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COOLEFIND: Bill's final winner
photo: Steve Hunt

Bill Warner, one of the Midland area's most respected and successful trainers, has decided to call it a day.

"If you can't do it properly you shouldn't be doing it at all," he said, admitting that it was becoming more of a problem to find staff and that the training was less easy without the support of his wife Christine, who had played a large part in the running of the yard and who passed away nearly three years ago. "And the farming has taken over to some extent," he added. With his son Ben, Bill farms around 150 acres of arable, plus cattle and sheep, at Mears Ashby, near Northampton.

With Bill, the horses always came first, and he admits that he got almost more pleasure from seeing them safe in their stables than from performing on the racecourse. "I like to think that I didn't abuse any of them, and I never got any enjoyment from running for the sake of it," he commented.

His first winner between the flags was Clipston, partnered by Dick Saunders, at Garthorpe in 1981, and the same horse, who had won the 1975 in-hand championship at the Horse Of The Year Show, triumphed at 50-1 in a Hereford Hunter Chase the following season, in the process giving the late Johnny Wrathall his initial success under Rules. "The owner, Mrs Ferguson, couldn't be there," Bill recalled with regard to the latter occasion, "and as it was in the days before mobile phones we had to stop at a telephone kiosk on the way home and ring her up to tell her the news."

The high point of his training career he considers to have been the Aintree Fox Hunter Chase victory of Sheer Jest, ridden by Alan Hill, in 1995, but as always with racing there have been lows along the way. "I hated it if any of the horses got injured," he said. "I think the worst day was when we took two horses to Higham and lost both of them."

Bill's reputation was such that he always managed to obtain the best riders for his horses, as is evident from the three aforementioned. "I've been b.....y lucky," he stressed. "I've had some good owners and some cracking jockeys." One of those owners was Judy Wilson, for whom Bill trained over 100 winners, the final one of which was Coolefind in a Towcester Hunter Chase in May.

The most recent regular pilot at the Warner yard was Stuart Morris, who rode for Bill for ten years prior to hanging up his boots in April. "They were very good to me and helped me a lot," he says of Bill and Christine. The strong links are set to continue as it is Stuart who will now take over the training mantle from Bill, and his string of around a dozen for the coming season will include those belonging to Judy Wilson.

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