Milton's millions mourn his passing IN due course, I shall be revealing one of the better-kept secrets of the horsey life, but bear with me. First of all, you must wade through a whole load of gush about a lovely big white horsey. It happens every now and then and probably more often than we deserve: we get a horse that is very very good and very, very white.

Grey, we are supposed to call it in horsespeak: which is like describing gold as yellow or Desert Orchid as nice. In particular, I want to celebrate a grey, grey horse called Milton, the showjumper whose picture was stuck on to the walls of a million girly bedrooms. More handsome than anything that merely sings and pouts. Milton jumped. Or, if you prefer, flew. He died this week, aged 22, of heart failure after an attack of colic, at the yard of John Whitaker, his partner in his greatest exploits. He was a fabulous horse all right - and I choose my words with care, because he was the sort of horse around which horsey myths and fables are concocted.

Showjumping was once one of the core sports of the British sporting curriculum and its champions were made BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Then came the prefixes and immediate public disenchantment. This was a horse known variously as Everest Milton, Next Milton and Henderson Milton, but if ever a horse was able to rise above such things, it was Milton. He rose above all the trashy things of the earth, it seemed, and cleared them without touching a pole.

These grey horses fill a need. Desert Orchid did so more than any horse since television made sport accessible to all: the one horse that we could all recognise, there at the front, gleaming and leaping.One Man followed, just as spectacular, just as recognisable, but not, alas, with us long enough to rival Dessie.

Silver Patriarch, second in the Derby two years ago, has a huge following, for all that he has never quite made the transition from excellence to greatness. There was a horse that ran in Hong Kong in the late Seventies and early Eighties, called Silver Lining. He won absolutely everything, looked like a punter's fantasy come to life and everywhere his hoof touched the earth, Hong Kong dollars sprouted and bloomed and tumbled ripe into happy punter's hands.

Milton was of this company: a grey both brilliant and dearly beloved. There is a horsey theory that claims that greys are always very very good or very very bad - and whichever old wife told that one, she was at least half right.

Milton's personal roll of honour is far too long to be repeated here. Highlights include the fact that he won more than £1 million, two World Cups and a European championship. He did not go to the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, when he was at his peak. There was a lot of rumour and controversy about that one, which I shall not bother about now because it is an unworthy subject when we are here to celebrate a special beast.

Milton was brought through the lower ranks by Caroline Bradley, who died at 37 after suffering a heart attack in the course of a competition. After this terrible event, her parents, Doreen and Tom, sent the horse to Whitaker, who took him from the intermediate stages to the various peaks of his Himalayan career.

I met both Milton and Whitaker at the Yorkshire hillside wind-trap that Whitaker finds cosy, and there I learnt many things. Whitaker comes across on television as the cliché dour Yorkshireman - hard, uncompromising, possessed of very few words and still less inclination to use them.

It seemed to be a ludicrous paradox - grim, unsmiling old Whitaker riding the world's most flamboyant horse - but the fact is that they had perfect complementary personalities. Simply, it was a partnership that worked. Mainly, it worked because Milton was the best. And so is Whitaker. And being the best does not in fact mean hard and uncompromising. Au contraire. Whitaker let me into one his own secrets: forgiveness.

"You lose more than you win and you mustn't show the horse you're upset," he said. "You often see it, riders getting upset with their horse when it has had a fence down. Makes it worse. The horse doesn't know what he's done wrong." It was this generosity, combined with his quite extraordinary precision, that was Whitaker's contribution to the partnership. The rest - and, of course, the dominant part - was the horse's own athleticism and what showjumping people called "carefulness", his reluctance even to touch a pole.

It was Whitaker's naturally self-effacing qualities that allowed the horse to be so much himself and to outshine the rider in terms of charisma one hundred million times. Whitaker was content for the horse to be the star. Any genuine horseman revels in the sense of privilege in riding a very special horse.

And as Milton passed, or rather swaggered and curvetted, from prize to prize, from achievement to achievement, from peak to peak, so he left a trail of love in his wake. He excited a gushing, quite unrestrained love, especially in that part of the horsey British public that never sets a hand on a horse. For each of Milton's fans, Milton was theirs. They had the joys of ownership, of total partisanship, of awed privilege in being allowed to share in his triumphs.

It was said that Milton always rose to the crowds and basked in their admiration, which is a little too anthropomorphic to ring quite true, but certainly, like every great competition horse, Milton responded to the extraordinary demands and atmosphere of tension and excitement that is part of all public competition in any form of sport.

He was one of those horses with a million owners, one of those horses able to inform the unhorsey of what it is like to be involved with a horse. And they put Extra Strong Mints in parcels and wrote birthday cards, all the things that happen when a horse seizes the public imagination. The fact is that most people in horse ownership own one, or at most two, or maybe a share.

And here comes the secret. And it is the ultimate secret of the horsey life. Every single horse is Milton. Every owner feels that partisanship, that privilege. About every horse, there is a little bit of Pegasus. And we who know the individual know all his flaws and his failings and all the good bits as well. And it is not an idealisation or a fantasy, but a day-to-day reality, a responsibility, an encumbrance, a disappointment, an elation, a vehicle for dreams, a companion in daily life, a co-conspirator in the world of flight. A partner.

Every horse is Milton; every horse can be hell at times - and every horse is also Paradise Regained.

As published in the London Times, July 10, 1999 sent in by a HorseQuest.com member.