Hair taken from some of the Turf’s greatest champions could make £50,000 when it goes under the hammer at a Newmarket auction of racing memorabilia on Wednesday

Racing enthusiast Ray Goddard may never have seen a racehorse run in his own colours yet, through a unique collection he put together over the course of more than 50 years, he would have argued he owned a piece of some of the Turf’s greatest champions.

The Reading lorry driver’s passion for the sport saw him collect hairs taken from the tails and manes of a host of racing legends. Mill Reef, Arkle, Nijinsky, Dancing Brave, Pretty Polly, The Tetrach, Dubai Millennium, Shergar, and Vaguely Noble, Ray owned a piece of them all.

And on Wednesday his collection, taken from 829 champion racehorses, stallions, and broodmares, and collected over a period of 55 years between 1948 and 2003, will go under the hammer at Race to History, a specialist auction of racing memorabilia being held by Newmarket- based auctioneer Graham Budd, in conjunction with Weatherbys, at the town’s National Horseracing Museum.

Every one of the hair samples was neatly plaited by Ray’s wife Mary and each has its own provenance having been labelled with the date and place of acquisition.

Ray died in 2004 but many of the anecdotes about how he came to acquire his specimens are as priceless as the collection itself.

It is however short of his own candidate for the greatest of them all, dual Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Ribot.

Back in 1957 Ray was set to get the great horse’s hairs on a visit to Newmarket’s Woodlands Stud where he was standing as a stallion but before he could get to Suffolk the horse was shipped to the United States. Not to be put off, 15 years later Ray arranged for his son, who was going on holiday to the States, to visit the stud farm in Kentucky where the aging stallion was then based.

Unfortunately two months before the visit Ribot died. Ray’s son however did come home with the hair of Derby and Arc winner Sea Bird.

“Collecting locks of horse hair might seem like an unusual pastime, but it’s provided us with an incredible archive, featuring some of the most famous horses the racing world has seen,” said Graham Budd. “It tells a wonderful story of half a century of racing history.”

The collection is expected to make up to £50,000.

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