By his own admission Mike Edwards wasn’t very good at school.

In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement because he left the education system at the age of 15 without a qualification to his name.

“I couldn’t wait to get out,” he said, “they were the worst days of my life. I didn’t do any sport, I didn’t work hard.”

But while school was clearly a bit of a non-starter for the now 72-year-old, it’s fair to say he has been a front-runner in life for the best part of six decades now, working in the racing industry for a good number of years, travelling the world to watch some of the top sporting events through his job as a sports travel agent and working tirelessly on the administrative side to support rugby and cricket in Gloucestershire.

National Hunt racing was always his first passion.

He has worked for some top county trainers, has owned horses as part of a family syndicate – he still does – and, wait for it… he is also the racing tipster for The Local Answer! And as you’d expect from someone who has been involved in the sport for so long he’s a rather good tipster too!

“Cheltenham Racecourse shaped my life and it still influences me today because I live in Guiting Power which is right at the heart of National Hunt racing,” he said.

“In the 1950s I was just a scruffy kid who lived in Cleeveland Street by the gasworks but it was only a short walk to the racecourse.

“In those days you could walk onto the middle of the course and you could stand by any of the fences, I had a connection with racing.”

Since those early days he has barely missed a meeting at the home of National Hunt racing, going to the Festival meeting in March 50 times in a row.

“It was over 52 years because one of the meetings was cancelled due to foot and mouth and another because of snow,” he said.

But while racing has always been his passion, there is much, much more to Mike Edwards, who worked for one-time Gloucester and England prop Mike Burton in the sports travel business for many years, a job that really was as good as it sounds.

If there was a major event taking place in this country or almost any part of the globe in cricket, rugby, football or even boxing – his dad Doug used to box at Cheltenham Town Hall and his son is a big fan of the noble art – there is every chance that Mike Edwards was there and he rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest sporting names that this country has ever produced.

As Edwards says: “It’s not bad for someone who left school at 15.”

Cheltenham-born Edwards’ involvement in sport – and more specifically racing – started at the age of 14 when he used to muck out for trainer Geoff Turk.

“I’d ride my bike from Hester’s Way to Whittington Manor where he was based,” Edwards said. “He was a well known motor trader in Cambray but he also had a licence to train horses.

“I’d go up there at weekends, he didn’t pay me but I just wanted to be with horses.”

Edwards left school soon after and quickly found that once on his own in the outside world he had many of the tools needed to thrive.

“When I left school I took advantage of everything I could,” he said. “I worked hard, I read everything I could, it was amazing. When it was down to me I had no problem working.”

His first job was as a commis chef on the Cheltenham Spa Express.

“It was a business train that left Cheltenham for Paddington at 7am in the morning and returned at 6pm,” Edwards explained. “They were all businessmen and in the morning they’d all have a full breakfast and on the way back they’d have a proper dinner.

“It was really old fashioned but it was my dream job. I was a trainspotter and when I got to London I’d go to Old Oak Common which was a railway shed right next door to Wormwood Scrubs.

“It was full of old engines and for a trainspotter like me it was paradise.

“There were plenty of trainspotters in Cheltenham in those days. We didn’t have TVs and every night there’d be about 100 kids on Lansdown Bridge watching the trains.”

So why did Edwards give up his dream job?

“The Beeching axe fell,” he said. “They took away the food service. They went from Victorian opulence to selling buffet food from a trolley!”

Edwards, however, was soon back on track as he found work as a trainee chef at Cavendish House.

“That was a really old fashioned restaurant,” he recalled. “We used to knock out 250 a la carte meals every lunchtime. We had 50-odd waiters and waitresses dressed in black waistcoats and I remember the head chef was Albert Tatum.

“He used to shout out the orders, it was terrific. It was so old fashioned, it was unbelievable.”

From there the young Edwards moved to the Savoy Hotel but the unsocial hours – late nights and early mornings – weren’t great for a young man still finding his way in the world.

“I was a young lad,” said Edwards. “Mr Walliman, the hotel owner, wanted me to go to Switzerland and learn to be a chef but I didn’t want that.”

So he returned to what he knew best and loved most – racing – and landed a job as a stable lad with trainer Chris Taylor.

“My dad wasn’t overly impressed but he went with it,” admitted Edwards. “And in the end he used to go racing, before that he used to be a big Robins fan.”

Taylor was based at Old Farm in Stoke Road, Bishop’s Cleeve – “The house is still there but there are houses where the paddocks used to be,” said Edwards – and he was a decent trainer.

“I worked for him for 15 years and I ended up as head lad,” said Edwards.

“He was very good. When I first started he was just a young man but he trained Wood Spirit who won the Grand Annual at Cheltenham two years in a row. He trained on the Flat as well.”

Edwards was later doing a bit of work for Bill Denson, who trained at Woodmancote, and Colonel Jack Gibson, who trained at Ham.

“Colonel Gibson was the first trainer to have an equine swimming pool,” said Edwards. “It’s still there today and I had the greatest privilege of looking after the great Persian War who at the end of his career was there for swimming therapy.”

After working for Irish horse dealer Tim Horgan, who had taken on the Stoke Road yard from Chris Taylor, for a short period Edwards linked up with Taylor’s former assistant Rupert Ward at Minchinhampton.

“I was head lad but while I was there I was offered the job of travelling head lad with Peter Walwyn in Lambourn,” said Edwards. “I was also offered a senior role by John Edwards who was based at Ross-on-Wye but I turned them down because I was too much of a home bird.”

Edwards doesn’t give the impression of being a man with too many regrets but he does regret turning down Peter Walwyn.

“I was a fool,” he admitted. “If I’d have gone I’d probably still be at Lambourn now. Within a few months of me turning him down he’d trained Grundy to win The Derby!”

And Edwards had another issue around this time as well.

“I was getting too big to ride out,” he said. “I’d always been quite tall but I was always skinny. Then I started playing rugby for Gloucester Old Boys and I enjoyed the social side. But that was no good because I was putting weight on and I wasn’t an enthusiastic trainer!”

So Edwards got a job as a van driver for Moog – “It was a good job,” he said – but it wasn’t long before, in his words, “the horses called me back”.

By now he had married Julia and they were proud parents of one child with another on the way.

“We were living in Hester’s Way and I remember looking out of the window and thinking, ‘I want to bring up my kids in the country’,” he said.

So he took a job running a small stud in Barton, just outside Guiting Power, for Rosie Hambro, a job he did for two or three years before he gave it up “rather impulsively”.

“I’d got no home because we were living in a tied cottage, no job and by now we’d now got three kids,” admitted Edwards, before adding, “but the Lord always smiled on me.

“The Guiting Manor Trust offered me a house and we’ve been in the village for 35 years now.”

With the house sorted Edwards now just needed a job and once again the gods were kind to him.

“I was walking in Pittville Park in Cheltenham when I bumped into Dave Courtney of 3D Cricket,” explained Edwards. “It was a Friday and he told me to go and see him on the Monday and I started working for him on the Tuesday!”

Edwards’ job was to organise cricket tours – “He had a huge database,” Edwards added – but it wasn’t so much the work but who he worked with that made this period of his life so special.

“Tom Graveney,” said Edwards. “As a boy he was one of my great cricket heroes and I shared an office with him for five years. Every day he had a story and I used to prime him. He could remember every ball that was ever bowled at him and the first half-hour of every working day was always spent listening to Tom, he was a great bloke.”

By now Edwards had been lucky enough to meet another sporting great from the county, Mike Burton, and when the former British Lion decided to set up his own sports travel business it wasn’t long before he was giving Edwards a call and asking him to come and work for him.

“That was fantastic,” said Edwards, “I travelled around the world. I did all the England cricket tours – South Africa, the West Indies, Australia. We always had a celebrity to lead the tour and we always used Tom Graveney.

“I went to five Rugby World Cups, four Lions tours, a Football World Cup and did all the big fights between the British and American boxers. We went to Las Vegas lots of times and I remember the one time there was so much snow over there that we had to get off the plane before we were due to depart.

“They found us another plane a few hours later and it was Concorde. It took us nine hours to get to Vegas and three and a bit hours to get back!”

Edwards loved his boxing – he’d grown up with it through his dad – and ask him to name the greatest sporting occasion he has been to and he’ll say the first world title fight between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield.

“It was at Madison Square Garden,” said Edwards, “that’s what made it so special, a heavyweight world championship fight there. The fight was a draw but it never should have been. Lewis should have won.”

Edwards was staying at the famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and the first person he bumped into when he walked in was David ‘Syd’ Lawrence, the one-time Gloucestershire and England fast bowler who was also there to see the fight.

Edwards also has fond memories of the 1993 Lions tour to New Zealand where he worked alongside the great Wales fly-half Barry John.

“I shared a room with him for two weeks but I think I only saw him once,” laughed Edwards, “he liked a night out.”

Five years later Edwards was in France for football’s World Cup and he said: “I was sitting at a table in a restaurant and I looked across and sitting at the table next to me were Arsene Wenger and Johan Cruyff.

“I also met Ron Atkinson when I was in Marseille. He is good mates with Ken Skeen, who is very well known in Cheltenham, and once I told him I knew Skeeny, Atkinson spent the next five hours telling me his life story!”

Edwards certainly liked working for Mike Burton.

“He was the most charismatic person you could ever wish to meet,” he said. “He could have been an actor on the stage. We were at this dinner in North Harbour, there were 1,500 people there and the guest speaker didn’t turn up.

“Mike did the speech instead and I’ve never seen anything like it. He had a naked talent for it. He was the best after-dinner speaker, he could mimic, he could talk. To work for someone like that was amazing.

“I went to all these places all over the world for 20 years and it never cost me a bean. I used to lie awake in the 60s and think about the great cricket grounds – the MCG, the SCG and the Wanderers in South Africa, I’ve been to them all, it’s unbelievable.

“I remember landing in Melbourne, walking down the street and thinking, ‘Is this really happening, what am I doing here?’”

Edwards knows he has been a lucky, lucky man but he’s one of those people who made his own luck through sheer hard work.

Mind you, he didn’t have so much luck when he played his first game of adult cricket for a team called Cheltenham Wesley.

“I was about 14 and I ran out our captain which was a disgrace,” he laughed, “although I played a few more games for them.”

So what were his strengths as a cricketer?

“I tried to be a batsman,” he said, “nobody would let me bowl, I used to bowl leggies.”

From Cheltenham Wesley Edwards joined Cheltenham Milers where he played alongside the likes of Matt McCabe, Andy Cuzner and Pete Thick.

“They were all legends,” said Edwards, “they were a wonderful bunch to play with. They were top people, wonderful fun.”

And while Edwards undoubtedly enjoyed his time with the Milers, he eventually decided to set up a new club called Cheltenham King George who, as the name would suggest, played their home games at King George V playing fields.

“Myself, Mick and Pete Williams and Dave Jackson were the founders of the team,” said Edwards. “We lasted for about 15 years and had a wonderful time. We played in all the local competitions and in one season we fielded two teams.

“We also acquired a ground at Whittington. It was a lovely ground but having your own ground made it much more difficult to maintain.”

That was the beginning of the end for the club but by now Edwards was also the groundsman at the Victoria Ground, home of Cheltenham Cricket Club, so his next move was, in many ways, an entirely logical one.

“I became captain of Cheltenham Extras,” said Edwards. “It was a brilliant period of my life. I never thought I would play at the Victoria Ground – I wasn’t good enough but I was just about good enough to play for their 3rd XI.

“It was amazing because I was captaining the likes of Ron Nicholls, David Brown, Pete Fereday, Dave Locke and Steve Hansford, it was unbelievable. They all knew a lot more about cricket than me but they never interfered. They might have had the odd word but that was it.”

Edwards played for the Extras for a good few years and still can remember his last game.

“It was against Cheltenham Civil Service,” he said. “I was fielding at slip so I didn’t have to run and the ball flew over my head for overthrows.

“I looked round and there was no one behind me so I had to run after it. The ball stopped just inside the boundary and the batsmen ended up running six.

“That was the headline to Derek Goddard’s report in the Echo the following day, ‘Civil Service run a six to Mike Edwards’ – that’s when I decided to stop playing!”

But he wasn’t lost to cricket because he immersed himself on the administrative side of the game, something he’d already been involved in.

“When I was at Cheltenham King George, Dave Creswell of Hatherley and Reddings talked me into becoming secretary of the Challenge Cup competition,” he said. “I did that for quite a few years and it taught me how to deal with clubs and general correspondence.

“I also got on the committee of the Gloucester Cricket Federation.”

Strangely, there was no Cheltenham equivalent at this time but that was something that Edwards, along with Arthur Bailey and Les Williams, put right.

“We formed the Cheltenham and District Cricket Association under Arthur Bailey’s leadership,” said Edwards. “He was the chairman, Les was the treasurer and I was secretary and we took over the running of our own affairs.”

Edwards also became chairman of the Gloucestershire Cricket Association – the forerunner of the Gloucestershire Cricket Board.

“Dave Courtney had been chairman and I was vice-chairman,” recalled Edwards, “but when he stood down I was left holding the baby.”

Edwards freely admits that it was a difficult time while he was in charge.

“Ken Booker used to run the youth cricket and we used to raise £7,500 a year,” said Edwards. “We had two grass nets at Cowley Manor but we produced three international cricketers – Syd Lawrence, Jack Russell and Steve James.

“Then the ECB took an interest in running club cricket and we were given £65,000 but then everyone wanted a slice of the money. It was very difficult and quite unpleasant.”

Edwards is a big fan of Booker. “It’s a privilege to know him,” he said. “People like him, Graham Wiltshire and Brian Worrall did so much for youth cricket.

“It’s different now because all the Gloucestershire youth teams have been taken over by the professional side of the game. They are all run by the county club but they’ve not produced an international for 35 years – we produced three.”

Interestingly for someone who has lived in this county all his life, Edwards is not a Gloucestershire cricket fan.

“My mother was from Yorkshire and I consider myself a Yorkshire fan,” he explained. “We used to go up there all the time when I was young and I’d go to Headingley a lot. I caught the end of Sir Leonard Hutton’s career and I also saw Freddie Trueman play.

“He was the greatest thing since sliced bread in those days. He was an England fast bowler and he was fiery. I also saw Ray Illingworth play, he was one of England’s best captains although the best has to be DW Jardine.”

Edwards clearly loves his cricket and he loves his rugby too even though it was something he didn’t get involved in until he was 20.

“I used to play a few kickaround games of football at King George but that was it,” said Edwards.

“Then I started watching rugby on TV and I thought, ‘This is a good game’.

“I remember talking to Colin Russell who ran a sports agency and telling him I wouldn’t mind having a go at rugby.

“That was on the Friday and half-an-hour later I got a call from Norman Partridge, who was an ex-Sherriff of Gloucester, saying that he’d heard I wanted to play a game of rugby before adding that I could play tomorrow!”

And play he did, for Gloucester Old Boys 4ths at Plock Court.

“I played second row,” continued Edwards, “I was a plodding second row all my life.

“I played for Gloucester Old Boys for 14 years. I was just a foot soldier but I got up to the 2nds although I never played for the 1st XV. I played for the enjoyment.

“The thing I always try to emphasise is that you don’t have to be good to play sport and there are all sorts of areas that you can be involved.”

A back injury forced Edwards to give up rugby in his mid-30s although he couldn’t say ‘no’ when Froggy Jones asked him to help out Cheltenham North when they were short.

“I played about four games for them, I played full-back,” he said with a laugh.

It was around this time that John Woodward, who these days is the Cheltenham Tigers’ historian, asked Edwards to take over as secretary of Cheltenham Saracens.

He played a couple of games for the Saracens but it was off the field that his influence was most felt.

“The club wanted to form a Colts team,” he said, “so I got together with my old mate Bob White, who played for Cheltenham and Gloucester, and together we formed a Cheltenham Saracens Colts team which we ran very successfully for three or four years.”

Edwards enjoyed his time with Saracens but he admits that he did have some concerns.

“I found it difficult being part of a social club,” he said. “It wasn’t just a rugby club. I felt the football was better looked after than the rugby.”

By now Woodward had moved to Cheltenham and he was soon calling his old pal to see if he would join him.

“He wanted to reform the Cheltenham Colts team that had been so successful in years gone by,” said Edwards. “I also became fixtures secretary of the club which was a position I held for 38 years.”

These days he is a life member of the club and he looks back on his involvement with the Cheltenham Colts in particular with great pride.

“When I joined it was the last season that the club were playing at the Athletic Ground,” he recalled. “The Colts were a legendary team and we beat all the top sides like Cardiff and Northampton.”

Great days, of course, and Edwards enjoyed many of them but ask him which his favourite sport is and he’ll say: “In my youth it was always racing and now in my old age it is racing.

“I’ve seen all the greats – Mill House, Arkle, Persian War and racing provided me with the greatest moment of all when I led up Lester Piggott at Haydock.

“I liked him, he used to talk to all of us. He was something else. People talk about McCoy but Lester Piggott was a bit different, he lived off a piece of toast!”

Edwards has tasted success as a horse owner over the years as well although at a very different level to that of Piggott of course.

The Edwards family syndicate have had some of their best results in point-to-point racing, winning the Kent Grand National with Kilbeggan Blade with Ally Stirling on board.

They’ve also had success with Master Jubb while Boher Lad, who is trained by Alan Phillips at Callow End near Worcester “is still going strong” says Edwards.

“He’s won a point-to-point and won three times over hurdles. He’s 12 now. We’ve also got Why Lie who is a novice hurdler.”

Edwards’ passion – and love – for horses is very apparent.

“We’ve just lost Halexy,” he said. “He died in the field from a heart attack aged 24, coming up 25. He was a Cheltenham winner although not for us, we never got him on the racecourse.

“He was a cracking horse, I looked after him day and night for 12 years.”

It’s a wonder that Edwards had the time because he has plenty of other interests.

“I’m vice-chairman of the John Buchan Society,” he said. “He wrote The 39 Steps and I’ve been involved with the society since 1980.

“I’m also chairman and founder of the Upper Windrush Local History Society. We’ve been going for eight years and I’m very proud of it, it’s one of my little babies.”

And there’s more.

“I’ve been church warden at Guiting Power for 18 years,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “I only went in to do it for three months!”