Veteran trainer dies in hospital after suffering fractured skull in freak accident

Bill Turner, one of Britain’s most popular trainers whose time in racing stretched across six decades, has died as the result of a head injury suffered in a freak accident on Monday.

Turner, who turned 78 on Sunday, sustained a major skull fracture when he was knocked over by a horse at his stable in Sigwells, Somerset.

The former jump jockey, who never regained consciousness, was renowned for his skill training two-year-olds, winning Doncaster’s Brocklesby Condition Stakes, traditionally the first juvenile race of the season, on no fewer than six occasions.

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Turner had declared Red Snapper to run in the Richard And Louise Fox Wedding Anniversary Nursery Handicap at Chepstow today.

Speaking before racing at the Monmouthshire track, his daughter Kathy told Sky Sports Racing: “Dad passed away about an hour and a half ago. We had the phone call on the way up in the lorry.

“I’d already made the decision a couple of days ago that the horse was to run in dad’s name, in his honour.

“Whatever happened, he would have wanted that and he slipped away this morning.

“The love that that man had – he wasn’t just my dad and my sister’s dad, and Ryan’s grandfather, he was everyone’s dad.

“The people that he helped all through his years, they look at him as a dad.

“The messages and the support from everyone has just been absolutely outstanding.”

Despite his advancing years, Turner was famed for his indefatigable work ethic and was preparing a non-thoroughbred horse for the sales at the time of the accident.

“He would have preferred to have been going flat-out up the gallops but unfortunately just a freak accident,” added Kathy.

“I still can’t get round that this injury has done this to him because I pulled him out from underneath horses on the gallops.

“It was only last Sunday he was up on my sister’s salon roof, re-felting it!

“That was him - you would have never changed him.”

Turner’s last success in the Brocklesby came in 2013 with Mick’s Yer Man, ridden by his grandson – then a 7lb claiming apprentice – Ryan While, who said: “There is never going to be another gentleman like him – a gentleman in everybody’s hearts.

“He’s done everything for us and everybody else and I just hope we can make him proud in some way.”