RUPERT COLLENS is a pen name for a very well-known racing character, Sir Rupert Mackeson Bart. Now well past his 80th birthday, many regard him as a racing national treasure like his deceased friends Sir Peter O’Sullevan and Lester Piggott. Aged fifteen, he was riding fast work for local point to point trainers in his native Kent in the mid-1950s. Not allowed to ride in public until aged eighteen by his parents, he rode point to point winners in the UK and Ireland, and flat race winners in Belgium and Germany. For the past forty years he has been a familiar sight on racecourses selling racing books, many written or ghosted by himself, and prints. In fact, he has traded on forty-four of the current racecourses in the UK, and numerous in Ireland and France.
