Born on March 12, 1929, John Lawrence was the son of Geoffrey Lawrence, First Baron Oaksey, and adopted the name John Oaksey when he succeeded to the barony following the death of his father on August 28, 1971. He was the best amateur National Hunt jockey of his generation, famously winning both the Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown and the Hennessy Gold Cup on Taxidermist, trained by Fulke Walwyn, in 1958 and suffering an agonising defeat in the Grand National, in 1963, when his mount, Carrickberg, trained by Donald Butchers, was caught close home by 66/1 chance Ayala. All told, Oaksey rode 205 winners during his career, but retired in 1975 as the result of injuries sustained in a crashing fall at now-defunct Folkestone.
By that stage, though, ‘My Noble Lord’, as Channel 4 racing colleague John McCririck would later christen Oaksey, already had his accomplished fingers in various different pies, as a journalist, broadcaster and innovator. In 1957, he began writing the ‘Marlborough’ column in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and, the two years later, inherited the ‘Audax’ column in ‘Horse and Hound’. As a racing broadcaster, he worked for ITV and, later, Channel 4 from 1969 until 2002.
Oaksey was also instrumental in the creation of the Injured Jockeys Fund (IJF), which was established in 1964, after jockeys Stanley ‘Tim’ Brookshaw and Patrick ‘Paddy’ Farrell were both left paralysed after falls at Aintree in 1963/64. He was, in fact, one of the original trustees of the IJF and Oaksey House, a state-of-the-art rehabilitation centre in Lambourn, Berkshire, which opened in 2009, was named in his honour. Oaksey died, aged 83, on September 5, 2012, having suffered from Alzeiheimer’s disease in his later years.