20 years ago | NEC Arena, Birmingham | 21st September 2003

Twenty years ago, I had a pretty full diary in mid-September. We were in the second year of our sponsorship of the Prince Phillip Cup, which meant I’d be at the NEC in Birmingham for the Horse of the Year Show. In the weeks leading up to the show, there were strong indications that that year’s guest of honour at the Sunday evening performance would be HRH The Princess Royal. As a sponsor, I would have a seat in the Royal Box, next to her.

That same weekend, Helen was eventing her mare, Maddie, at the Milton Keynes Horse Trials, a two-day event. On paper, it was the most advanced level of competition she’d ever entered. Unfortunately, there was no way I could be there to watch.

We set up the show stand and did all the publicity stuff we needed to do with all the teams in the competition, to maximise the coverage of our sponsorship. This was, of course, pre-social media but as we had our own customer magazine and a News section on our website – as well as press release activities to generate – we were, even then, doing a lot of the sort of things that you’d do today, to gain maximum exposure.

Did I mention we were also re-building a store, that year and were weeks away from opening it? We’d decided that the winners of the ‘PPC’ would have the honour of officially opening it. It was a ridiculously busy time.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday whizzed past in a blur but in my mind the whole weekend was leading upto the Sunday evening encounter with royalty. Actual royalty, not just an overblown metaphor for a person of some note. I remember getting back from the NEC to our hotel, the Holiday Inn at Fort Dunlop, just outside Birmingham and calling Helen to see how she and her friends had got on, having driven the horsebox down from Warrington to Milton Keynes earlier that day. After a drink in the bar, I was ready for bed. Tomorrow would be a long day, I reasoned.

It was – but nothing like the way I was expecting.

In the middle of the night, my ‘phone rang. I don’t even remember who it was. I just remember hearing that Maddie had got out of her stable, bolted and injured herself so badly she’d probably have to be euthanised. I was told that Helen was in an awful state and had asked for me to be there. It was a lot to take in.

Struggling to catch up to this harsh reality, I focused a little and saw that it was about one in the morning. I remember taking he stairs down to the lobby because I knew I’d be quicker than the lift. I remember wondering to myself if this was actually happening as I ran across the chilly, deserted car park. How soon could I get there?

At that time of night, with quiet roads and, just like 1993, relatively few speed cameras, I confess there was some speeding involved. Google advises me now that a drive from Fort Dunlop to Milton Keynes Equestrian Centre will take an hour and seven minutes. I have no idea what my travel time was but I can say it was a lot less than that.

When I got there, the worst fears were realised and the horse had had to be put down. Understandably, Helen was devastated and was being comforted in the horse box of some other friends who were also competing there. I’ll always be grateful to G & S for their kindness that night and also to M & L, our friends who were Helen’s grooms that weekend, for suggesting that I take her home while they dealt with everything that the new day would bring.

It was, by now, about three o’clock and we got in the car, ready for the long drive back to our home in Warrington. I got back on the M1 and headed north. We were both exhausted and drained and, by the time we got to the M6, I was beginning to flag. I started to worry that I was risking a second, worse tragedy by staying at the wheel. I suddenly remembered that I still had a hotel room in Birmingham so I reluctantly turned off the motorway at Fort Dunlop and suggested we grab a few hours’ sleep there.

We both slept terribly but we did manage to get some rest. We awoke around 6:30 and, not really feeling upto inflicting our shell-shocked selves on the rest of the team, we decided to slip quietly away. In an awful silence, we drove north. Somewhere in Staffordshire, we spotted Helen’s horsebox being driven home (empty), by M, followed by her husband, N, who’d driven down from Warrington overnight to be there for her. It was an awful, forlorn sight and, with some unease, I decided the best thing to do for all concerned was to overtake this funereal procession and get home as quickly as possible.

That Sunday was a strange, numb non-event of a day where we barely functioned. I remember optimistically thinking a few times that day that it was still logistically possible to drive back down to Birmingham, get out the dinner jacket and fulfil my appointment with HRH. And then I remembered that I’d have to leave Helen alone, to do that. By four in the afternoon, I finally accepted it was an impossibility. I made the conscious decision to make myself unavailable to meet an actual Princess; the actual daughter of the actual Queen. And even that realisation still hadn’t registered as the most tumultuous moment of the last twenty-four hours.

The most common, clichéd way to describe this whole nightmarish episode would be to say it was ‘surreal’ but technically, surrealism is generally light and frivolous in tone. This was a much darker level of mind-bending. More Hieronymus Bosch than Salvador Dalí. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to watch it on television. Anything with horses involved was far too painful.

As you can see from the picture, my Dad fulfilled the sponsor’s duties that evening, dining with Princess Anne and presenting the prizes with her in the Arena, when Wylye Valley won the cup. Six weeks later, we invited them to cut the ribbon as we opened the new store. The trauma of that Saturday night led to M & N booking a last-minute holiday. A few weeks later, we learned that they were expecting their first child. A few weeks after that, so were we.

For lots of reasons, it seemed as though this one awful event had led to a huge shift in our lives. Suddenly nothing would be the same again and some of that change was tragic and terribly sad – but then what followed was incredibly happy. There’s no need for any of that to make sense – it’s just life.

Happily, there is one final footnote to add. Nearly eight years later, I was asked to give a speech to the National Equine Forum in London. Its President, HRH Princess Anne would be in attendance. During the Interlude, the speakers would be introduced to her for a few moments. When I finally did meet her, she was very knowledgeable about the issues I’d raised in my speech and graciously complimented me on my contribution.

Modesty and, I imagine, etiquette forbade me to mention that I’d ‘stood her up’ at the NEC all those years before. The ironic thing is, she’d have been the first to understand that the trials and tribulations imposed on us by horses tend to supersede any other consideration. Even royalty.