Paul Haigh

Paul Haigh: 1945 – January 30, 2021

PAUL HAIGH: an eloquent, talented capable writer, a person for whom words just flowed. His writing was true to himself; he revealed his personality, his political persuasions, his humour, his desire to fight for the small man, and was never afraid also to have a pop at someone or an organisation he did not appreciate.

He could bring a scene, an emotion, an event so vividly to life with an economy of words that most journalists can only dream of matching. His writing was usually laced with a wry sense of humour or reflective of his political view point… often both.

His copy was always typo free, accurate and sent on time. If there were an instance when he had forgotten a deadline, an emailed nudge would result in beautifully tailored copy arriving within the hour.

When he was at the Racing Post he turned out three pieces of comment a week for the daily newspaper, a truly herculean effort appreciated by anyone who has ever tried to write an original thought.

Paul was a man of contradictions. He did not go racing in the UK, but he loved travelling abroad to the big international meetings. He fought for the small man, but he loved big time racing. He was generous in his support, and this magazine was a recepient of that help, but he was highly focused on doing the right thing for himself.

By the time International Thoroughbred got to know Paul he was firmly in love with international Flat racing; happily admitting that he could not understand the attractions of the NH winter game, did not appreciate the company of The Festival-set of “tweedy” types, those who would arrive in Gloucestershire en masse to watch, in his view, slow horses galloping in mud.

To him racing was all about the big time on the Flat: the champions, the stars, the fast ground, the big jockeys, the betting, international racing’s jet set.

In the last piece of editorial he wrote for us in the December 2019 edition he happily and easily name dropped a 1980s conversation he had with Kieren Fallon into his copy.

At the height of his journalistic powers he loved to get the inside line, create contacts with those who were playing at the top, find the story, and get a handle on situations which could not be mentioned in print, something behind the reason for his departure from the Racing Post after working for 23 years for the publication.

He also loved the Far East. After departing the Post, an event that he possibly never really recalibrated in his life, he had two years’ working at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. The corporate world of the HKJC was probably not for him, but it did strengthened his love of the Far East and its people.

He certainly had an old-school journalist’s approach to life. An overheard conversation on a journey back to Hong Kong’s airport, after a racing trip for the December International meeting in 2016, was spent reminiscing with his generation of friends and journos about some down town bar in some Hong Kong back street deemed a favourite because it stayed open until the financial markets opened.

Paul died aged 76. He had started out in racing marking up bookmakers’ boards until he was signed on as a writer for Pacemaker magazine by editor Michael Harris.

He joined the Post at its beginning in 1986 and won specialist columnist of the year for a trade publication in the Magazine Publishing Awards in 1984, a success followed up with the racing journalist of the year award at the HWPA Derby Awards in 1993.

He wrote for this magazine from 2009 to 2019, and was due to return to his First Word column again this year

He was incredibly proud of his two daughters Catherine and Victoria almost to the point of bewilderment, wondering how could have produced such clever and beautiful girls.

Through last year’s arrival of the COVID pandemic he emailed us to say how much he was missing seeing his grandson, whilst recalling the pride of travelling to his daughter’s wedding in America.

Paul would certainly had given a smile and would have been amused had he known he was sharing this collection of obituary pages with Prince Khalid Abdullah.

Paul wrote the First Word for International Thoroughbred for 10 years, unstintingly producing for every issue until December 2019.

We’ve let Paul have the Last Word with his own piece written after Frankel had won the Juddmonte International at York in August 2012.

It still stands alone as a piece of writing today and is Paul’s own tribute to the late Prince Khalid Abdullah.

“Haigh” by Lawrence Wadey

FIRST MET HAIGH (for some reason we always referred to each other by our surnames) at the Racing Post pre-launch lunch at the Cricketers Club in Marylebone Street in December 1985. From that moment to this we were the best of friends. We gelled. I know not why.

In those intervening 35 years I would have read the vast majority of his work and can say without hesitation that no other racing journalist, in my opinion, has made their point better because Haigh always did so with such wonderful wit and such accomplished prose.

And some of the issues Haigh tackled head-on were – and still are – the biggest issues in UK racing, not least the relationship between it and the bookmakers in all its many and troublesome facets.

And yet he was so very modest about his own talents. He would have penned many a column from my spare room in Happy Valley, Hong Kong, and then in the Coloane district of neighbouring Macau. We would enjoy a post-race escapade and the next afternoon, almost without fail, he would be complaining he was writing shite, didn’t have another column in him – EVER! – and was going to quit.

I’d then read it and have to spend the next hour convincing him it was truly and wonderfully uproarious and what I and virtually every other journalist, racing or otherwise, would give to be able to write half as well.

After he left the Racing Post, rather acrimoniously it has to be said, he worked for the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) from 2007 to 2009 and colleagues from there tell of how blown away they were by the encouragement they received from the maestro.

David Morgan, who himself became an outstanding journalist for the HKJC, remembers: “I used to read Paul’s Racing Post columns religiously when I was a lad.

“I then once applied for a job at The Post and was set a task to ‘write a column in the style of Paul Haigh’.

“He helped me a lot when we worked together during those all-too-short six weeks when I first moved to Hong Kong.”

The HKJC’s Roy Li, who helps the new overseas riders when they come into town for the first time, says he is now so glad that on a trip to the UK in 2019 he made a point of visiting Haigh.

Haigh was also the best company. In recent correspondence between a group of us old Racing Post hands, Brough Scott made the very good point that very few great writers are also great company.

But Haigh was. He had such a ready humour. Anything you ever did with Haigh, however mundane, was all the better for his presence. He gave everything a piquancy.

I remember a dinner at the Studio City casino out here in Macau. A huge Eastern European gambler walked in, straight out of wrestling mania, with an incongruously diminutive Asian lady on his arm.

Quick as a flash Haigh quipped: “The next bout is a catchweight contest.”

Perhaps above and beyond all this we mustn’t forget that Haigh was also a devoted father to Catherine and Victoria and, recently, a devoted grandfather to Catherine’s son, Leo.