Journalist Paul Haigh Dies at 76

The British racing press room has lost one of its legends with the passing of former HWPA Racing Journalist of the Year Paul Haigh, who has died aged 76.

In truth, Haigh, who received his crowning accolade at the Derby Awards ceremony in 1993, was never much seen in the press rooms of British racecourses even at the best of times because he was a feature-writer rather than a reporter.  And when he chose to make race-meetings the subject of his features, he would be as likely to watch the action on television in his living room (or in a betting shop) as from the stands through binoculars.  But it was this detachment that made his writing so special: he wrote from the point of view of someone more at home throwing his pencil at the TV in disgust as the horse which he has backed starts to weaken than rubbing shoulders with grandees in the Committee Room.

Haigh's entrée into the game came via a route no longer available, as a boardman in a betting shop, marking up the prices before the races and the results afterwards, with the Extel commentaries the sound-track to his working days. His passion for the game and his command of the language came to the attention of Pacemaker editor Michael Harris, who signed him up as one of the magazine's feature-writers.  That he took to this like a duck to water was shown by the fact that in 1984 he won an award as specialist columnist of the year for a trade publication in the Magazine Publishing Awards. When the Racing Post was founded in 1986, he was hired by founding editor Graham Rock to write a column (which could and would be on pretty much any subject) two or three times a week.  He filled this role until 1993.  Thereafter he became a freelance writer but still contributed to the Racing Post intermittently until 2009.

Haigh's political persuasions—ie left-wing, anti-establishment—underscored his output, his belief in the importance of fairness and natural justice under-pinning his work to at least the same extent that his passion for the sport did.  Overall, though, the principal ingredient in his work was humour. A Paul Haigh column would probably enthuse the reader and very possibly get him thinking—but, most of all, it would almost certainly make him laugh.

Michael Harris, under whom Haigh worked both at Pacemaker and a few years later at the Racing Post, said in that newspaper's tribute to his former colleague, “His writing was as good as anything I've ever read on horseracing. Not necessarily from the point of view of his opinions, but certainly from his wonderful style of writing and the humour it conveyed.

“He consistently showed all the attributes of a great columnist in that he was controversial, irreverent and often very funny.  He was a wonderful raconteur but along with that he was also obstinate and difficult to control. He would say what he thought and to hell with the consequences.

“The genius of Paul Haigh was in his writing ability and journalistic skills. He wrote with an Orwellian clarity to the point where even his great nemesis, the late John McCririck, once said that Haigh was always a good writer and sometimes a great writer.”

As well as for his many memorable Racing Post and Pacemaker columns, Paul Haigh will perhaps be best remembered for his books, most notably The Racehorse Trainer, which was published by Partridge Press in 1990 and contained profiles of 21 of the world's leading trainers at the time, the words written by Haigh and the photographs taken by George Selwyn. For anyone looking to compile a time-capsule of the racing world in the final quarter of the 20^th century, this book would have been an automatic selection.