THE DUKE of Richmond, the owner of Goodwood racecourse, had it about right. “We’ll have to create a race for Dunlops now,” he said on hearing the news that the youngest member of the great Sussex training family was about to set up on his own.
It has been quite a week for Harry Dunlop. On Monday, he supervised his first gallops as a full-time trainer; on Wednesday, he bought his first horse, a filly by Oasis Dream, at the Tattersalls sales and late into Friday night, he was shepherding a five-year-old called Race the Ace and a quirkily coloured hack into his Windsor House Stables in Lambourn, a yard with history ingrained in the brickwork.
When the former champion trainer Peter Walwyn is your landlord and the rollcall of winners includes See You Then, three times the champion hurdler, there is no hiding from the past. But then Harry Dunlop is well trained himself. All his life he has been used to feting the Classic winners nurtured by his father, John, at Arundel Castle.
He was two when Shirley Heights burst up the rail to win the 1978 Derby and fully engaged in the family business when the wonderfully quirky Millenary brought home the St Leger 22 years later. Of the five English Classics, only the 2,000 Guineas is absent from the honours board at Arundel.
To add to the challenge, Harry has to uphold the reputation not just of his father, but, since Ouija Board’s brilliant victory in the Oaks two years ago, of his elder brother, Ed, as well. Watching his father at work last week, eyes fixed in concentration, sales catalogue in hand, merely reminded him of the family’s competitive genes.
“Dad’s still keen as mustard, competitive as hell,” Harry Dunlop says. “He’s hard at it and he’s got some nice two-year-olds for next season, too. Seeing Ed with Ouija Board was also a factor. It’s not that you have to be competitive against him, it just drives you that bit harder to want to do it for yourself.”
Telling his father of his plans to start on his own, when the Arundel yard was his natural inheritance, was not the easiest conversation of his life. His father’s undimmed enthusiasm for the job and his own desire to make a name for himself, though, made the decision inevitable.
“Being a Dunlop, it’s a help, you can’t get away from that, but there’s expectation too, people expect you to do well,” he says. “They probably think I’m very lucky and they’re right, but I wasn’t pushed into this, I chose to do it and now I’ve got to prove that I can compete. A surname’s not much use if you don’t have any winners.”
It’s taken a year to find a suitable yard, back in the Berkshire town where Harry served his apprenticeship with Nicky Henderson. Unlike Ed, who took over a functioning yard in Newmarket after Alec Scott’s premature death, Harry and his wife Christina are starting from scratch, buying tack, setting up an office, finding staff.
Phil Wright, who had been at Windsor House with Ralph Beckett, the previous tenant, has been recruited as head lad, the key member of the team. Christina is front of house, marketing guru and decorator-in-chief. An initial leaflet, announcing Harry’s arrival in Lambourn and sent to journalists, potential owners and friends, has already infringed racing’s usual code of practice but gave notice that this will be a user-friendly racing yard.
“We’ve got to make an impact,” Harry says. “That means not just getting in as many horses as we can but attracting different types of owners through syndicates and offering a really strong, professional package. Communication is vital in that, but in the end you’ve still got to get the right horses and have some luck.”
If a high-class equine education is critical to success, then the youngest of the Dunlop family is halfway to the winning post already.
A study at school decorated with a picture of the brilliant filly Miesque, rather than a Page 3 model, would have given the careers master a clue about young Harry’s future, but three years with Henderson, a profitable spell as assistant to Henry Cecil in Newmarket and then five years with his father back in Arundel represents a grounding of Oxbridge class.
All the strains of three brilliant exponents of the trainer’s art are discernible in his own philosophy, a latent appreciation of jumping and the game’s rough and tumble from Henderson, the absolute concentration and patience needed to handle delicate fillies from Cecil and pretty well everything else from life outside the family front door.
“Dad was doing interval training long before Martin Pipe discovered it, and yet after so many years he’s still curious about anything new, wanting to do better,” he says. “Again, it’s having patience, not forcing horses and having the skill to train the huge variety of horses he does.”
The outer emotional temperature, he admits, might be different. While Ed has inherited his father’s cool demeanour, Harry cannot promise any such detachment. “When I have my first winner, I won’t be like that, I tell you,” he says. Nor was he in his finest hour as a jockey, riding Shagreen up the hill to victory in a bumper at Cheltenham. Christina discovered the video in the recent move and couldn’t stop laughing. “There were only about five people in the winners’ enclosure,” Dunlop says. “But it was still one of the best feelings.”
Though the stable will house a few jumpers as well, a couple of horses have been earmarked for the racetrack before the end of the Flat season. An early winner would certainly calm the nerves and heighten confidence. An easier task, undoubtedly, than winning a race exclusively for Dunlops.
