In his clerking days his great reply to the question “What do you do when meetings [occasionally three of them raced on the same day] clash?” was: “Pray for a frost.”
Since retiring Bevan, 75, has taken up oil painting and, after coming up with the original proposal, he has co-ordinated the Injured Jockeys Fund visitor scheme for 10 years, the idea being that a number of the IJF’s 600 beneficiaries suffer from loneliness which can be partly remedied by regular visits from racing people.
So he is a top, top man and if the tone of this sounds as if I am sucking up even more than usual then it is with extremely good reason.
For Bevan’s ship has just come in but, as he says, “it’s been a bloody long wait”. Indeed, the boat, which though visible has still yet to dock, has been becalmed in the Doldrums for more than 100 years.
Charles Saatchi has not just started collecting his paintings as the basis for an Old British Artists movement. No, this is altogether more romantic.
Back in 1890, Hugo’s great uncle Ralph, as good a horseman as he was poker player, emigrated to Canada. His party trick was to double the difficulty of bucking broncos by riding them in an English hunting saddle and, at a cowboy gathering in Calgary, he won a game of poker.
The frontiersman he beat could not pay and settled his debt by offering the Englishman a percentage of the mineral rights on two square miles of Alberta wilderness.
Though Ralph married he had no children and the rights ended up in the lap of two of his great nephews, Hugo and brother Julian, an eminent QC.
It has been a long time coming and makes Pip’s travails in Great Expectations pale into insignificance, but in the autumn an oil company started drilling on the plot.
Now, having invested in a petroleum company looking for oil in the North Falklands Basin, I have a basic knowledge of the drilling process. When these companies bring some brown sludge to the surface, they send it off to test for oil content.
In my case brown sludge proved to be just that, with a hint of seawater, and instead of tripling the value of my shares they collapsed, but in Bevan’s case the tests have shown that this stuff is so neat you could almost run your car on it.
Bevan has yet to see a dollar but already there have been a few helpful suggestions as to what he should do with his new-found fortune and how he should handle being on the rich list half a stride behind Sheikh Mohammed – even though his own best hope is that it might match his state pension and contribute to the old peoples’ home.
Nicky Henderson, whose yard is so chocker with horses that he can hardly take many more, suggested he buy a grouse moor.
Other trainers will be forwarding the pedigrees of potential champion racehorses. Hugo is not interested: “You can tell them that the only horse I’m going to have is a nodding donkey – they don’t fall, they don’t need feeding and they win every day.”
I’m fully expecting him to arrive by helicopter as Towcester for his part-time raceday meet-and-greet job providing, of course, it does not clash with an OPEC board meeting.
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