the times | Wednesday January 26 2022 51
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Edward Ivor Montgomery Herbert
was born in South Africa in 1925. His
grandfather had started the Natal Wit-
ness newspaper group in Pietermaritz-
burg and his grandmother had founded
the Red Cross in the country. His
parents, Sir Teddy Herbert, an engineer
who was awarded the Croix de Guerre
in the First World War, and his South
African-born mother, Sybil (née Davis),
returned to England shortly after he
was born.
Herbert was brought up in Queen’s
Gate in London and West Leake in
Nottinghamshire. As a teenager he
became “horse mad” and built his own
point-to-point course in a meadow at
the end of their garden and was soon
hunting with the Quorn.
At Eton he excelled at rugby and the
field game. He also wrote poetry. His
schooling, however, was interrupted by
the war: in January 1943 he joined the
Coldstream Guards, was commis-
sioned a year later and arrived at Kiel,
Germany, in a tank two days before VE
Day. He frequently remarked how for-
tunate he was to be alive. “The majority
of boys in his team photographs joinedup a year before him and lost their
lives,” his daughter Kate said.
After the war, he went up to Trinity
College, Cambridge, to read economics
and English. Weekends were spent
point-to-pointing and partying. Al-
though he would rather have pursued a
career as a writer and with horses, he
followed his father’s wishes and started
work in the City of London. This he jug-
gled with training horses at his home
near Henley and writing articles and
books. His first novel, Eastern Windows,
was published in 1953.
Herbert left banking when he took
up a full-time job with the Evening News
in London in 1954, becoming a features
writer and columnist as well as tackling
the equestrian world. In due course he
took over Dick Francis’s racing column
on the Daily Express. His most memo-
rable interviews were with Princess
Grace of Monaco (whom he thought
“beautiful but terribly sad”) and
Barbara Cartland, the novelist (whose
garish pink clothes he considered
“just terrible”).
All the while Herbert had no little
success as a trainer. In 1957 he trainedNo racehorse trainer, it
seemed, was as well
connected as Ivor
Herbert. He could
have asked his
friend Princess
Anne to open
the annual fête
in his Bucking-
hamshire vil-
lage or the chef
Albert Roux or
indeed one of
his political pals,
such as Lord Car-
rington or Michael
Heseltine. Instead he
opted to create a frisson
by asking Jilly Cooper, then
at the height of her fame as a
writer of steamy novels about the hors-
ey set. For good measure he invited
along bunny girls from the Playboy
Club in London to encourage villagers
to take part in the tombola.
Herbert’s life not only encompassed
numerous connections but also a num-
ber of careers. He was, at various times,
a merchant banker, the founder of a
bloodstock agency, the author of 23
books, including one co-written with
Princess Anne, a travel and racing writ-
er, a restaurant critic, a wine merchant,
a documentary maker and a play-
wright. Strange but true, he also wrote
the screenplay for The Great St Trinian’s
Train Robbery in 1966.
He may have been something of a
dilettante but racing was the recurring
theme of his life. As well as being chair-
man of the racing committee of the
Turf Club, he was also one of the
Queen’s most trusted advisers on horse
racing matters. He was, for the most
part, discreet about their friendship,
even if he did once let slip that the bed-
room he had been put in when staying
at Balmoral had been “freezing cold”.
He also went to stay with the Queen
Mother in Scotland while writing a
book about her horses and was struck
by her informality by comparison with
the apparent regality at Fairlawne, the
Kent home of the Queen Mother’s
trainer, Peter Cazalet. There, he said,
his pyjamas had been unpacked and
laid out on his bed. It was also there, in
the mid-1960s, that he first came across
Roux, the family’s cook, who was about
to open Le Gavroche in London.
Herbert and Roux would later make a
television programme together about
restaurants.
A blithely unselfconscious man, Her-
bert had a keen sense of adventure,
which he seemed to have inherited
from his paternal grandfather who was
shot off his horse during a dispute over
a gold mine in South Africa. Herbert
twice broke his neck riding in point-to-
points as a young man. Undeterred, he
drove his sports cars at breakneck
speed and lived fast generally, clocking
up two divorces, gaining a reputation as
a connoisseur of wine and, as a travel
writer, seeking out exotic locations
every chance he got.
The young Herbert
twice broke his neck
riding in point-to-points
Ivor Herbert turned his hand to many things but was “horse mad” from a young age. He was
known for his lunch parties at his home in Buckinghamshire, which he shared with his wife, GillyLinwell, the
Cheltenham
Gold Cup
winner,
which was
some achievement given he was an am-
ateur on account of being primarily a
journalist, was only 31 and had just a
handful of horses in training. He had
been advised that the holder of a licence
could not sell information about his
own horses but had already backed
Linwell at 100-6. Hence the recorded
credit for this triumph went to Charley
Mallon, his Irish head lad, who told the
Queen Mother — whom he insisted on
calling “Madam” rather than “Ma’am”
— that watercress was Linwell’s fa-
vourite food. “It’s mine, too, only in
sandwiches,” was the reply. The horse’s
owner, David Brown, ran Aston Martin:
the model made famous by being
driven by James Bond bore his initials.
Urbane and elegant, Herbert made
the most of his connections, becoming
a founding member of Annabel’s night-
club and setting up a bloodstock agency
with David Smyly. He also co-authored
three books with Smyly’s wife, Patricia,even though, as she recalled: “He
sniffed at my writing, comparing it to an
undergraduate’s essay.”
In the early 1960s he bought the Old
Rectory in Bradenham, Buckingham-
shire, the village where he trained, from
the church. He would tell friends that
he had been able to see the house from
a train as a child and yearned to own it
one day. Here he would regularly give
lunch parties for which the menu was
always the same: “Bradenham lamb”,
which he marinaded himself, with
frozen peas and baked potato.
In addition to his books — The Win-
ter Kings sold well and there were ac-
counts of two great horses, Arkle and
Red Rum — his play The Night of the
Blue Demands ran at Guildford in 1972.
When The Mail on Sunday was
launched in 1982, he became the lead
travel writer and racing editor. Some
racing journalists found him a little too
grand and at times he appeared to be
taking on too much: when Frankie Det-
tori rode the winners of the first three
races at Ascot in 1996, Herbert dictated
his report and left for home. Unfortu-
nately for him, Dettori went on to win
the next four races as well.
Herbert’s Travels took him around
the world, not least to Kentucky, where
he was a visiting professor of creative
writing at Louisville University. Her-
bert’s Rambles, also in The Mail on Sun-
day, kept him closer to home as a res-
taurant critic. “His ar-
ticles predated AA Gill
for brutal honesty, wit
and mentions of travel-
ling companions,” his
daughter said.
Herbert’s first wife
was Jennifer McBean,
whom he met in Scot-
land while stalking, and
married in 1952. They
had a son, Nick, who
survives him and runs a
fabrics and wallpaper
business on Lots Road,
London. His second
marriage, in 1969, was to
Gilly Steele-Perkins,
who worked at Christie’s,
the auctioneers, and
whom he met at a party.
They had two daughters,
Kate, a teacher and
former journalist who
survives him, and Jane,
who ran two restaurants in Cornwall
and who died of cancer in 2019.
With his second wife he founded Bra-
denham Wines, storing his selections in
the vast cellars of his rectory. When he
served on his parish council, it was on
condition that he would be the chair-
man and that all meetings would be held
around his dining-room table and that
only his wines would be drunk.
In his old age Herbert’s helper and
companion was Elisabeth Renouf, who
looked after him for six years.
“All his carers found him impossible,”
she said. “He wouldn’t eat something as
simple as a plate of baked beans, even if
he was hungry. He had to have a prop-
erly cooked meal, properly served.”Ivor Herbert, racehorse trainer, wine
merchant and writer, was born on
August 20, 1925. He died on January 5,
2022, aged 96mentgivenhewasanam-ti
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Ivor Herbert
ANL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKWine merchant, author, bon vivant and Cheltenham Gold Cup winning trainer whose friends included Jilly Cooper and the Queen
Broadway actress and
sister of Arthur Miller
Joan Copeland
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