By Chris McGrath
His road to Damascus was the one to Devon and Exeter steeplechases. It was during the petrol crisis of 1973, people were sharing car journeys whenever possible, and the trainer for whom Philip Blacker was riding that day said that they would be picking up one of the owners. She turned out to be a sculptor named Margot Dent.
A few weeks ago Blacker stood up to give the eulogy at Dent's memorial service. She had lived to 103 and, though her sight had failed in the end, she had been able to continue giving Blacker lucid counsel in his second profession. “Let me tell you about the most important day of my life,” he began. “The day I met Margot Dent.”
At the time Blacker was still in his early twenties, and riding against a generation of devil-may-care hardheads. Though he had never even picked up a piece of clay, he had long been intrigued by sculpture—and here was this woman, full of evangelical zeal for her vocation, insisting that he give it a try. The following summer, Blacker went to stay with Dent and her husband and was given an initiation into the rudiments of the craft.
Dent had been a pupil of John Skeaping, who would become something of a hero for Blacker. Skeaping's own induction technique was cheerfully inclusive. “Sculpting is easy,” he would say. “Say you want to make an elephant. You just take a chunk of wood, look at it carefully, and then take away the bits that don't look like an elephant.”
Unsurprisingly, Blacker would focus on a different type of quadruped. On retirement in 1982, indeed, it turned out that he found himself ploughing a field left fairly fallow since John Hislop had persuaded Skeaping to make the bronze of Brigadier Gerard in the Rowley Mile pre-parade ring at Newmarket.
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