In racing, some names are shouted from the rooftops — trainers, jockeys, big owners, the front-page faces. But sometimes it’s the quieter ones in the background who shape the game in ways that last much longer than any trophy.

Dick Whitford was one of those men.

He didn’t train champions or shout tips from the parade ring. He worked with a pencil, a notebook, and a head full of figures. But his work changed the way people looked at horse racing — not just in a betting shop, but across the whole sport.

Before computers, before data analysis became fashionable, Whitford was doing the hard yards — weighing up form, comparing performances, and finding a way to measure a horse’s true ability. He was one of the first to believe you could boil all that down to a number — a single rating that told you how good a horse really was.

And, remarkably, he was right.


—

He first developed his ratings while serving at sea during the war. Most people used their downtime to smoke or sleep — Whitford studied form books and scribbled calculations. He created what he called a “universal handicap” — a rating scale that could compare horses of different ages, distances, and classes, all on one simple scale.

He sent his early figures to newspapers, and they started turning heads. Then came the meeting that would shape racing history: Phil Bull, another racing obsessive and the man behind Timeform, saw what Whitford was doing and brought him in. Together, they created the first proper Timeform ratings — Bull had the stopwatch, Whitford had the formbook. It was a perfect pairing.

But it didn’t last. Whitford left Timeform not long after it started — for reasons that probably had more to do with money and recognition than anything else. Bull became the public face, but many insiders still say Whitford’s method was the real backbone of the system.


—

After Timeform, Whitford went his own way. He became a private handicapper for a big punter called Jack Gerber, and the results spoke for themselves — they landed some serious races using Whitford’s ratings as a guide. Eventually, he ended up back in the public eye — as the main Flat-race handicapper for The Sporting Life newspaper.

For a good stretch through the 1970s and early 80s, his figures were printed in the paper every day. Regular punters swore by them. His style was unusual — the best horse in each race had the lowest number, often just a ‘0’. Everyone else was shown in pounds inferior to that top rating. It took a bit of getting used to, but once you understood it, it made perfect sense.

Sometimes he published two sets of figures — one for recent form, one for last season’s best. That caused a bit of confusion at times (even Whitford admitted it himself), but it showed how seriously he took the question of whether a horse was really in form or just living on reputation.

And it worked. In 1970, it was said that Whitford’s top-rated horses made a level-stakes profit across thousands of races — a feat almost unheard of, then or now.


—

In the years that followed, racing moved on — computer ratings, official marks, the rise of Racing Post Ratings and all the rest. But the core idea behind all of them — that you could rate a horse’s ability in pounds, compare it to the others, and make a sound judgement — goes back to Whitford.

He didn’t chase the spotlight. He didn’t play the pundit. But his work shaped the way we all read a racecard today. Every time you glance at a number next to a horse’s name and try to work out what it’s worth — that’s Whitford’s legacy.

He passed away in 2004, aged 92. There weren’t big headlines or grand tributes. But in betting shops, in form books, in the back pages of racing papers — his fingerprints are still there.

A quiet genius, who let the numbers do the talking.