Obituary: Paddy Farrell

THE JUMP jockey Paddy Farrell's contribution to horseracing's insular world will prove more enduring and less abstract than the achievements of riders whose names clutter the pages of the record books.

Farrell, who partnered his first winner, Port Luna, at Roscommon in 1949, rode for 15 years, a career which yielded just shy of 300 winners, 35 in Ireland. Among those were valuable successes, on Stormhead in the 1955 Topham Trophy at Aintree and on State Secret in the Becher Chase there the same year. He also twice won the Mildmay Chase on Liquidator in 1959 and Rye Light in 1962, a year earlier finishing third in the Grand National on O'Malley Point.

It was Farrell's final ride, however - on Border Flight in the 1964 Grand National - which was more significant than any of his victories. His mount crashed at the Chair, Aintree's most formidable obstacle, leaving Farrell paralysed from the waist down with a broken back.

Three months previously, Farrell's colleague Tim Brookshaw had suffered similar injuries from a fall in a hurdles race, prompting Farrell's retaining owner Clifford Nicholson and Border Flight's owner-trainer Edward Courage to start a fund for the pair. The Farrell/Brookshaw Fund raised pounds 50,000 before, at the pair's request, it was widened to cover all National Hunt jockeys who were inactive through injury.

In 1971 the charity became the Injured Jockeys' Fund, which provides care for riders of both National Hunt and Flat codes who have lost their income through injury. It currently has over 1,000 beneficiaries on its books, with an annual payout of in excess of pounds 500,000.

Farrell's close friend and riding contemporary Jack Berry, a trustee of the fund, recalls: "When he got hurt on Border Flight in 1964, he had a wife and four young kids, so we went to Wetherby collecting with buckets. That was the nucleus of the Injured Jockeys' Fund.

"You couldn't get any proper insurance cover. After you'd had two or three claims, you were a bad risk and they wouldn't insure you. Then there was a bloke in Hexham who started insuring jockeys, and he pissed off with all the money. You had to go 10 days or a couple of weeks without a penny . . . It was tragic it happened to Paddy but it was a good thing for the jockeys that followed. Good came out of bad."

Unlike their modern counterparts, jockeys in the 1960s hadn't the benefit of back and body protectors. National Hunt riders' helmets were cork, whilst those on the Flat wore just silk caps in the colours of their horse's owner. Running rails were not plastic and hollow, as now, but wood with concrete pillars, and physiotherapy had yet to find its role.

Farrell's injuries pricked the collective conscience of racing. "It needed something dramatic to happen," says Brough Scott, also an IJF trustee. "Paddy was a kind, brave and honest man, and an extremely appropriate symbol of the need to care for others. As in all activities it is the top of the pyramid that is glamorous, but racing isn't that glamorous, even in the middle.

"It is young men's dreams, and young women's dreams, and sometimes it doesn't work. But you can't say how great the whole thing is and then do nothing about the unlucky ones."

Patrick Anthony Farrell, jockey: born Grangecon, Co Wicklow 20 July 1930; married 1956 Mary Furlong (two sons, two daughters); died York 20 November 1999.