"During my racing days, I broke twenty-one bones.... As a jockey, I broke one collarbone five times and the other one six. Now it's an even dozen. I broke my nose five times. The twenty-one broken bones don't include ribs. You don't count broken ribs, and you don't say anything to the doctor about them; you just carry on. If you let people know you'd broken them, you'd miss some races. The pain stops when you get warmed up."
1 Dick Francis was born on October 31, 1920 on the farm of his maternal grandfather, Willie Thomas, at Coedcanlas in Pembrokeshire, Wales. His paternal grandfather, Willie Francis, had been a great amateur steeplechase rider, and his father, was a professional rider and stable manager. "The fields of Coedcanlas, my grandfather's farm, sloped down to the Cleddeau estuary, and rose and fell over the surrounding hills, so that we had a large and exciting terrain for our explorations, and could get comfortably beyond the range of even the loudest grown-up voice calling us in at bedtime.
"We loved the farm. It was our mother's home, and I was born there.
"The farmhouse was large, creeper-grown, and white-washed, with solid buttressy walls six feet thick.
This is a free page. This page contains 191 words. This
biography contains 6,094 words (approx. 20 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Dick Francis Access Pass.
