Lord Oaksey - Telegraph Shortly before that Oaksey had begun what was to be a highly successful partnership with the staying chaser Taxidermist when they were runners-up in the Kim Muir Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. In April 1958 Taxidermist and Oaksey beat their more favoured stablemate Mandarin in the second running of the Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown; and that November, Taxidermist, again ridden by Oaksey, produced an amazing turn of foot to pass four horses after the final fence in the Hennessy Gold Cup, then run at Cheltenham, to win by a very short head from Kerstin. At the following year's Cheltenham Festival , Oaksey enjoyed his first Festival win when Sabaria, whose trainer Bob Turnell was the first man for whom Oaksey regularly rode out, won the four-mile National Hunt Chase. Other winners at the Festival were on Jimmy Scot and Black Baize, in 1966 and 1971 respectively, while Bullocks Horn landed the Foxhunters" Chase in 1973. Bullocks Horn also won the Foxhunters" at Liverpool, a race in which Oaksey had been successful seven years earlier on Subaltern. He was also first past the post in the 1974 Whitbread , on Proud Tarquin, but this time there was no happy ending. Proud Tarquin had jinked to his left as he landed over the final fence and the marginal interference he thus caused to The Dikler persuaded the stewards that the placings of the pair should be reversed. Oaksey was very aware of the risks run by jump jockeys, some of whom sustain injuries in falls which bring their careers to a premature end, and often when they are ill-prepared financially for such an eventuality. In the 1963-64 season Tim Brookshaw and Paddy Farrell suffered such misfortune in falls at Liverpool. Both men broke their backs, prompting the establishment of the Farrell-Brookshaw Fund, with which Oaksey was much involved. It was the forerunner of the Injured National Hunt Jockeys" Fund, which later embraced all professional riders under the banner of the Injured Jockeys Fund (IJF). For more than four decades this fund has provided a lifeline for riders who have fallen on hard times, and Oaksey, who began as one of the trustees and later became chairman, never stopped working for it and its beneficiaries. For his services to the fund he was appointed OBE in 1985. Indeed, it was virtually impossible to find a good cause in racing in which Oaksey was not involved. Such was his kindness and consideration that he found it almost impossible to say no when someone came to him for advice or assistance. Throughout his riding career, and while he worked with the IJF, Oaksey was also writing full-time for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and Horse and Hound. Often he would describe races in which he had ridden. There was, for example, the celebrated piece he wrote, minutes after the race, when it had seemed as though he would win the 1963 Grand National on Carrickbeg - "and then Ayala's head appeared like Nemesis at my knee." He had joined The Daily Telegraph in 1957 as assistant to Lt-Cdr BWR ("Bill") Curling - then the paper's senior racing correspondent under the Hotspur byline - and soon started writing his own column as "Marlborough." In no time his different vantage point - from the backs of the horses he had been riding - made his copy compulsory reading for the many people who came to enjoy the fluency and flair of his prose. Two years after joining The Daily Telegraph he became "Audax" in Horse and Hound, a role he was to fulfil for almost 30 years. He retired as Audax in 1988, the same year in which he ended 28 years with The Sunday Telegraph, for which he had written since its launch in 1960. He estimated that, at his most prolific, he had been producing some 6,000 words a week. His career in television was equally impressive. He worked for ITV's World of Sport from 1970, and when racing coverage was transferred to Channel 4 in 1986, he became a regular member of that commentary team as well. While the vast majority of viewers loved Oaksey's contributions, he was not famous for his skill as a tipster. He once received the following letter from an aggrieved punter: "Dear Bastard, I am writing to tell you that you could not tip more rubbish if Channel 4 bought you a forklift truck." As well as producing a section of The History of Steeplechasing, Oaksey wrote a biography of Mill Reef, his favourite Flat horse, about which he also produced the script for a film called Something To Brighten The Morning. An anthology of his Horse and Hound articles was called Oaksey on Racing; and he was involved in the extremely entertaining Flings Over Fences, a biography of his great friend Gay Kindersley. John Geoffrey Tristram Lawrence was born on March 21 1929, the only son of the 1st Lord Oaksey and 3rd Lord Trevethin and his wife Marjorie, daughter of Commander Charles Robinson, RN. Geoffrey Lawrence, who was created the 1st Lord Oaksey in 1947 and succeeded his brother as Lord Trevethin in 1959, had been for many years a leading light in the legal profession, and was known for his impartial conduct of the international tribunal which tried war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945; he had become a High Court judge, Lord Justice of Appeal and a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. As a young boy, John learned to ride on an old pony called Mince Pie, who had "a deeply embarrassing habit of farting the moment she saw a horse larger than her." His autobiography would later be entitled Mince Pie for Starters (2003). After attending Eton (where he was captain of boxing), he did National Service with the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers, then read PPE at New College, Oxford. From there he went on to Yale Law School, but racing was his first love, and the prospect of starting out in the law on a tiny salary was not appealing. So when, in 1956, a chance encounter with Bill Curling led to an offer to become Curling's assistant at The Daily Telegraph, John leapt at the opportunity. He was elected Racing Journalist of the Year in 1968 and an honorary member of the Jockey Club in 2001. His homebred chaser Carruthers won last year's Hennessy Gold Cup. In 1959 he married Sir John Betjeman's former secretary, Victoria ("Tory") Dennistoun, whose father John ("Ginger") Dennistoun was a shrewd trainer of a small mixed string near Wantage. The marriage broke up in unhappily public fashion in the mid-1980s, when Lady Oaksey left her husband for the artist Maggi Hambling. John Oaksey married secondly, in 1988, "Chicky" Crocker (née Hunter), who survives him with the two children of his first marriage: Patrick Lawrence, QC, who was born in 1960 and succeeds to the baronies, and Sara, a former jockey who married the trainer Mark Bradstock. The 2nd Lord Oaksey, born March 21 1929, died September 5 2012