The best year Geoff Lewis enjoyed as a jockey was 1969 when he finished second in the championship, having ridden 146 winners as against Lester Piggott’s 163. The following season, he was again runner-up to Piggott in the jockeys’ title race but, more importantly perhaps, he rode the handsome little colt Mill Reef as a two-year-old in all five of his victories. Then, towards the end of 1970, he was offered the post of first jockey to the leading trainer Noel (later Sir Noel) Murless.
Before he accepted the appointment, Lewis made a proviso that was directly responsible for ensuring the greatest successes of his career as well as a degree of fame that might not otherwise have materialised. He secured an assurance from Murless that, when occasion demanded, he could continue to ride Mill Reef for the late Paul Mellon, who owned him, and Ian Balding, his trainer.
How far-sighted and lucky that stipulation turned out to be can be realised with a glance at Mill Reef’s phenomenal career at the age of three, even though it began with a disappointment. In the 2,000 Guineas he was made a warm favourite, but was well beaten by Brigadier Gerard.
That there was no disgrace in the result was proved subsequently when “The Brigadier” became arguably the most brilliant miler of the century. Meanwhile, Mill Reef, better suited to longer distances, was not beaten again in 1971. His successes, with an inspired Lewis in the saddle, encompassed the astonishing and unique sequence of the Derby, the Eclipse Stakes, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes and culminated in a triumphant day in Paris in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
The year 1971 was also notable for Lewis when, in June, he achieved a unique feat by riding the winners of all three important Epsom races at a mile and a half. In addition to the Derby he also captured, for Murless, the Coronation Cup on Lupe and the Oaks on Altesse Royale, on whom he later also triumphed in the Irish Oaks.
Geoffrey Lewis was born in 1935 at Talgarth in mid-Wales, the sixth of a Brecon builder’s 13 children, who all had part-time jobs to keep poverty at bay. Lewis had a milk round beginning at 5.30am before he went to school. After his family moved to Shepherd’s Bush, west London, in 1945 he became a pageboy at the Waldorf Hotel despite having a severe stutter. As he once disarmingly said: “It was so bad that if I paged anyone they had usually left before I could get the name out.”
After four months in the capital he had the lucky break of at last realising his ambition to become a jockey. He was apprenticed at five shillings a week to Ron Smyth at Epsom. The experience he compared to heaven and he rode his first winner on Eastern Imp at Epsom in April 1953. When his apprenticeship ended in 1958, he became stable jockey to Peter Hastings-Bass at Kingsclere then, after Hastings-Bass died, to Balding who succeeded him at this famous stable.
Lewis on Mill Reef after winning the Epsom Derby in 1971
LES LEE/DAILY EXPRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Important Royal Ascot successes at this stage for Hastings-Bass included St Lucia in the Coronation Stakes in his first season as stable jockey and King’s Troop in the Royal Hunt Cup in 1961. This followed an earlier success in that particular race on Faultless Speech for the trainer Harold Wallington.
For Balding, Lewis rode Silly Season to victory as a two-year-old in the Coventry Stakes and Dewhurst Stakes but he was beaten in the following year’s 2,000 Guineas. It was no fault of Lewis’s because at the time it was not realised that this colt had a run, as it was once put, “about the length of a boy’s cricket pitch”. Silly Season later made amends by taking, with Lewis in the saddle, the St James’s Palace Stakes and Champion Stakes.
In 1968, fresh horizons beckoned. Lewis rode Right Tack to win the Middle Park Stakes for John Sutcliffe Jr. Then, the following year, after accepting a retainer to ride for Sutcliffe (but still maintaining his Kingsclere association), Lewis rode Right Tack to victory in the 2,000 Guineas — his first classic success — as well as in the Irish 2,000 Guineas and, in addition, captured the Irish Derby on Prince Regent for the French trainer, Etienne Pollet.
There shortly followed his glorious partnership with Mill Reef and, in 1973, he triumphed in two further classics both on Mysterious, for Murless, in the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks. All this was happening at the same time as Lewis spent his winters in India and was six-times champion rider there. His retirement as a jockey came in 1979 after a fruitful spell riding for Bruce Hobbs.
His training career began forthwith, based — where else? — at Epsom and success came immediately with a winner, Concert Hall, at Doncaster on his very first day. Soon he had 60 horses in his yard, among them Yawa who won the 1983 Grand Prix de Paris and 1984 Premio Roma; Rough Pearl whose most important success was in the 1984 St Leger Italiano; and Perion who, between 1986 and 1988, triumphed no fewer than 13 times at five furlongs, most notably in the important Newmarket sprint, the Palace House Stakes.
Lewis did well at Royal Ascot, twice saddling the winner of the King George V Handicap (Rough Pearl 1984 and The Thingaboutitis 1988) as well as that of the Queen’s Vase (Silver Wedge 1994) but he was unlucky when Silver Wisp was narrowly beaten into third place in the 1992 Derby. His trainer was convinced that he would have won had he fitted blinkers to the colt. His best — and certainly his fastest — horse was Lake Coniston, who succeeded half a dozen times at the top level, including the Diadem Stakes, the Prix de Meautry at Deauville, and with a very impressive performance in the 1995 July Cup, all of which earned him the title of champion European sprinter.
Horses aside, a most engaging feature of Lewis’s career as a trainer was a sidebet he placed for several years with Victor Chandler, wagering that he would train a specified number of winners. From 1991 to 1993 this was an annual success and netted a handsome profit of nearly £250,000 to be shared out among his stable staff. He is survived by his wife, Noelene, and their daughter Mary.
The later 1990s were to see a dramatic decline in fortune. The stable was badly hit with an equine virus that raged unabated for months. The number of horses at Thirty Acre Barn dwindled alarmingly, so that in the end it was no longer a financially viable proposition. Reluctantly, in 1999, Lewis had to sell up and end training at Epsom. But he did not abandon his bloodstock connections by any means. This irrepressible character, blessed with a great sense of humour, emigrated to Spain and in the seemingly unlikely surroundings of the Costa del Sol, carried on where he left off.
Geoff Lewis, jockey and trainer, was born on December 21, 1935. He died on August 26, 2025, aged 89