Sunday 29 May 2022 10:10 PM The 5ft 8in giant whose life was rollicking ride: On turf he gripped millions, ... trends now

As the Queen’s favourite jockey stood in the dock at Ipswich Crown Court in 1987, having admitted to defrauding Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (to use its modern name) out of £3.25 million in unpaid taxes, his barrister attempted to unravel the arcane complexities of Lester Piggott’s character.

It was an impossible task. Yet in attempting — vainly — to spare the greatest jockey in the history of horseracing from a prison sentence, John Mathew QC came as close as anyone, before or since, to unveiling the man behind that chiselled granite mask.

In the saddle, he averred, Piggott was undoubtedly a genius. His uncanny ability to communicate with a thoroughbred and manipulate the beast to his will while galloping at speeds of 40 mph, was honed by ‘ruthless determination, dedication and self-sacrifice’.

Upon dismounting, however, his preternatural powers abruptly deserted him, said Mr Mathew. He became ‘an introverted, isolated person with an inability to communicate. A person of extreme thrift and a hoarder of money. A man with no interests, no relations, or indeed any knowledge of anything outside racing; brilliant within his own, tiny sphere but, really, uneducated in all other aspects of life, about which he was uninterested, uncaring, and probably without the mental or physical energy even to try to cope’.

For the watching nation, devouring every morsel of a sensational case that saw Piggott jailed for three years, it was a rude awakening. For by then he had been a legendary figure for almost 30 years, and his many admirers had cultivated a romanticised image of him: an image enhanced by his unfailing ability to deliver on their annual Derby Day flutter.

Viewed through the grainy prism of a cathode-ray television set, back in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘good old Lester’ was the quintessential English sporting hero, a gentleman genius much in the mould of Compton, Moss, Cooper and Charlton — others whose universal fame made the usage of both their names redundant.

After gliding past the winning post at Epsom or Ascot, he would doff his cap to the radiant young Queen, in whose colours he often rode, and modestly defer the credit for his triumph on to his horse.

When the English Flat Season finished, this self-avowed patriot would board a propellor-driven plane to show a clean pair of hooves to American or Australian riders, flying the flag for Britain and Empire.

With his cheeky-chap one-liners, mumbled in the impaired, high-pitched voice that developed from his partial deafness, and his uniquely crouched riding style, adapted to suit his gangling, 5 ft 8 in frame, he wasn’t merely the ‘Housewives’ Favourite’ (a soubriquet that carried no derogatory connotations in his heyday). He was a national treasure. In truth, however, Piggott — who died peacefully, yesterday in a Swiss hospital, aged 86 — was a flawed character, like so many of the greatest sportsmen and women.

Within racing circles, his willingness to stoop to dirty and often dangerous tactics in pursuit of victory became evident in his teens. Vying for position with the veteran jockey Doug Smith, the 16-year-old prodigy cracked the older man over the head with the heavy end of his riding crop; an assault that brought him one of many bans.

When he accidentally dropped his whip, during a race in Paris, he pulled alongside a French jockey, stooped low and brazenly snatched that of his rival clean out of his hand, like a backstreet pickpocket. Like Diego Maradona, with his ‘Hand of God’ he would do anything it took to win.

Anecdotes relating to his almost pathological meanness are legion. In the weighing room, he would sidle up to less well-rewarded jockeys and cadge the price of a newspaper. Lodging with an aunt during his jockey apprenticeship, he presented her with a bouquet by way of thanks, then deducted the florist’s bill from his weekly rent.

And he wasn’t quite as uninterested in the trappings of wealth and fame as his barrister suggested. He holidayed in exotic places such as Tahiti and Honolulu and hobnobbed with the tycoons and celebrities for whom he rode. He taught the 1950s pop singer Tommy Steele to ride for a film role and socialised with pools magnate Robert Sangster.

He was also quick to accept their gifts. At 21, the aristocratic hotelier Sir Victor Sassoon gave him a Lincoln Continental car for winning one race: Piggott, who was constantly in trouble for speeding, promptly crashed it. After he won the 1957 Epsom Derby, the flamboyant society hairdresser ‘Teasy Weasy’ Raymond took off his solid-gold watch and placed it on his wrist.

Then there was his unconventional personal life. For many years, he was perceived to be a regular family man, devoted to his childhood sweetheart Susan Armstrong, a racing trainer’s daughter to whom he remained married for more than 60 years until his death.

They had two daughters, Maureen, who became an accomplished horsewoman, and Tracy, a horseracing presenter for the Irish TV channel RTE. By all accounts, Piggott was a devoted and generous father and grandfather.

Yet he always had a roving eye and caused a scandal, in late middle-age, by having a relationship with Anna Ludlow, 19 years his junior, who worked for his wife’s bloodstock business.

Rumours about their affair had echoed around the stables for years but Piggott always insisted they were just friends. The truth emerged when he had a serious riding accident in the U.S., in 1992, and Anna dashed to his bedside.

The following year she gave birth to their son, Jamie, who attempted to follow in his father’s hoofprints as a jockey in his teens but is now a bloodstock agent.

Treated so shabbily, many wives would have headed for the divorce court. Not Susan, who permitted Piggott to spend half the week with her, in their luxurious Newmarket bungalow, and the remainder with Anna and the baby, a couple of miles down the road. They were all ‘good friends’, she maintained.

As for Piggott, in a rare personal interview, granted to The Mail on Sunday, he played the down the scandal with a trademark shrug of his shoulders. Though he admitted Susan had found it all ‘bloody difficult’ at first, he even attempted to make his behaviour seem virtuous. ‘In my position, some people might have chosen to divorce and abandon their first family, but I had no desire to do that. I chose to become the head of two households instead,’ he declared.

All those involved in the ménage, including his daughters, were ‘comfortable with it’, he said, adding: ‘What others think is of no importance to me.’

Lester Keith Piggott had lived in his own ‘tiny sphere’, as his QC described it, almost from the moment he was born, in Wantage, then in Berkshire, on Bonfire Night 1935. It wasn’t only his congenital deafness (a disability that went undiscovered until he was eight, when his parents saw him pressing the radio tightly to his ear) that set him apart from other children.

His grandfather was a champion jockey; his father, Keith, rode some 500 winners before running a racing stable, and his mother, Iris, was an accomplished amateur rider, so Lester was predestined for a career on

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