He started training with just one
horse, a venerable maiden point-to-pointer, but gradually built up
his business over the next few years. In 1991, he moved to Hatherden
Stables, near Andover, Hampshire and took out his first public
training licence in 1991. Seamus saddled his first official winner as
a trainer, The Mrs – a mare formerly trained by his uncle, the late
Paddy Mullins – in a novices’ hurdle at Nottingham in November,
1992.
However, in the early days, Seamus
found winners hard to come by. In 1995, he moved to Wilsford Stables
– part of the Lake Estate, owned by the Bailey family – in
Amesbury, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, but it wasn’t until the
1997/98 National Hunt season that he reached double figures. In fact,
that season he saddled 17 winners and earned just under £89,000 in
total prize money.
It’s fair to say that Seamus hasn’t
made too many headlines over the years, but he has trained or two
“Saturday” horses, as Paul Nicholls likes to call them. In 2004,
he saddled Kentford Grebe to win the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle Final
at Newbury and See You Sometime to win the Noel Novices’ Chase at
Windsor. Two years later, See You Sometime also won the Cotswold
Chase at Wincanton and the United Gold Cup Handicap Chase at Ascot
and, two years after that, Strawberry won the Mares Only Novices’
Chase Final at Newbury.
More recently, his best horse has been
Chesterfield, a Pivotal gelding he “inherited” from John
Ferguson, when the latter handed in his training licence to become
chief executive and racing manager to Godolphin. In April, 2017,
Chesterfield won the valuable Pinsent Masons Handicap Hurdle on Grand
National Day at Aintree and completed a notable double for
conditional jockey Daniel Sansom when following up in the QTS
Champion Hurdle at Ayr two weeks later. In fact, Seamus is already
enjoying his most successful season ever, numerically, in 2017/18,
having saddled 28 winners and earned over £200,000 in total prize
money for the second year running.