Whittingham was a man who reckoned that sleep’s overrated and he was always at his barns to start work

Whittingham was a man who reckoned that “sleep’s overrated” and he was always at his barns to start work by 4am – no matter what time he had retired the night before Five hours’ sleep was regarded as a lie-in. “And I’ve never had a headache in 73 years,” he once said.For a man of humble origins – he grew up on a ranch near the border with Mexico, the son of a Yorkshire father and Irish mother – he had a glitzy array of owners in his barn. They ranged from the gold magnate Nelson Bunker-Hunt to the singer songwriter Burt Bacharach. When one of Bacharach’s horses had been running below form, the owner suggested he should be wormed.

Whittingham’s response was, “You haven’t been turning out too many hits lately, either. Maybe we ought to worm your piano while we’re at it!”Whittingham was a proud family man although he suffered a personal tragedy in 1974 when his son Taylor shot himself aged 21. His other son Michael beat Whittingham to success in the Breeders’ Cup series, winning the Classic with Skywalker in 1986. Whittingham’s daughter Charlene is married to the prominent racetrack vet Helmuth von Bluecher.Charles Whittingham, racehorse trainer: born Chula Vista, California 13 April 1913; twice married (one son, one daughter, and one son deceased); died Pasadena, California 20 April 1999..

ANDREW OSMOND was a writer of great industry who was blessed with a rich fund of original ideas He wrote millions of words in his 61 years. Many of them have been greatly enjoyed and by an army of people. At his best, his writing in the genre of the political thriller was as good as it gets. When Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton and Richard Ingrams (whom Osmond had met at Oxford) put together the first issue of Private Eye in 1961, they approached Osmond for funds. To their amazement he coughed up the then vast sum of pounds 300.

Although memories differ, it is generally agreed that Osmond thought up the name Private Eye during a meeting in Rushton’s bedroom, which doubled as the editorial office in the early days. He then helped sell the first issue, wandering through Chelsea pubs and offering it to likely looking readers for six old pence a copy.
What drew people to Osmond was his immense warmth and ceaseless generosity. There are few of us who are incapable of displaying some kind of charity, perhaps by lending something valuable or through a well-judged compliment But, in Osmond’s case, he was himself generous. It was not something he did, it was actually his nature.There are countless examples of Osmond’s generosity, such as when early on he found he had more Private Eye shares than he actually needed. His response was to give half of them away to those contributors who had none. (This included me and my wife Tessa, who worked at Private Eye at the time. By extraordinary coincidence, Tessa received a dividend from the shares Andrew Osmond had given her on the day he died.)It often happens that generosity and a fertile imagination go hand in hand – they are possibly born from the same root.

Osmond’s seemingly endless stream of ideas was to serve him well when, after a spell in the Foreign Office in Rome (he had joined the diplomatic service in 1962) where he had met Douglas Hurd, the two men decided to co-write political thrillers Their first was Send Him Victorious in 1968. The huge success of Scotch on the Rocks (1971) and The Smile on the Face of the Tiger (1969) was proof, should it be needed, that Osmond had all the skills to write professionally, and he had by then decided to go it alone.Although well crafted and full of twists, Osmond’s first solo novel, Saladin! (1975), failed to have the impact of the collaborative books. One reason may have been that he never told a story better than when it had just entered his head. He often put a novel through dozens of drafts, each losing a little of the brightness of the one before on the way.I first met Osmond at Private Eye in the late Sixties where, having by now left the Foreign Office, he had been asked by Richard Ingrams, the then editor, to think of ways to help the magazine climb out of what had become something of a financial slump. For a while he ran Private Eye’s commercial side, which largely consisted of thinking up ways of selling mugs, tea cloths and satirical cushions designed by Willie Rushton. It was a job he enjoyed, not because it needed any commercial experience but bags of his unlimited energy and enthusiasm.The net result was a thriving mail-order business. When not being the commercial director (I name him this in retrospect as no one apart from the editor has any official name at Private Eye), he would spend the day walking around the office with a cup of coffee and a French cigarette, and recounting in absorbing detail the storyline of a film or novel he had just thought up.If it was a film, Osmond would go through the whole thing, from the credits to the dialogue in final scene.