North Yorkshire trainer following in father’s famous footsteps.

IT is the Classic racing image of its day. Horse and jockey standing tall, proud in victory. The taker of the spoils. The oil painting, hanging in the front room of Jason Ward’s Middleham house, isn’t the only record of battles won.

Photographs, newspaper reports, and mementos of a life in racing that goes far above and beyond his own adorn the walls and mantelpiece.

“The painting is my great grandfather, on my mother’s side, Captain Wilson, who was very well known in his day,” explains Ward.

“He was the first jockey to win the Grand National two years running. It’s of Roquefort’s victory in 1885.

“Have you ever read one of the old Lord Carnavon books? I think it is Men And Horses I Have Known. It’s a real jaunt through his year in racing – one of these toffs – and there is a bit about Captain Wilson.

“He wasn’t a toff. He was a non-commissioned officer, and it just said what a good guy he was and what a proper man he was.

“A boy got hurt jumping one day and there were no hospitals and he took him home for four weeks. He got the boy right and fed him up. He was just a good guy.

“My grandfather, Charlie Ward, was champion apprentice in 1894 or 1895 and he ended up riding over hurdles. He had a fall at Kempton, had internal injuries, they sent him home and he died two days later.

“My father, Bob Ward, was eight or nine at the time and his mother didn’t want to let him go into racing at all. Dad sneaked into racing and, like me, worked for a lot of people before he took a licence.

“It’s generation and generation. The family is steeped in racing. I was born in a yard.”

Ward hopes his ancestors are looking down with approval. They should be. What Ward is doing in the Manor House Stables isn’t too far short of miracle work.

In the most famous yard in the town, home to the last northern trained Derby winner in Dante, the 43-year-old is beginning to recreate those glory days in the 1940s.

Don’t look too deeply at the numbers – although they are impressive enough. A strike rate of more than 60 per cent and a 13 winner campaign last year with not too many more than a baker’s dozen to work with.

Look at Sweetnessandlight, bought for only £800 and who, following a 40lb rise in the handicap, will go to Royal Ascot in search of glory in the summer.

Eastward Ho went up two-and-a-half stone in the figures in the same period, while Kuwait Star and Romanticize also made their presence known in the winner’s enclosure.

That’s a lot of progress in just 18 months since arriving in Middleham.

“I lost my father seven or eight years ago and I wish he could have seen this,” Ward reflects. “I think he holds a record. All he did in the 1950s and 1960s was run good horses in sellers and they were certainties.

“He was winning day after day and I think he went two or three weeks just winning a seller every single day.

“He was called the selling plate king.

“They are big shoes and there will be a lot of people out there who remember dad and will be saying ‘can he do it or will he fail?’ So there is a bit of pressure there.

“It’s nice when you get the likes of Peter Easterby coming over and they say ‘it’s good to see you doing well’.

“You have got to have confidence in what you do and I have always had that.”

The Windsor Forest Stakes, over a mile, is on the itinerary for Sweetnessandlight at Royal Ascot. A winner of five races last season, the yard’s star attraction carries Ward’s hopes and dreams of Pattern race glory.

He isn’t just going down for the ride, or a “day out with the family”. He’ll expect his four-year-old to be in the frame.

“It is like winning the Lottery having a filly like her. It’s so good for us. She has brought me so much more business, just because of what she has achieved.

“I spent all last spring trying to find an owner for her and, at one point, I was practically giving her away on a free lease and I still couldn’t find an owner.

“She’s the only one we kept and it was so exciting. It was my first full season and we went down to Sandown and were placed in a Group race.

“We were offered a lot of money for her in the winter to go to the States because she is a fast ground filly and they do well out there.

“Don’t get me wrong, I could do with six figures sat in the bank account, but the Windsor Forest is on the itinerary.

“The top hat is booked. She will definitely go. It’s very exciting and it would be great to go down there and mix it but I want to go there and be in the three.

“I’m not going there to be mid-division, have a day out and take the family.

“This is what it is all about. I am not 25 any more. I’m 43 and I have been doing this for a long time and I have got plans and targets.

“I might not tell everyone what they are but I have got them in my head and I know where I want to be going and taking this business.”