To be a great jockey takes character as well as ability and Geoff Lewis, whom we have lost at 89, had that in spades. As the sixth of a Welsh labourer’s 13 children, he put in a 5.30 a.m. milk round before he went to school. When the family moved to London, and before he started on five shillings a week as an apprentice to Ron Smyth in Epsom, he was a diminutive pageboy at the Waldorf hotel, a role that wasn’t aided by his severe stutter. ‘It was sometimes so bad,’ he once said, ‘that if I paged somebody they’d probably left before I could get the name out.’

The film clips of Mill Reef recycled on Lewis’s death were a reminder of what a special horse he was in 1971, winning the Derby by two lengths, the Eclipse by four and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes by six before going

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