Sir Robert Ogden epitomised the self-made, self-reliant Yorkshireman. He left school at 14 and progressed from hauling stone in an ancient truck to owning his own racehorses, aircraft, villa in the south of France and yacht, all the while keeping at arm’s length anyone he took to be a phoney or a fool. After one notable triumph at Aintree, he had had his fill of both and whisked his trainer away for what he called “a proper drink”.
The trainer, Martin Todhunter, had triumphed in the three-mile handicap with Kingsmark, one of Ogden’s horses. “Sir Robert was quite a shy man and all the hierarchy at Liverpool were running round after him. He said to me, ‘I’m sick of all this’.” What Ogden termed “a proper drink” was no longer the Yorkshire tea or bitter that he could barely pay for in his teenage years. “Robert drank Château Lafite because he could afford to do so,” said his friend Nick Cheyne. “Everything he did was done stylishly with no expense spared.”
His stud was based amid 300 acres at Sicklinghall, near Wetherby. Ogden was a champion National Hunt owner three times. One of his four victories at the Cheltenham Festival was with Voy Por Ustedes and another horse, Exotic Dancer, came runner-up in the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Other successful horses, all in his distinctive mauve and pink checked silks, included Ad Hoc, Marlborough, Star De Mohaison, Fadalko and Squire Silk. Perhaps Ogden’s most memorable success was when his son, Adam, won the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown on Act The Wag.
From 2013 he concentrated on Flat racing and breeding, winning the Irish St Leger, Hardwicke Stakes, Duke Of Cambridge Stakes, Falmouth Stakes and Prix Rothschild. He rarely gave interviews, yet he still became a staple figure of gossip columnists owing to his predilection for what they called “Brazilian firecrackers” who would accompany him to race meetings.
His capacity for work took in charitable causes, particularly Macmillan Cancer Relief. In 1993 he funded a cancer resource centre at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds and treatment units in Harrogate and Northallerton.
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This was done as unobtrusively as he was able, as was his sale of Boston Hall, his company’s headquarters in Wetherby, to Geoffrey Boycott, who shared many of the traits of the archetypal Yorkshireman who has succeeded despite a humble background.
Ogden, who was knighted for his services to charity in 2001, was to the fore in regenerating the mining region of South Yorkshire, where the great cricketer, himself knighted in 2019, grew up. His business activities ranged from extracting coal from disused colliery soil heaps to building farm roads and constructing farm buildings out of old military bases.
He went in for quarrying and engineering and diversified into property, including buying land in London’s docklands before the regeneration of the area in the 1980s. He made a profit of about £60 million on a four-and-a-half acre site he purchased from the Greater London Council when it was wasteland. His foresight propelled him into The Sunday Times Rich List, with an empire estimated in 2008 at £135 million.
“Robert was a grafter and expected everyone else to be as well. He was very good at smelling out people giving him bullshit. He would be fine with anyone who told him the truth and was loyal to them,” said Cheyne.
He was also a keen environmentalist, renovating a number of the disused mining sites he bought from British Coal, including the Goldthorpe colliery, where there had been strong opposition to the Thatcher government in the miners’ strike in the 1980s.
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“These were big, black, dirty tips and he planted millions of trees,” said his nephew, Justin Garnett, who now runs his companies. “Ten per cent of coal was left from the old slag heaps and could be sold before the tips were restored, planning permission was gained and the land was sold for housing development.” Ogden was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher.
Born in 1936, Robert Ogden was the eldest of six children of Albert Ogden, a builder, and Maria Ogden (née Marks). He grew up in Bradford, where he attended Wibsey Modern School.
He was only a boy when he left home to start his working life on a small, remote farm in the Yorkshire Dales. Even though he had left school at a very young age, or perhaps because of this, he funded the education at sixth-form level and at the University of Leeds of more than 400 young people from deprived parts of Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham.
His tasks at the farm included milking by hand 20 cows twice a day. After National Service with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, Ogden embarked on his first enterprise by buying an old tipper truck. His mother sold her own car to help him to pay the deposit.
He used the truck to move crushed stone from Skipton Rock Quarry to RAF Menwith Hill station near Harrogate, arriving early each morning to ensure he was first in the queue to transport as many loads as possible. Having saved up he added to the fleet, recovering York stone and selling it in the south of England. All material recovered from demolition projects, not least terraced houses in Bradford, was recycled for use in the construction industry, whereas previously it would end up in landfill. The Ogden Group of Companies — he was not related to Ogden the jewellers — that he founded in 1956 won four Queen’s Awards for export and technical achievement.
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Ogden was divorced from Bernice Watkinson, with whom he had two sons: Adam, who served in the Household Cavalry and now works in property, and Robert, also in property. They survive him, along with his second wife, Ana (“Fafaa”) Oliveira, whom he met through a friend in horse racing.
Whether on his 55m yacht, or at home near Wetherby or Cap Ferrat, Ogden employed high-class chefs. He ate at The Waterside Inn in Bray while he was at Ascot. Once, when attending the horse sales at Tattersalls, Newmarket, with Jack Hanson, his neighbour who introduced him to horse racing, he had too resplendent a lunch and slipped trying to get up the steps of his aircraft, falling on to the tarmac. He spent the night in hospital. It was a rare day when “Robert had more success in the lunch room than the sales room”, Cheyne said.
Sir Robert Ogden, racehorse owner, was born on January 15, 1936. He died of cancer on March 6, 2022, aged 86