English: From the Sludgegulper archives. Does anyone else remember ,well before the new racecourse at Great Leighs, that Chelmsford's hinterland supported an unusual flat race trainer? Clipped from the Sun, not the current Currant Bun, but the successor to the Daily Herald which changed its format and politics ever so slightly in 1969. The author of this piece should be well known to listeners of Just of Minute. Poston's meat vans were a common sight on the roads en route to Smithfield market.

Peter J Poston, born Brentwood (?) 1913. m Frances M. Townsend 1948 Parents Charles & Florence Poston. Brother Robert C. b 1912. Charles Poston, b. Brentwood (lived at Rosemount, Queens Road) 1876, was a Stockbroker, like his father of the same name before him, who interestingly is counted twice in two different places in the 1901 census!

See here for this piece on PJ Poston and John Meacock, another fascinating trainer from the same period whose horses all had persian names which translated as Carpet Beater etc. sEE ALSO this story here www.quixall-crossett.co.uk/quixpress.htm

Racing colours for Peter Poston I think were light blue with yellow spots, red cap. (anyone confirm from Horses in Training books?) See comment below by MCFCBurnsy - the colours were actually as body, but with yellow sleeves and yellow spots on a black cap. .

In 2011 the Guardian's Chris Cook Friday 11 February 2011 12.08 GMT carried the following extract from a book: [Claims Five: The funniest book about horse racing by David Ashworth] Ashforth's appreciation for pathos comes through in an interview with Peter Poston, some years after Poston had quit training. He "had a theory about breeding. If you went back far enough (about 300 years), every racehorse traced back to the Godolphin Arabian or the Byerly Turk or the Darley Arabian. That meant they all had the same breeding, more or less. What was the point of paying a lot of money for a racehorse when you could get virtually the same horse for almost nothing?"

This being Ashforth's world, the theory turns out to be excellent but Poston ends up "in a tiny caravan in somebody's front garden" just the same. Having bought Athene for 140 guineas as a yearling, Poston then fails to win a race with her and gives her away as a prize in a £1 raffle. "It was a very generous gesture," Ashforth records, because Athene would later give birth to Rheingold, winner of the 1973 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.

discussed here in 2015

The picture from the Guardian has been clipped and cropped in this piece on one of PP's leading apprentices Bevan Freeman b 1949 sites.google.com/site/jockeypedia5/bevan

More memories here from 2018/9 including comments from Joe Perkins, one of his Mill Green apprentices

horseracingmatters.com/blog/bygone-flashes-of-eccentricity