Arkle's owner, Duchess of Westminster, dies

RACING: Tony Sweeney looks back on the racing life of an owner who was fortunate to own the greatest steeplechaser of all time.

Anne Duchess of Westminster, who died on Sunday aged 88, took the first step on the road to turf immortality when at the 1960 Dublin Horse Show Sale her trainer Tom Dreaper paid his north Co Dublin neighbour Mrs Mary Baker 1,150 guineas for an unbroken three-year-old by Archive. In naming him Arkle his new owner followed a custom of bestowing names of Scottish peaks on her favourites.

However, the day that Arkle secured his first win in a hurdle race at Navan his tote odds of 49 to 1 gave no clue to what the future held in store.

That autumn he won his final starts, including HE The President's Handicap Hurdle and he would never again be beaten in this country winding up with 14 consecutive victories, including three Leopardstown Chases and an Irish Grand National.

On the international scene Cheltenham was to provide the setting for a Gold Cup hat-trick including the great steeplechase showdown with another Irish-bred champion Mill House on whom he exacted revenge for a Hennessy Gold Cup defeat at Newbury the previous November.

He was still only nine years of age when fracturing a cannon-bone in running in the King George VI Chase at the Kempton Christmas meeting but such was his courage that on three legs he was still only narrowly beaten by Dormant.

A couple of days later Terry Wogan featured an Arkle request on the BBC Light programme for a Tom Jones number one hit - what else but The green green grass of home.

He would never race again but by then he had proved himself the greatest of all steeplechasers and one whose level of excellence may never be equalled; he had played a unique role in popularising television coverage of the sport; Arkle may have been his registered name but "himself" was sufficient to identify him to an entire generation of race fans; while he also transformed the look of big races in this country with two handicaps being published one with and one without Arkle.

Born Anne Sullivan in Co Cork and known to her intimates as Nancy, she would for fear of injury never permit Arkle to contest the then unmodified Aintree Grand National course which rendered the Kempton Park debacle all the more ironic.

Even without Arkle and having sold on another horse before he won the Foinavon Grand National she still secured an Aintree triumph with a long-shot Last Suspect.

Last month she marked 50 years of widowhood having been the fourth and last wife of Bendor, the Duke of Westminster and England's richest land owner.