Only two men have trained more Irish Derby winners than the four sent out by Prendergast's legendary grandfather "Darkie", Vincent O'Brien with six and Aidan O'Brien, who is going for his 10th – and eighth in a row – with a team headed by Ruler Of The World.
And if you were a darkie or a paddy, or any kind of Johnny Foreigner, you could be sure that law would give you even shorter shrift.
In 1997, the state dropped "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny", harking back to Confederate times, because of the lyrics' reference to "massa" and "darkie".
Typically, these shows featured a lineup of a dozen or so men performing comic songs and skits based on "darkie" stereotypes, above all the image of black people as happy-go-lucky, lazy, feckless guys lying around and chewing on something or other.
Not every player was happy to be deprived of versatile little score-enhancers like "wog," "spic," "jew" (the verb), "lez," "goy," "honky," "cunt," "darkie," and "fuck".
Apparently not recognizing the victim of his latest auction, Malcolm Peter Brouwerr) nonchalantly orders Tom (Leopold Lowe) to be a good "darkie" and carry him to Memphis.
For instance, a senior sports commentator recently was caught on tape calling an African footballer a "darkie", and the initial reactions were miles ahead of the naive #tintingate discussion.
"I was literally sat in a toilet in a cubicle," he tells me, "and heard someone say, 'What's this darkie like then?
All that, then to come and have someone call you "a darkie".
Thus he hurtles from the Haxey Hood, a 300-man annual football match in Lincolnshire, to the ancient sport of shin-kicking in Chipping Campden, to the inimitable Gloucestershire spectacle of cheese-rolling and the unfeasibly still-popular festival of 'Darkie Day' in Padstow.
"The Tommies said, 'Darkie, let them have it.' I made the order: 'Bayonets, fix,' and then 'B company, fire.' You know what it is to go and fight somebody hand to hand?
