those days.

  It pleased my parents when I took up teaching as a profession. At least it was something I could fall back on if all else failed. Ce trained as a nurse at Westminster Hospital in London and they were very proud of her. She had become less country-orientated than I and, despite the rigours of the medical world, she enjoyed London and came to know its streets like the back of her hand.

  When I began teaching, I was given a job at St Mary’s School in Wantage, where I stayed for nearly five years. Biology and history were my two main subjects. In later years, Terry often introduced me as ‘the ex-human biology teacher, and barren mare who specialised in sex-education’ – although nothing was further from the truth. Teaching locally suited me because I could always escape home at lunchtime to ride my horses; the school was barely two miles away.

  I was blissfully happy and could continue training my event horses. I even rode at the Three Day Event at Badminton in 1973, finishing twelfth. In those days there was a phase called ‘roads and tracks’, which came before jumping the cross-country obstacles. On this part of the competition, the competitors rode a number of miles through woods and along the edges of fields, and there was a set time in which to complete the exercise. I remember walking round in the starting box with pupils from St Mary’s cheering me on.

  When I decided to end my career as a teacher and gave in my notice, I was surprised to be offered the post of headmistress. It would have been a huge challenge and I did attend some interviews, but in the end I turned down the offer as it would have been too restricting and there would have been no time for my horses.

  *

  My interest in three-day events continued well into the eighties. In 1980 I was asked to join the senior selection committee under the chairmanship of Chris Collins, former Champion Amateur National Hunt rider who had himself become involved in the eventing world and had successfully ridden around Badminton on several occasions. It was an honour to be asked to go onto his committee, and when Chris retired in 1984, I took over as chairman. During my time in office, we selected the horses and riders for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and I travelled over to support them in person and make the final decisions. It was an unforgettable experience. The team won the silver medal. I spent ten days in a rented house with team vet Peter Scott Dunn and his wife, plus several other officials. In the evenings I was sent out to buy supper from the local fast-food stores. I remember being surprised by the looks I got as I innocently walked down the streets, but I later learned that our lodgings were right in the middle of Seoul’s red-light district. I enjoyed many travels as chief selector, and my visits to Australia, Germany and Poland were especially interesting.

  My work with the event riders fitted in well with the activities in my livery yard. Most of my horses were at grass during the summer months, and the point-to-point horses enjoyed their well-earned rests. I trained over 100 point-to-point winners in the eighties. They were memorable days and enormous fun. My runners were sponsored by Piper-Heidsieck Champagne, and apart from having the logo on the horsebox, we were regularly supplied with cases of champagne. It was not surprising that I made so many new friends when I took bottles of it to the point-to-points, where we had huge picnics for our supporters. Sadly, the sponsorship ended when I saddled my last point-to-point runner in 1989 – the same year that I started training racehorses with a licence – but I had definitely got a taste for champagne.

  I was still drinking it when Terry entered my life in 1993.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Terry’s Background

  The main livelihood of the Biddlecombe family was farming, but there were always horses and ponies to be seen about the farm. When Terry and his brother, Tony – older by two-and-a-half years – were little boys, they attended Hartpury School, near Gloucester. Their father, Walter, took them to school with a pony and trap, or, if he was in a hurry, he simply lifted them up in front of him on his horse. They regularly fell off, but the bruises and grazes didn’t bother them. The broth
ers hated school and loathed walking home, especially in the rain. They rode their ponies on many days of the week and their father, a talented rider himself and a great judge of a horse, gave them lessons. He was strict with his sons, but they always looked up to him. Terry told me that they were always told to speak out and tell the truth. As well as having huge respect for their father, they both adored their mother, Nancy, who looked after the whole family. I’m told she was a brilliant cook.

  It was a close-knit community as well as a happy one, full of love and happiness. In the school holidays and at weekends there were countless gymkhanas and local shows. The Biddlecombe boys were extremely competitive and won many classes. They were excellent riders, and mounted games and showjumping competitions were their forte. In later years, both of them competed at the Horse of the Year Show.

  Barry Hills, the successful flat-race trainer, was a good friend of the Biddlecombe family. ‘It was about 1950 when I got to know Terry at shows around Hartpury,’ he said. ‘His father was the best gymkhana rider I ever saw and he did all the shoeing himself at the farm.’

  On many occasions during his childhood days, Terry helped milk the cows in the family dairy – and in the 1950s, this was done by hand. There was no proper electricity and no mains water, and much of the work was carried out by the light of hurricane lamps. Today’s farmers are spoilt by comparison. Dairy equipment is elaborate and ultra-modern, and if milking parlours were not run by electricity there would be serious problems. Few people nowadays can imagine how a farm could operate with water being brought to the dairies in buckets, yet Terry was well accustomed to these hardships. He was made to work hard, even though he didn’t always enjoy it.

  Terry and Tony were inseparable as children and remained the best of friends as their lives progressed. They both enjoyed racing, and in their twenties, as professional jockeys, they often rode in the same races. Their sister, Sue, who was born seven years after Terry and supported her brothers in their racing careers, was an excellent rider herself as a child, but later she had a bad fall and injured her back. Afterwards she handled their fan mail, answered telephone calls and dealt with the newspaper cuttings that outlined her brothers’ racing successes.

  As a child, Terry enjoyed everyday life with the horses and ponies at Lower House Farm, Upleadon, but Tony told me that he did very little in the yard and never liked preparing the ponies for shows. ‘He never mucked out a stable anywhere in his whole life and always said, “It’s not my job – my place is on top of a horse.”’ Tony remembers when their father had two acres of potatoes planted in the fields and got his boys to pick them and bag them up in big brown sacks. On one occasion when Terry was about fourteen, he went missing early in the morning and everybody got worried. A few hours later they found him, curled up asleep in a potato bag after a good night out. Even then he had an eye for a pretty girl.

  After Hartpury School, Tony and Terry moved to King’s School in Gloucester, where their father had been educated. During those schooldays they would speed home in the afternoons and ride their ponies in order to get plenty of practice in before the summer gymkhanas. Terry was not academically minded, and although he enjoyed football, athletics and cricket, he could not wait to leave school. Indeed, both brothers left school at the age of sixteen.

  Terry had his first ride on a racecourse in 1957. By the spring of 1960, he had won a number of races as an amateur jockey, and it soon became clear that he was exceptionally talented. Racing soon became his way of life. Jeff King, a top professional jockey during Terry’s riding days, remembers a particular occasion when Terry was still an amateur. Jeff was riding for Bob Turnell – a highly respected trainer – and the pair of them gave Terry a lift home from Ludlow races. When they got close to his parents’ farm, Bob said, ‘Where do I go now?’

  A shy Terry said, ‘It’s fine. Drop me anywhere and I’ll walk home the last few miles across the fields.’

  He was duly let out of the car onto a grass verge and set off across country with a heavy bag on his shoulders. Bob was impressed and said to Jeff, ‘That boy will go places.’

  How right he was.

  Terry joined the professional jockey ranks in the autumn of 1960, a season that marked the beginning of his extraordinary rollercoaster of a life. During those years, Jeff and Terry continued to get along famously and had many good times together. Jeff says he remembers the times when Terry rode at the races after an evening out in London. ‘He would sit on his bench in the weighing room and examine his private parts to see that they were still intact.’

  Terry was unusually tall for a jockey and heavy-boned too. When he was riding, his weight was always a problem, but he constantly drove himself to shed many pounds in Turkish baths all over the country, only relieving the boredom by mixing a few sips of water with countless bottles of champagne, Babycham or brandy. He later told me that the alcohol helped him to lose extra pounds because it made him sweat more. He maintained that if he had not rigidly stuck to his routine in the Turkish baths he would not have been able to carry on riding, but the punishment he gave his body had a serious effect on his health in later life. To lose twelve pounds in twenty-four hours was not uncommon, although he proudly told me that he lost almost a stone one hot summer’s night in Scotland, when he slept with a certain lady in a bed made up with nylon sheets.

  Indeed, girls of all ages queued up to meet Terry and he became famous for his film-star good looks. Yet, while it is true that he loved members of the opposite sex, he also adored his public and never forgot to acknowledge them, right up until the end. He rewarded his followers with some great wins in the saddle, while his wicked sense of humour, his burning of the candle at both ends and his sheer brilliance as a jockey singled him out as unique. Brough Scott, one of his many good friends and a fellow jockey, wrote in the Racing Post:

  He was the Prince Hal of his time and the last of the true cavaliers. He was big, bold, blond and beautifully athletic in and out of the saddle. He took life as well as fences at the gallop. We used to call him ‘The Blond Bomber’. At his peak, he was irresistible with his flair and fearlessness; he wanted to take on fences, drink, girls, food, cars and anything else available. We ordinary mortals looked on in awe as he strode through life as if he owned it.

  *

  Throughout his racing career, Terry lived dangerously and fearlessly. He demonstrated his highly competitive streak and was a brilliant jockey. Yet despite his exceptional talent, Terry suffered many hardships, and had more than his fair share of misfortunes. He had innumerable crunching falls and spent many weeks in hospital beds. yet his courage and determination never diminished.

  In the 1960s, Terry was at the top of the tree in his profession as a steeplechase jockey. During that decade he won three jockey championships, but at the same time struggled even harder to control his weight and suffered enormously from the after-effects of his many falls. His injuries were countless and he admitted that, at times, he was at a low ebb. He was a lot more complex than people ever realised. In fact, in the early 1970s, his zest for race-riding noticeably diminished. He had married Bridget Tyrwhitt Drake in 1968, but domestic pressures built up and, although their two daughters were born in 1972 and 1974, times were not particularly easy and he was often unhappy.

  *

  To his friends and admirers, he appeared outwardly to be the same Terry Biddlecombe, but inwardly he was mixed up and unsettled. There was considerable pressure on him to retire, but he dreaded the future. In 1973, he applied for a permit to train some racehorses from his yard at Corse Lawn, near Gloucester, but it was turned down on the grounds that his stables and premises were unsuitable. This was a blow to his pride and he was bitterly disappointed.

  Terry’s last ride as a jockey was at the Cheltenham Festival in 1974. After this, his first marriage disintegrated further and finally came to an end in 1976, when Bridget returned to her family home in Hampshire and took their two children with her. Once again Terry was left on his own. For
tunately, he had his family close by and plenty of friends. He was kept busy with his livery horses and there were some good parties. In addition, Gary Newbon from ATV Midlands gave Terry a once-a-week racing spot on his television sports programme. Yet Terry remained unsettled. His second application for a permit to train had been rejected again in 1975. When he gave up race riding, it had created a sense of bereavement. His occupation had gone. He was no longer in the public eye and his purpose in life had been taken away from him. It was possibly while on the rebound from race-riding that, in 1977, he met and fell in love with Ann Hodgkins. They married in 1981, and she was to give him three more children, including two sons.

  *

  Although Terry’s life had changed drastically, nobody fully understood why he decided to uproot himself and move to Australia in 1988. True, he had been offered a job connected with the racecourse in Perth, but by the time he arrived, that had fallen through. It broke Terry’s parents’ hearts when he left England, and it broke Tony’s heart too. The brothers had never previously been separated and Terry had always lived close to home. His new life in Australia was a big contrast. However, he still managed to gather up a number of horses and cattle on the land he had acquired and later told me that he enjoyed his freedom and the complete change of scenery. Life moved at a slower pace and he made plenty of new friends: good people who supported and appreciated him.