Born on 13 February 1928, William Anthony (Bill) Tellwright was a prominent amateur rider for over 30 years. He rode his first winner at Birmingham on 16 January 1950, when Bright Daw, who he also owned, landed the Edgehill Handicap Chase.
He won 11 times on the popular hunter chaser Happy Morn II, who won a total of 25 races under National Hunt rules in the mid-1950s. Happy Morn II was habitually slow to get going and was often a fence behind the leaders at halfway, but always finished strongly. He was responsible for three of Bill’s six wins in the 1953/54 season.
Bill recorded a career best score of nine in the 1954/55 campaign, seven of them on Happy Morn II, including the race that eventually became the Horse and Hound Cup, the Final Open Hunters’ Chase at Stratford. Another was his victory in Sandown’s Royal Artillery Gold Cup on Barber’s Tale, owned and trained by Jim Hammonds.
The following season started well, winning four in a row on Barber’s Tale in the opening weeks, between 30 July and 24 August landing three-mile chases at Newton Abbot (twice), Buckfastleigh and Devon & Exeter. Bill ended the season with a score of eight.
Another good horse with whom he was associated was Wartown, on whom Bill won at Cheltenham in November and Leicester in January of the 1957/58 season, and landed an amateur riders’ chase at Stratford on 31 October 1959.
He rode five winners during that 1959/60 season, two of which were gained on his own horse Gaggle Of Geese, trained for him by Willie Stephenson. They landed a division of the St Ivo Novices’ Hurdle at Huntingdon on Boxing Day and followed up at Haydock Park two weeks later.
He achieved his greatest success when winning the Kim Muir Chase at Cheltenham in 1961 on the Fred Rimell-trained Nicolas Silver, just 17 days before that horse won the Grand National in the hands of Bobby Beasley.
He owned, trained and rode French Cottage to win a pair of selling chases at Manchester and Leicester in January 1961. The following season, French Cottage gave him the first leg of a double at Woore on 5 October 1961, completed by another of his horses, Nothing, in the novice chase.
In the 1962 running of the Royal Artillery Gold Cup, Bill, riding Condor, was much inconvenienced by a broken collarbone sustained ten days earlier at Sandown’s Grand Military meeting when falling on Blue Marlin. He still managed to finish second, beaten just three-quarters of a length by Pax Vobis.
French Cottage provided Bill with his sole success of the 1962/63 campaign when winning a Manchester selling chase on the first day of December 1962. That horse was also responsible for the luckiest win of Bill’s career, in a BBC-televised amateur riders’ chase at Cheltenham on Saturday, 12 December 1964. Turning for home, John Lawrence (later Lord Oaksey), aboard the grey Pioneer Spirit, was well clear of Bill on French Cottage, the only others still going, when, with the race at their mercy, Mr Lawrence inadvertently steered his mount onto the wrong part of the course, leaving French Cottage to plod past and scoop the prize.
Bill won a second Royal Artillery Gold Cup on Trunk Call in 1966, by which time he had reduced his number of rides under rules. He finished second in the 1972 and 1973 renewals of the Royal Artillery Gold Cup before winning it for a third and final time in 1976 on Apache Chief.
A steward at Uttoxeter for more than 20 years, he continued to ride in point-to-points, retiring in triumph in 1983 when winning the North Staffs members’ race on Rathlek.
He died three years later at North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary on October 23, 1986 from a broken neck, suffered while out schooling a hunter near his home at Hale, near Market Drayton. He was 58. He left a wife, Jane, who he had married in October 1953, and four children.
In the words of John Oaksey, his contemporary in the saddle, Bill Tellwright was “tough, cheerfully resolute and extremely difficult to dislodge.”