Gordon Howey

Article by Chris Pitt

Jump jockey Gordon Howey, who numbered a Cheltenham Festival winner among his 16 winners, died in hospital in Taunton on February 28, 2016, aged 67. His burgeoning career had been ended when he was paralysed in a car crash in 1972.

Gordon left school at 15 and joined a Flat stable at Wantage, where he managed just five rides in three years. He moved to join Les Kennard in the West Country, staying there for 18 months before teaming up with trainer-farmer john Thorne at Kilve, near Bridgwater. He rode his first winner for Thorne on Blown Over in the £1,019 to the winner “Double Star” Handicap Chase at Lingfield on Saturday, March 21, 1970.

He rode one more winner that season – John Thorne’s The Round Of Gras in the Newton Abbot Challenge Cup Maiden Hurdle (Division 1) on May 28 – and five the next.

He gained his biggest success when booting home 28-1 outsider Drakes Gold in the three-mile George Duller Handicap Hurdle (now known as the Coral Cup) by four lengths at the Cheltenham Festival on March 16, 1972, despite swerving badly left on the run-in.

The following month he came within a length of landing a treble at Wincanton’s Easter Monday fixture, winning a handicap chase on Herbert Payne’s Miss Medina, a novices’ chase on Shiner for John Thorne and finishing a close second on novice hurdler My Matt.

Gordon walked away unscathed from a second fence fall on Poetic Gipsy at Stratford on the last day of the season, June 3, 1972. However, later that year he was badly injured in a road accident, suffering a broken neck which left him paralysed from the arms downwards.

He spent a year in Stoke Mandeville after the accident but his injury was so serious that it left him a tetraplegic. Despite that, he maintained a positive outlook and still managed to get out racing, weather permitting, being driven to meetings by John Thorne’s wife. He even ran discos at the Hood Arms pub in the village of Kilve, when he lived and was cared for by his mother, Mary.

Gordon was a long-term beneficiary of the Injured Jockey Fund. When Mary could no longer manage to lift him out of bed, she was helped by former jockey Nicky Dawe, whose wife Jackie is the daughter of the late John Thorne, for whom Gordon rode most of his 16 winners. Following Mary’s death in 2012, Nicky took over as Gordon’s full-time carer.

Nicky Dawe paid this tribute: “Gordon was a wonderful guy who lived for his racing and still talked about his riding days up until the very end.”