A virgin racegoer meeting the Lord of Warren Place would have scoffed at the idea that this cool, Gucci-wearing, rose-loving toff was a deeply competitive animal who would fill in a little square in a notebook with a crayon each time he trained a winner; and who studied the Racing Post's trainers' table to see whether the previous day's victory had moved him up a notch.
This is where Waugh would have scored with his pen.
His portrait would have described a nonchalant English figure who had failed the Eton entrance exam, used the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester as a place to drink and gamble and stumbled into racing through family connections.
A novelist could have sent Cecil one of two ways: on to the scrap heap of over-privileged and under-disciplined sons of the gentry or to unlikely glory on the racetracks of England.
Cecil's father was killed in action with the Parachute Regiment in North Africa a fortnight before his birth in Aberdeen in 1943.
His mother, Rohays, was the daughter of Major-General Sir James Burnett of Leys, 13th Baronet, owner of Crathes Castle in Aberdeenshire, where Cecil stored away in his memory many fine anecdotes to share with his guests at Warren Place.
The abiding theme, of course, was the eccentricity of the upper classes, with their military obsessions and chaotic relationships.
Although Cecil was distinctly refined in his manner and tastes, he was also the "people's trainer" in the sense that punters adored him for his high-strike rate and determination to win every race he contested, rather than "lay one out" for a future handicap.
He was classless in his dealings with his staff, who he treated as partners in a crusade to cultivate horses the way he did his amazing rose garden, which lent Warren Place the feel of a stately home or National Trust property. Through his father-in-law, the royal trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, Cecil walked a smooth path into the training profession in 1968, but his special talent for understanding horses was not inherited.
Success came quickly, with the first of his 10 trainers' titles in 1976. Twenty-five Classic winners were dispatched from Warren Place.
His best horses - the likes of Reference Point, Ardross, Oh So Sharp, Frankel - were expressions of his gift for knowing when a horse was in full bloom.
Without wishing to sound too mystical, Cecil poured the last of his energy and talent into Frankel, arguably the greatest flat racer of all time, who was turned from a borderline tearaway into a cool assassin who could bide his time in races and who destroyed all comers.
As cancer began to claim him, providence granted Cecil a horse with every attribute he loved in the thoroughbred.
He was Frankel's coach and custodian, in the last months of his life, when death seemed to hold off just long enough for him to send the magnificent creature off to stud.
Privately, people in racing said Frankel was keeping Cecil going, keeping him alive. He survived another eight months before succumbing to the disease which claimed his twin brother David in 2000.
In an age when training has been turned into a scientific or mechanical process in many yards, Cecil had nothing to declare but his genius.
