Bill Gredley interview: I bought myself nine horses for 90th birthday, now one could win the Derby

“It confuses people because it hasn’t got a face,” says Gredley. “The tourists flock to it.”

But talk about how to make an old man happy? That is one battle he will relish and, I know, the council will regret ever having started.

But just as the old soldiers who fought in WWII are dwindling, so are the numbers of evacuees, kids who were shipped out of London to avoid the falling bombs to be ‘adopted’ by families in safer places – he is one of the few left.

He was taken in by a Welsh mining family. “They had a big tin bath which they’d fill up with water and under which they would light a fire,” he recalls. “When it was hot and the husband, Mr Harry, was back from work, we’d all have to leave the room while his wife scrubbed him clean.”

After a year his dad took him back to London and when the East End was bombed out he went to Essex with his grandmother. When she was served with a CPO (Compulsory Purchase Order) on a property she owned in London, he looked into it, got her some extra money, someone cut him in on another deal and he was off and running in commercial property.

He started in racing after meeting someone in Mark’s Club. “There were racing types in there, someone took me to the races and I ended up having a bit of horse with him,” he recalls. “Then I came across Clive Brittain [the trainer] who could talk the monkeys from the trees. Then when I moved from London I bought Stetchworth Park Stud [in 1980], went to Keeneland and bought 20 horses to stock it.”

On those early days Brittain was supposed to have asked him to have two of his horses, a colt and a filly, home to the stud for a holiday and he turned them out in the same paddock. “Like putting a man and woman in the same bed,” he chuckles.

Unlike Ambiente Friendly, his previous best horses Environment Friend – who beat two home in the Derby before winning the Eclipse next time out – User Friendly, an Oaks and St Leger winner who was just touched off in an Arc – and the Gold Cup winner Big Orange, were all homebreds.