Former jockey and best-selling author Dick Francis dies at 89 | Daily Mail Online
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Crime writer and former jockey Dick Francis, who has died aged 89
Dick Francis, the best-selling author who was the Queen Mother's favourite jockey, died yesterday at the age of 89.
Buckingham Palace said the Queen was saddened to learn of his death on the Caribbean island of Great Cayman.
Francis became a hugely successful thriller writer after the Queen Mother's horse Devon Loch, which he was riding, mysteriously collapsed 50 yards from the winning post in the 1956 Grand National.
His wife Mary collaborated with him on his books until her death in 2000. His last three novels were written with his younger son, Felix, a former teacher, who had previously helped research much of his work.
Felix said: 'My brother Merrick and I are, of course devastated by the loss of our father, but we rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man. It is an honour for me to be able to continue his remarkable legacy through the new novels.'
Sir Peter O'Sullevan, the former BBC commentator, said Francis was one of the 'people's champions'. And ex-jockey John Francome said: 'He was a lovely person who always had a sparkle in his eye and he had a wicked sense of humour.
'I remember we used to laugh out loud about the old times and he did say to me that he would have happily given up all the success he achieved as an author to have won the Grand National on Devon Loch.'
HE WOULD have preferred to be remembered as a rider not a writer. But it will be for his prolific career as the author of thrillers that Dick Francis will go down in history.
The irony is that it was his heartbreaking failure to win the Grand National on the Queen Mother's horse Devon Loch in 1956 that was responsible for his second career as a writer.
The huge wave of public sympathy after he had triumph so cruelly stolen from his grasp, when his mount collapsed in the run-in within sight of certain victory, led to him being asked to write an autobiography.
The success of that book inspired him to start thriller-writing. The first novel, Dead Cert, was published in 1962 and others followed in 34 languages at the rate of one a year  -  with an estimated total of 60million sales.
1956: Dick Francis riding Devon Loch, the Queen Mother's horse, in the Grand National. It was winning before appearing to jump a phantom fence in the final straight. By the time it had recovered, it had been overtaken
Richard Stanley Francis was born on October 31, 1920, into a horsey family of Welsh gentry in his family's old farmhouse in a remote corner of south-west Pembrokeshire.
He was five when he had his first ride, bareback on a donkey called Jessie, and won sixpence when his elder brother Doug bet him that he could not jump Jessie over a low rail fence while he faced backwards. 
'Those years (his jockey days) in retrospect were the special ones. The first growth; the true vintage. The best years of my life'
 
At six, Dick announced that he was going to be a jockey, at seven that he would win the Grand National.
His education was minimal. He played truant two or three times a week and escaped punishment because his father was by then running a riding stables at Holyport, near Maidenhead, Berkshire, and saw no point in forcing the boy to school when he was obviously destined to be a rider.
He showed little aptitude for any subject and from the age of seven spent more time in the saddle than at his lessons, riding at numerous horse shows each summer (often for the circus owner Bertram Mills), and hunting two or three times a week each winter with the Berks and Bucks Farmers' Staghounds.
Honour: Dick Francis and his wife Mary after receiving his CBE in 2000
'A better pair of hands on a pony I have yet to see,' said Bertram Mills's circus horsemaster Tom Masson.
Francis left school at 15 without any qualifications and became his father's assistant, helping to train horses ridden by Princess Elizabeth (the future Queen) and Princess Margaret.
By now he was hunting as often as five times a week  -  with the Duke of Beaufort's Hunt, the Belvoir, the Pytchley, the Whaddon Chase  -  but his dream of finding a job in a National Hunt racing stables was ruined by the outbreak of World War II.
HE SAID he served as a RAF pilot throughout the war, from 1940 to 1945, but for the first three years he was actually a lowly airframe fitter  -  an 'erk'  -  and toiled unhappily in the sands of North Africa servicing aircraft in the Western Desert. It was not until 1943 that he was sent to Southern Rhodesia and taught to fly Tiger Moths, and it was 1944 before he won his wings.
He met his future wife, Mary Brenchley, at a wedding in October 1945. She was 21, a teacher, pale and beautiful. It was love at first sight, even though they had little in common. Mary had a degree in French and English, loved books and the theatre, and had no interest at all in horses.
Both families tried to dissuade them from marrying but they ignored the warnings, were married in June 1947 and lived wonderfully happily ever after.
The author, who wrote 42 novels, at a book signing and (below) collecting his OBE in 1984
They said they had only four rows in 50 years and could not even remember what one of them was about. Mary said such harmony was down to the danger of her husband's job as a jump-jockey.
'There's no better cement for a marriage than knowing that your husband might die that afternoon, because you can't afford to quarrel in the morning.'
In October 1946, aged 26, Francis embarked at last on his career as a jockey when he became an assistant to the Chester National Hunt trainer George Owen. Over the next nine years he was to have nearly 2,300 races and 345 winners.
During the 1947/8 season he turned professional and rode 16 winners  -  leading to an invitation from leading owner Lord Bicester to ride regularly for him. 
In October 1946, aged 26, Francis embarked at last on his career as a jockey when he became an assistant to the Chester National Hunt trainer George Owen.
Over the next nine years he was to have nearly 2,300 races and 345 winners. During the 1947/8 season he turned professional and rode 16 winners  -  leading to an invitation from leading owner Lord Bicester to ride regularly for him.
One of his mounts, Roimond, almost carried him to victory in his first Grand National in 1949. But they were pipped at the post by a horse that Francis had ridden many times and whose life he had saved just three months previously.
A rueful Francis joked afterwards: 'If I'd known he was going to beat me today, I'd have let the bugger die!'
In 1950, the Francises moved south to be closer to Lord Bicester's horses and trainers, settling first at Compton in Berkshire and then at an unpretentious bungalow at Blewbury in Oxfordshire, where they were to live for 31 years, even after the thrillers had made him rich.
As a jockey, Francis's annus mirabilis was in 1953-4, when he was engaged by the Queen Mother's trainer Peter Cazalet and rode some of the best jumpers in the land. That season he became champion jockey by a huge margin. However, the Grand National eluded him, though he came tragically close when Devon Loch was only 50 yards from the winning post and far in front of the others but suddenly collapsed.
The mystery has never been solved though Francis believed that his mount stumbled as they raced for the finish because they hit a sudden wall of noise as the Aintree crowd roared at the prospect of the National being won by a horse belonging to the Queen Mother.
So close: Francis walks off the racecourse after the bizarre collapse on Devon Loch
Francis never really recovered from the dreadful disappointment. He was 35 and had suffered so many falls and broken bones that he felt his career was coming to an end. The following January, after yet another bad fall when he was trampled by several horses and kicked in the stomach, he was persuaded to retire. (He once reckoned he'd hit the ground at 30mph about once every 12 races.)
The legendary racing broadcaster Peter O'Sullevan later called him 'one of the outstanding horsemen of his era'.
After the publication of his autobiography, The Sport Of Queens, which was ghosted by his wife, a writing career beckoned. The books were all set against the background of the racing world and the heroes all had similarities, the strangest of which was that nearly all of them had a physical handicap.
Only one hero, Sid Halley, was allowed to feature twice. A moral as well as a physical cripple, Sid was, among all Francis's characters, recognised as being closest to the former jockey's heart.
Author? Dick and 'clever, literate, university-educated' Mary in 1993
Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing 'team'. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books  -  in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish.
Indeed, as his biographer, I am convinced that Francis (who was poorly educated and not at all literary) did not write the books himself. I am sure that they were written by his clever, literate, university-educated wife but published under his name because as a famous jockey he would sell more copies.
In 1980, Mary told me: 'Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it's much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they're taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.'
When I revealed the truth in my double biography of the Francises in 1999, the Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was 'evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.
She said equivocally, "It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick's books ... I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write". The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this".'
Royal patron: Francis was jockey to the Queen Mother (pictured right)
Pen in hand, Francis relaxes. His books were all set against the background of the racing world
The truth is that Dick Francis hated writing and took little pleasure in the success of the books. His first love was horses and he once said: 'My life ended when I stopped racing.'
When asked how much Mary contributed, he said: 'It's difficult to say. I wrote during the day and she would read what I'd done at night. And she would say, "Oh, you can't write this, it's not right." It would be to do with my use of the English language.'
For decades, the Francis family delivered an instant best-seller a year. The couple earned so much that they bought three light aircraft and a luxury boat for sailing on the Thames; they regularly flew Concorde and took expensive cruises.
LESS successful was Francis's skimpy and embarrassingly hagiographic authorised biography of Lester Piggott, published in 1986. Mary's lung problems forced them to move to Florida in 1981, though they returned to England each summer to stay at the same family hotel in Paignton, Devon.
In 1992 they moved to the Caribbean tax-haven island of Grand Cayman, where they bought an apartment right on Seven Mile Beach and two plots in the West Bay cemetery. It was there that Mary was buried after she died (in Dick's arms) of a heart attack, aged 76, in 2000.
It was the end of a great love affair and there were no more 'Dick Francis' books until six years later, when another was ' co-authored' by their son, Felix, to be followed by two more.
Dick lived on alone in Grand Cayman for years even though his health deteriorated and he had to have a heart bypass operation in 2006 and his right leg amputated in 2007. Despite all the literary adulation-fame and fortune, he mourned the loss of his racing days and remained haunted by the way he was robbed of winning the Grand National.
Of his jockey days, he said: 'Those years in retrospect were the special ones. The first growth; the true vintage. The best years of my life.'
● Graham Lord is the author of Dick Francis: A Racing Life