SPORTSMAN’S DEATH

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 April 1933, Page 11

SPORTSMAN’S DEATH

LIVED, FOR RIDING. “Everyone interested, in racing in Britain is lamenting the death of Captain Reginald Sassoon, M.C., the millionaire amateur ridlpr, who succumbed after a week’s illness following a fall while riding his own horse in a steeplechase at Lingfield (writes the London correspondent of the Melbourne “Herald”). Captain Sassoon only took up raceriding seriously when well into the thirties. He was a millionaire by virtue of his relationship with the great Bombay banking and mercantile house of Sassoons, which has branches throughout the East. He possessed large plantation interests in India and China, and always spent his summers abroad. But of late his winters had been given to riding steeplechases in England. He lived for nothing else. Once, indeed, he travelled from Shanghai overland by way of Siberia, to Liverpool to ride at a meeting, and as soon as it was over he caught the mailboat to Bombay. Captain Sassoon began to ride and own horses soon after the war. At first he was neither an accomplished horseman nor a good race-rider. Indeed, he»was regarded as a joke on the turf, and his bespectacled figure never suggested that he was at home in the saddle. But he set out to become a good jockey as he had become a good soldier, and he succeeded. But his pluck remained greater than his skill. He was always taking bad tosses. He rode in a Grand National on his sister’s horse shortly after breaking a collar-bone during a training gallop. He once had five bad falls in six weeks, but unless completely knocked out and unconscious, he always got up smiling.

“YOU WILL KILL YOURSELF.” His friends, realising that he was not in the first flight of horsemen, urged him to give up racing. “You will kill yourself,” they said. “Try something else.” But Captain Sassoon only laughed. “There’s nothing to equal it,” he would reply, and although he had played polo and even hunted big game, he always declared that there were no thrills to equal those of riding over tall fences. “There never was a pluckier or finer man,” says his trainer, “but he began riding too late to make a success of it.” Captain Sassoon, one may be sure, knew all about his own shortcomings, ne took special courses of instruction from famous steeplechase jockeys and he was always in the saddle when he was at home. He would ride from 7 a.m. to 9 o’clock, and again from 10.30 to noon, and probably have a race or two in the afternoon. He bought every horse he liked, and at his death had twenty-seven in training. Naturally his ambition was to ride his own horse to victory in the Grand National, the greatest steeplechase event in the world. He bought the impetuous mare, West Indies, with that end in view. She was not an easy one to ride, and perhaps Captain Sassoon’s best race was when he rode her and won over a part of the National course in 1931. Many visitors thought it was odds against her rider staying on her back for many fences, but after nearly parting company at the first obstacle, Captain Sassoon stuck on, and the mare, making no mistake, Avon with ease. They were accorded as great a reception in the paddock as if they had Avon the National. But she fell and broke her back before the Grand National, and noAv her gallant OAvner has gone, too. His mount —a favourite —hit the first fence in a bustling start, and rolled tAvice over the stunned rider. Comparatively recently Captain Sassoon had discarded his spectacles, and it may be that his sight Avas not sufficiently good. “HE NEVER FALTERED.” No finer tribute could have been paid to him than that Avritten by a friend: “Captain Sassoon Avon our respect. He had none of those frills which, Avhen fluttered in the faces of the foolish, go to make popularity. He Avas nearly blind in 1914 when he joined the Irish Guards, and so unobtrusive Avas he that his brother officers Avere blind to his qualities, too. “Then the test came, and Captain Sassoon never altered his gait, but kept going steadily on —in bad times or good times, they Avere all the same to him.

“Obstacles! Why, they were just made to be scaled. Men stood astonished. There was so little fuss, and so much achievement, till at the end of the war this man, with manners as quiet as a mouse, was garlanded with the wreath of a hero, and it was handed to him by no field-marshal or general, but by the men who mattered most —the Guardsmen who knew and loved him.”