Racing diary: farewell to Sam Sheppard, the man who put the fun into breeders' fund His father, Gay, was clerk of the course at Newton Abbot, Exeter, Taunton and Stratford, his uncle was a senior handicapper. His cousin, Jonathan, is a top trainer in America while another cousin, Gurney, was a great point-to-point rider in East Anglia. His own earliest racing memory is of "treading in" for his father at Newton Abbot after the tidal wall had collapsed and, like Laytown, racing could only be staged when the tide was out. Of course running the EBF has not always been a cakewalk. Once a trainer rang him and berated him for 20 minutes because Weatherbys had told him his horse was not qualified for an EBF race. "What," he demanded finally putting the ball in Sheppard's court, "are you going to do about it?" "Well," said Sheppard calmly, "the reason your horse is ineligible is because it is a colt and you've entered it in a fillies" race." Touché. Mark Bradburne, my brother-in-law who retired from race-riding at Christmas, was presented with a cheque for £3,000 at Cheltenham on Sunday. This was not the sum total of his pension pot or what it cost his weighing-room colleagues to remove him but the Griffins Richard Davis Award. He must now put it towards his business. The award recognises the "effort, initiative and forethought" jockeys put into developing new careers and is given by JETS, the Jockeys Employment Training Scheme which, over two decades, has helped numerous ex-jockeys find gainful employment. Bradburne trained to become an electrician when he was sidelined with a broken back and I can't tell you how handy it is to have one in the family. His first job for me was to put some new lights in the utility room. They worked very well until the children had a shower. The house lights fused and water started cascading through the ceiling like a mini Victoria Falls just at the point where the apprentice's handy work was most evident. Drilling through the waste-water pipe, as it appeared to me, seemed a slightly unlucky start. But the real answer lay above, where the children had tried to turn the shower into a bath. The grinning son and heir had blocked the plug hole with his bottom and water was freely over-flowing, taking the shortest route downwards and ultimately finding its way out through to the light fitting. The falsely blamed brother-in-law was instantly forgiven, the children were not.