A rarely-seen BBC profile of my grandfather, Jim “Jimmy” McCaughey
— a Warwickshire builder who turned a construction fortune into one of the boldest
racing operations in Britain, and then handed a piece of English turf history to the
ruling family of Dubai.
He built the Heart of England group of companies out of Leamington Spa,
and by the late 1970s he was one of the largest landowners in the country. Then he walked
into racing at full tilt. He was spending so heavily at the Newmarket sales that the BBC
put him on television as the face of the money pouring into bloodstock — and he was
unrepentant about it, arguing on camera that a good colt was worth the price before he
had ever run.
The yellow silks with the black diamond and sleeves went out over roughly 32
horses, placed with the best trainers of the day — Fred Rimell over jumps,
Ryan Price, and a young Michael Stoute on the Flat. His bloodstock agent was
David Minton, then of the Curragh Bloodstock Agency, who he met by chance
at Warwick racecourse in 1977. The first horse Minton bought him, Connaught Ranger, won
the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham the following March.
In 1979 he bought Harwood Stud at Woolton Hill near Newbury from Major
Herbert Blagrave, and renamed it Gainsborough Stud after the 1918 Triple
Crown winner buried in its paddocks. He kept Blagrave’s stud manager, Michael
Goodbody, and set about stocking it with mares.
Then, in 1981, he sold it to Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al
Maktoum of Dubai. It was the Sheikh’s first stud in Britain. From those
hundred-odd acres, Gainsborough grew into farms across England, Ireland and Kentucky, and
after Sheikh Maktoum’s death in 2006 the bloodstock passed to his brother Sheikh
Mohammed and into Godolphin — with echoes still visible in
champions like the 2025 Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty.
