With the recent passing of Johnny ‘The Fish’ Ferrand and Graham ‘Brad’ Bradley, racing lost two of its most loved and colourful characters. I was in business with both of them – one more successfully than the other.

I remember one time when Johnny the Fish and I thought the chef of our pub, the Pheasant Inn, was in the small, grotty kitchen. But when we walked in, there was no sign of him. Then we looked behind the serving counter and saw him sitting on the floor, injecting heroin into his arm. The Fish’s eyes got bigger and more watery than normal, he puffed his cheeks out and dryly observed: ‘Well that’s a bit strong… before lunch.’

At St Michael and All Angels church in Lambourn last week, trainer Nicky Henderson regaled us with tales of the Fish.

‘You can imagine how naughty he must have been at Cheam, where the King was captain of his dorm,’ Nicky suggested. The packed church certainly could. For the last quarter of a century, they’d all fallen in love with the kindest and most irresponsible of human beings, while drinking with him.

Before we bought the Pheasant, with the aim of making it the racing pub around Lambourn, I thought he was called Johnny the Fish because he used to be a fishmonger, and he looked like a fish. But I discovered fairly quickly that it was because he drank like one.

It was a questionable acquisition. The building, if that’s what you could call it, was a complete dump and had parking for only four cars. Or three, if the chef turned up. But we were proud of our new project, so when the Hendersons invited us to lunch to shoot the breeze with the Queen Mother, we persuaded her to stop in at the Pheasant on her way back to Clarence House for a large pink gin. Then I got slightly cold feet. We were having a problem with obscene graffiti in the ladies’ loos, and I hadn’t whitewashed some pretty fruity stuff over that morning.

‘Pink gins at the ready,’ I advised Her Majesty as we poured her into her chariot. ‘One thing though… probably best to “go” here before you leave. The loos aren’t great at the Pheasant.’

Johnny was wicked company. Every trainer and jockey in the area would stop on their way home from the races and have a skinful with him. The trouble was he drank more than everyone else put together and never really cottoned on to the idea that the customers were meant to be buying him a drink, not the other way around. He was also known as ‘the Ferret’ to his oldest mates, such as Bill Wiggins, who was unfairly nicknamed ‘Bungalow Bill’ when he was Joan Collins’s romantic partner.

Two girls were brave enough to marry Johnny, and happily the first marriage produced Suzanna, who was duly packed off to Stonar, from where he always picked her up at the back door – until he finally got a treble up at Cheltenham. On his next visit, he boldly walked up to the front door, with the swagger of a man of means. ‘Mr Ferrand, you are three terms in arrears,’ the bursar, who was lying in wait, growled. With a certain flourish, the Fish thrust a rather tatty plastic bag full of bookmakers’ £50 notes towards him with a triumphant, ‘I think you’ll find I’m now three terms in credit.’

Johnny the Fish’s service is one of my happier memories of St Michael and All Angels church. So many friends from a distant past, so many boozing mates around the village – and an acceptance that there was more speed than stamina in his pedigree, which made his departure from the pubs of the Lambourn valley at the age of 76 seem like the end of a life well lived.

Brad’s departure, on the other hand, after a horrible time with dementia, felt brutal and premature. He was one of the most stylish jockeys of his generation, who famously led home the five Michael Dickinson runners on Bregawn in the 1983 Cheltenham Gold Cup, and won the 1996 Champion Hurdle on Collier Bay, after getting ‘jocked-off’ the more fancied Alderbrook because he overslept and missed a morning gallop.

He also won the 1997 Hennessy Gold Cup for me on Suny Bay, two years after I cost him another victory in the same race. Although he was my first jockey, I asked him to ride Black Humour, who jumped like a drunk, and so he missed out on winning the race on Couldn’t Be Better. But such was the bigheartedness of the man, he was genuinely delighted for our team and our second jockey, Dean Gallagher.

Sometimes he was too kind – or perhaps naive. Telling a judge in the High Court that the reason why another ex-jockey, Barry Wright, had a load of cash under his bed was because he’d passed on inside information on races to a punter, as they all had, as opposed to selling a barrowload of cocaine, was akin to throwing himself under a bus. It was certainly the end of his involvement in racing.

His service in Wetherby, a few days before Johnny’s, was extraordinary. Every jump jockey I can think of from Britain and Ireland in the 1990s had travelled to the northern town to pay tribute to a guy who had their backs when times were hard.

I hope both men got to look down on us to see how much they were loved. ‘Shouldn’t we have memorial services before we die?’ Simon McNeil, who rode Katabatic to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase, pondered before we sloped off to the pub.