As you’d expect from someone who has done a fair amount of after-dinner speaking, Richard Phillips can tell a good story.

He’s entertaining and also a very good mimic, so if he hadn’t made a career in horseracing he would certainly have had no trouble keeping a roof over his head.

As it is, 300-plus winners, including one at the Cheltenham Festival, have enabled the now 58-year-old to enjoy a long and very enjoyable career as a National Hunt trainer.

The last 20 or so of those years have been based at Adlestrop, just a long gallop from Stow-on-the-Wold in the heart of the Cotswolds, a place which he feels privileged to call home.

And he’s certainly happy because Phillips is as passionate about horseracing today as he was when he first fell in love with the sport more than 50 years ago.

“I look at it as my vocation,” he said. “I’ve never had a real job, I like it so much I don’t feel the need to go on holidays.

“I’m very lucky, I’m obsessed by horseracing, it has always floated my boat.”

That obsession began as a six-year-old when he first came across Epsom Racecourse, the famous course just a couple of miles from the village where he grew up.

He admits that horseracing was pretty much all he thought about while he was at school and while his teachers may not always have approved, there was the odd academic benefit.

“My English teacher said I was good at creative writing,” he said. “It was the only ‘A’ that I got,” adding with a laugh, “they said I was very imaginative but everything I wrote involved horses… I could have been another Dick Francis!”

As it was, even though he enjoyed writing about horses, it was always his ambition to work with them and he got his first big break when he landed a job with Classic-winning trainer Henry Candy, based near Lambourn, some three decades or more ago.

“I was with him for eight years and I was very lucky,” said Phillips. “He was a great mentor, he led by example.

“He was a very fair man, well respected and an excellent horseman. By observing great horsemen you learn how to deal with horses.

“I started at the bottom and I worked my way up to assistant. That was a great way to do it, I learned everybody’s job.

“I was able to understand all aspects of training horses.”

And that all-round knowledge certainly stood Phillips in good stead when he decided to branch out on his own, a decision he took following the death of his father who died at a relatively young age.

“My dad was a civil servant,” Phillips explained. “He was a very clever man but after the war it was probably a job he did because he thought he should.

“He should have been a sheep farmer or a vet, he loved the countryside.

“When he died that gave me the incentive to do what I wanted to do.

“I didn’t have any money but I had a lot of intent and a belief that if you want to do something enough you can make it happen.”

And make it happen he certainly did because after starting out in Lambourn at stables, owned by seven-times champion jockey John Francome – Clive Cox trains there today – he got a call from his friend Colin Smith who offered him the chance to head 40 miles north to Ford, just outside Stow-on-the-Wold.

“He owned Jackdaws Castle and he asked me if I wanted to train there,” Phillips explained.

“I knew I was only going to be there for a year or so because Colin was trying to sell it, but for me it was like a football manager leaving Scunthorpe United for Manchester United, no disrespect to Scunthorpe.

“Better players mean better results and it’s the same with horses, better horses mean more winners.”

Phillips was indeed based there for only one year – Jackdaws Castle is now home to racing legend Jonjo O’Neill after it was sold to JP McManus – but Phillips has absolutely no regrets.

"Some people felt sorry for me but they needn’t have,” said Phillips. “Looking back on it I was very lucky, I got to train better horses.”

And one of those horses – La Landiere – gave Phillips the best win of his career when she stormed home to win the Cathcart Chase at the 2003 Cheltenham Festival.

“As someone who missed a week of school every year with a mystery bug when the Festival was on, that has to be the highlight,” he said. “I used to watch the Festival on TV and the ambition is always to train another winner there.”

By 2003, Phillips had moved 11 miles east across the Cotswolds to his current home in Adlestrop and it’s a move that has served him very well.

"I needed to find somewhere else and it was a great opportunity,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of work developing the stables, we’ve got some great gallops and we’re surrounded by beautiful countryside.

”I’m very lucky because I’ve got some incredibly loyal owners and good people around me who have been with me for decades.”

Phillips has some 30 horses in his yard and he’s happy with that number.

“There’s room for a few more – we could probably have 50 – but it’s like a headmaster at school, he could have more pupils but then they wouldn’t get as much attention.”

Phillips’ best season was in 2002/03 when he recorded 32 winners and like all trainers he enjoys that incredible buzz of winning.

“I’d like as many winners as possible,” he said. “But it’s also important that the horses run well, I think we get the most out of the horses we’ve got.

“I judge it on us doing our best at all times, we want to keep the horses healthy, happy and fit.

“Training a racehorse is a state of mind, you’ve got to have the confidence that you are doing the right thing.

“Eventually, if you are doing the right thing and picking the right races, success will come.”

Doing the right thing is clearly important to Phillips, and as far as racing is concerned he wants to do the right thing by showing off all that is good about the sport.

That’s why he launched National Racehorse Week last year when trainers all over the country were encouraged to open their stables to the public for a day.

It will be held again this September and Phillips said: “I think racing as a sport needs to get on the front foot and give people the opportunity to see what we do, to show people all the great things horses do for us and what we do for racehorses.”

So why did he come up with the idea of National Racehorse Week?

“I was concerned that some people looked at horseracing as cruel to animals,” he explained.

“It was when Taylor Swift decided not to perform at the Melbourne Cup after some of her Twitter followers criticised her that I thought something had to be done.

“People who criticise racing think they know about racing but they don’t, I thought we should get out there and show just how caring an industry we are.

“National Racehorse Week is a week of celebrating the racehorse, a chance for people to see that they are incredibly sensitive, loving creatures.

“The horses are well looked after, composed and happy. The people who work with horses dedicate their lives to them.”

Some 120 trainers threw their doors open to the public last year. Phillips was obviously one of them and he will do the same again this year on the second Sunday in September.

That will be a special day, of course, and it will certainly keep Phillips busy, not that he has too much spare time.

When he spoke to The Local Answer he was on the way back from a trip to York Racecourse, a round trip of close on 350 miles.

“I’d been invited up there to walk the course,” he said. “The great thing about horseracing is that there are so many different aspects to it, you never stop learning.

“Many years ago the racecourse was a lake, it’s virtually on a floodplain. It’s incredible how much work has gone in to making it one of the best racecourses in the world.”

That thirst for knowledge about all things racing is one of the things driving Phillips on – he’s also a supporter of Racing Welfare and the Injured Jockeys Fund – and ensures there are very few empty days in his diary.

When he does have a day off he likes to play a round of golf. He plays off 18, which is pretty decent, but it’s probably fair to say that he is a better mimic than he is golfer.

That’s something that he has been doing from a young age, back in the days when impressionist Mike Yarwood was almost obligatory Saturday night family viewing at a time when there were only three TV channels.

For younger readers, Yarwood was a trailblazer for the likes of comedian Rory Bremner, and even for the young Phillips who surely would have been a contender for Britain’s Got Talent had it been around back then!

“I’ve always mimicked people,” Phillips said. “Harold Wilson is Irish racing commentator Michael O’Hehir slowed down.

“With Ted Heath it was all about the shoulders. My favourite politician was Denis Healey.

“My father worked with him at the Ministry of Defence. He was intelligent and had a sense of humour – he never said ‘silly billy!’

“I found Jim Callaghan difficult to mimic when he became Prime Minister – he didn’t have an accent – but then I saw Mike Yarwood impersonating him so I mimicked Mike Yarwood doing him.”

Say to Phillips that’s he’s pretty talented and he hits back immediately: “Not if I’ve got a flat tyre on the M3, absolutely useless!”

He’s probably being a bit harsh on himself there but his tyres are obviously going to need checking regularly over the coming weeks, months and years because he has no intention of giving up horseracing any time soon.

“Trainers never retire because their bank managers won’t let them,” he laughed, adding, “it’s a long road and we’ve done pretty well to survive.

“I think with training, as you get older, you get wiser. What you lose in youth you gain in wisdom, you’ve seen most of it before.

“I’ve never enjoyed it more than now. You do the best job you can do and that is very satisfying.

“You don’t do it for the money, we get rewarded in other ways.”

He insists “I’ll never retire” although in years to come he may slow down just a bit.

“We go to all these beautiful racecourses such as Newton Abbot or up to north Yorkshire,” he said, “but we never stay, we come home straight away.

“What would be nice is if we could go to these courses, saddle a winner or two, and then stay and enjoy some of these beautiful parts of Britain for a couple of days.”

And if he does, and he surely will, it will be richly deserved.