Dick Francis: from rider to writer
First attempts
iVillage: You used to be a jockey before a fall caused you to leave horse racing and start writing. Had you ever written before that - as a child or as an adult?
Dick Francis: I never wrote. In fact, I tried not to go to school! I was always interested in horses and ponies. But an unusual thing happened to me when I was a jockey. The Queen Mother's horse collapsed with me on it when I was 25 yards from the winning post in the Grand National. I was winning the race. Soon after that, an author's agent whose mother knew my mother had tea with both of them. He saw photographs of me in my mother's apartment and said: 'Has he ever thought about writing his autobiography?' My mother said, 'I don't suppose he has. But I can give you his address.'
So he got in touch with me and he suggested that this Grand National episode - it was in 1936 - was a good peg on which to hang an autobiography, and why didn't I do it? I didn't think I could, but Mary, my wife, said, 'Go on. Write as if you're writing to your uncle.' I used to write to my uncle a lot to tell him how the races were run or what the horses were like that I rode. So that's how it started.
In the meantime, after announcing my retirement, Sir John Junor, who was the editor of the London Sunday Express, asked me to lunch with him one day and said, 'Will you write half a dozen articles for my newspaper on the current racing scene?' So I said yes. I wrote for the Sunday Express on the racing scene every week for 16 years. Working for the newspaper is what taught me to write. I was essentially self-taught. After about five years with the Sunday Express, Mary said to me, 'You always said you were going to write a novel. Now's the time.'
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