Trained to the minute. If anyone knew the meaning of the oft-used expression, it was the incomparable Bart Cummings. Ten thousand metres in the legs and so forth plus a Mackinnon Stakes tune-up of every Melbourne Cup runner, the formula always seemed to stand the test of time.

Perhaps the only thing the Cups king mastered better than the blueprint and those eyebrows is the famous wit, the one-liner delivered without hesitation which would have pressmen and observers alike in stitches.

Legend says Cummings was at Flemington one first Tuesday in November at the climax of another spring and an engrossing Bart Cup bid. Watching a small screen television for the race – Cummings was renowned as an introvert and preferred the solitude of a quiet place, often the Flemington weighing room to watch races – Cummings was told his horse had been trained to the minute.

"But it is one minute past three o'clock now," he fired back, a reference to the delayed start of Australia's great race, carved in stone for 3pm on the first Tuesday in November.

And in saying so little he often said so much. Grumbling reporters wouldn't care they had so few musings to work with from Cummings to fill column inches – a quirky one-liner always seemed to say so much.

"How many flies am I allowed to have?" Cummings deadpanned decades ago to a health inspector, who commented there were so many of them in his stables.

And at the track, take the last of Cummings' 12 Melbourne Cup winners back in 2008 when Viewed denied English grey Bauer by a pixel in one of the closest Melbourne Cup finishes of all time, perhaps only bettered when Dunaden pipped Red Cadeaux three years later.

Asked about the tear in his eye after the race, Cummings said: "Yeah, I didn't have enough on it."

Bartism. Chalk it down as another one. No jockey in the trainer's latter years combined for more success with the master than Darren Beadman.

Cummings' devout Catholicism is well known. Media, hungry for anything Bart during the spring, would attend the annual racing mass just for a few utterances from the king on his way out of church.

Beadman had found God. Upon revealing to Cummings that he had spoken to God and he wanted him to quit being a jockey to join the ministry, Cummings retorted: "I think you should seek a second opinion".

The late Roy Higgins was another whose career wasn't the same without Bart. The stable jockey partnered Cummings' first Melbourne Cup winner in Light Fingers in 1965 before repeating the dose two years later on Red Handed.

Upon telling the trainer he would have won two less Cups had it not been for him, Higgins – intent on showing Cummings how small the margin had been in both – said Bart's record wouldn't have been as great if it wasn't for his saddle heroics in the formative stages of his career.

"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have won any," Cummings snapped back.

And perhaps his most enduring saying for last. Unlike most of his others, there is not a lot of humour involved. But just as Bart has been the staple of every spring, his words are now the staple of many an aspiring trainer.

"Patience is the cheapest thing in racing and least used," he said of his softly-softly approach.