Sigh of relief as Squires comes back from the dead

Point-of-Pointing can breathe a sigh of relief after one of its greatest behind-the-scenes heroes emerged from a major health scare.

Jim Squires, a leading figure in the West Mercian Area and well-known to stables across the country for his superb work at several courses, had to undergo an emergency heart operation in July some 36 hours after a routine heart op had gone ahead smoothly. “I was nearly dead,” he admits, but says he is now 75 per cent back to full recovery and will be on duty in his role as clerk of the course when Chaddesley Corbett kicks off the Mercian region’s 2025/26 fixtures on Sunday, December 7. He also plans heading to the season’s opener at Machen in South Wales on November 9.

Squires, who lives in Worcestershire, says: “I was rough this time last year, but thought it was a chest infection. It turned out to be a heart problem.”

Postponing surgery until the point-to-point season had finished, he duly went into hospital, was knocked out at 9am in the morning and came round eight hours later after a triple bypass and with a mechanical valve fitted to his heart. The following morning he was well enough to sit in a chair, but because there were no spare ward beds he was kept in the intensive care unit (ICU) for another night. That may have saved his life, for in the early hours things went badly wrong.

He says: “They hooked me up to a pacing box, which is a back-up system in case something was to go wrong with my heart. However, the pacing box developed a fault, and when it packed up it stopped my heart.

“Another lad in the unit who was in for surgery said I provided great night-time entertainment. A team went into action and there was a male nurse sitting on my chest pumping away. They shocked my heart three times and then opened me up again. Yet when I came round on Sunday morning I had no idea anything had happened.”

Squires is not one for sitting around, however, and he has been travelling the country attending seminars involving point-to-pointing and giving tutorials on the role of a clerk of the course. He was in Cheltenham two weeks ago, Newcastle last week, Taunton on Tuesday and Newmarket in three weeks’ time.

He says: “I’m not fully fit and sometimes need a little sit down in the middle of the afternoon, but I’ve been cutting a bit of birch and building a few schooling fences to keep my hand in. I’ve bought myself a cyclist’s heart monitor to keep my eye on that and I’ve just got to be a bit careful, but people have been great in rallying around.”

Squires has made one concession to his situation, and after 13 years has handed on the role of area chairman to another legend of the sport in the west of England, Dave Mansell, who rode 180 point-to-point winners before hanging up his saddle in 2020.