by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
To understand that paradox, and hence to understand properly the story of Lata Brandisová, we need to shift our focus for a moment and explore not her life but her world. This is an adventure from a rougher, more reckless age than ours: a time when men were men and women were their chattels, and horses were not the cherished pets they are now. Even aristocrats shrugged off daily discomforts that we would struggle to tolerate. Horses were expected to be as robust as their riders.
Yet horses were also cared for, as prized assets. Lata grew up in an age more horse-focused than any before or since, at a time when the ancient bond between the equine and human species had not yet been broken. Horses, and people who understood horses, and people whose lives revolved around horses, could be found in every corner of society. Peasants and farmers used them for work, the rich for leisure and war, and all who could for day-to-day transport. Only a minority had no contact with them at all. The rural economy was largely made up of local, horse-based micro economies. Řitka, with its stables, stable staff, farm and farm horses and its network of local suppliers, was just one small example. In Pardubice, ninety miles to the east, the phenomenon was replicated on a far grander scale.
The people involved may sometimes have exposed the horses in their care to great danger, but they were not indifferent. Rather, with few exceptions, they would normally do their very best to keep them out of harm’s way, just as today we try not to damage the cars we drive.
Decent people felt affection for their horses, too, but that didn’t mean that they never took risks with them – especially the fast ones. And ideas of acceptable risk, for both horse and rider, were very different from ours. In Lata’s world, the crazy horseman who risked a broken neck for the sake of a moment’s glory was admired for his pluck, not censured for his folly. The fact that that neck might sometimes belong to the horse rather than the rider was barely considered as a concern in its own right. Ideally, no necks would be broken at all; and if you did end up losing your co-participant, well, it was like losing a comrade in battle. You dealt with it and moved on.
It is important to understand this, because this is a story in which many necks were broken.
The seeds of Lata’s story were sown long before her birth, in the early nineteenth century, among the upper echelons of Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. Decades of disastrous war had just ended on the killing fields of Waterloo, in 1815. In the aftermath, two empires dominated Europe. The British, the new superpower, claimed credit for vanquishing Napoleon; the Habsburg lands – or at least their ruling classes – rejoiced at being liberated from his yoke. Both welcomed a new age of (relative) peace and prosperity. Both saw military strength and martial values as the key to making it last.
The British honed theirs in endless colonial skirmishes. The armies of Austria-Hungary, lacking this option, developed instead a barracks-based military culture obsessed with displays of bravery. The less battlehardened the officer classes became, the more they were encouraged to cling to the values of the battlefield. Honour was prized, cowardice was abhorred. Boorish rituals – drinking, gambling, whoring – helped to entrench crude stereotypes of testosterone-fuelled manliness. Duelling, in decline elsewhere in the world, was both widespread and tolerated: better a military caste whose members occasionally slaughtered one another on trivial pretexts than one that, softened by years of peace, quailed in the face of death.
But one particular manly virtue was prized above all others: boldness in the saddle.
It’s easy to see why. Cavalry remained a crucial weapon of war – at least for a land-based army such as the Habsburgs’ – and its components were valued accordingly. Breeders who supplied the imperial war machine with well-bred mounts could become as rich as modern arms dealers. Owners of fine warhorses flaunted them as projections of their own worth and virility. Yet what value were fine horses without riders who could put them to good use in war? The challenge for an army in peacetime was to ensure a reliable supply of skilled, fearless horsemen.
In seeking to rise to this challenge, the officer classes broadened their cult of bravery to embrace the most reckless behaviour. When Leopold Brandis swam his horse across the Danube, he was breaking any number of military regulations, yet the feat was entirely within the spirit of the unwritten military code – as was his exchange of gunshots with his prospective father-in-law. Never mind the potential harm to his fellow creatures: what mattered was his plucky spirit, especially as displayed in the saddle.
Anyone who doubted this code could be swiftly silenced with reference to the example of the British, famous for their foolhardy daring yet enviably successful in war, commerce, science and geo-politics. As the century progressed, the all-conquering liberators of Europe were increasingly adopted as role models. English styles of architecture, dress and manners became fashionable; but what really transformed Austro-Hungarian society was the ruling classes’ fascination with their English counterparts’ kamikaze approach to horsemanship.
Two British sports particularly impressed the Anglophiles: horse racing and fox hunting. From the 1820s onwards they began to imitate them, with competitive enthusiasm. Wealthy Hungarians such as Count István Széchenyi and Count Móric Sandor and wealthy Czechs such as Count Oktavian Kinský and Prince Franz Liechtenstein imported English thoroughbreds and hounds and organised hunts and races to show them off. Hungary’s first English-style race meeting took place in 1826, Bohemia’s in 1839. Bohemia’s first English-style hunt was organised by Kinský in 1836, near the then little-known town of Pardubice – where, in 1841, a permanent hunting society was established. The society organised a race meeting the following year that included several ‘steeplechase’ races.
The richest aristocrats splashed out not just on horses but also on the finest English trainers, grooms and, as racing took hold, jockeys. Dozens of Englishmen who were skilled with horses made the journey to central Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: for badly paid, barely educated stable staff, it was a rare chance to convert their talent into prosperity. The faraway countries in which they ended up must have seemed terrifying in their strangeness, but the potential rewards justified the upheaval – rather as they do today for South Americans and Africans who seek fame and fortune in Europe’s football leagues.
The story of the English racing diaspora to the Habsburg lands in the nineteenth century deserves a book of its own. (I recommend the excellent The Velká Pardubická and the Grand National, by John Pinfold and Kamila Pecherová, to which this chapter and the next are heavily indebted.) Some localities were transformed by the influx: the town of Alag, for example, became known as ‘the Hungarian Newmarket’ – while some of the migrants became little short of celebrities. Previously obscure Englishmen who found fame and fortune on the central European racing scene included Richard Fletcher, a hard-drinking jockey from Northenden, near Manchester, whose riding for Prince Thurn und Taxis was rewarded with a substantial hunting lodge at Loučeň; Henry Huxtable, another Mancunian, whose work for the Hungarian Prince Festetics earned him a mansion in Alag; George Williamson, a horse dealer’s son from Nottingham whose successes in the saddle and in Alag real estate were matched by a string of romantic conquests in high society (the Baroness de Buren and Daisy, Countess of Warwick, were among his ‘wins’); and Walter Earl, a farmer’s son from Northamptonshire who made a name for himself first as a jockey in Lednice and then as a trainer for Prince Auersperg – on whose Slatiňany estate Earl’s memorial stone can still be seen.
It was much the same with hunting. Bohemia’s best-known – and best-paid – early huntsmen were English expatriates who had acquired their skills the hard way in their native land before coming abroad to be properly rewarded for them. Examples include Thomas Sketh (employed by Prince Franz Liechtenstein at Lednice); Rowland Reynolds (recruited by Prince Ferdinand Kinský during a hunting trip to England to be his Master of Horse at Heřmanův Městec); and Samuel Stevens and Charley Peck, from Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire respectively, w
ho were both employed by the Pardubice hunt.
Attitudes to horsemanship in Bohemia were transformed by their work. The Anglophile aristocrats didn’t have much appetite for killing foxes – they were more likely to hunt deer, which they often did not kill – but they grasped that fox hunting was the key to the uniquely crazy British way of riding. Thanks to the enclosure programmes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those who followed hounds on horseback in England could do so successfully only if they could ride at high speed through countryside criss-crossed with field boundaries. This meant frighteningly large amounts of daredevil jumping: jumping hedges, jumping fences, jumping gates, jumping ditches; jumping unexpected combinations of these – all at a gallop, regardless of the going or the weather, in an atmosphere of ferocious snobbery in which perceived reluctance to take risks could see you ostracised as a ‘funker’. As a result a spectacularly gung-ho approach to horsemanship evolved. This kind of riding, which could be tested in steeplechase races as well as hunts, was barely safer than duelling. But it was hard to imagine a better way – short of genuine warfare – of making cavalry officers battleworthy.
At first the upper classes tested their own mettle in hunts but left the steeplechasing to specialist jockeys. But some aristocrats felt that this was not enough. Where was the fun in paying some Englishmen to take all the risks on their behalf?
The Hungarian Count Móric Sándor was the most notorious example of a nobleman who wanted all the horse-related glory to himself. Known for his reckless riding, Sándor had a string of extreme feats to his name, including riding from Vienna to Pest (now part of Budapest) in thirty-one hours without changing horse; riding across the ice of the Danube as it was cracking beneath his horse’s hooves; and jumping clean over three horses, side by side, as they pulled a moving cart in Nagyhéd Street in Pest. He rode in several steeplechases in Pardubice, and won at least one, but ended his riding career – and wrote off a horse – in a head-on collision with an iron railing in 1850.
Sándor’s contemporaries sensed that his kind of horsemanship went beyond the bounds of decency. The count was nicknamed ‘The Devil Rider’ , and it was reported that, at his funeral, the horses charged with pulling his hearse shied away and bolted.
Count Oktavian Kinský, whose principal residence was in Chlumec nad Cidlinou in eastern Bohemia, was similarly imprudent, but somehow more human. Known for his acrobatic skills – he could stand on his head in the saddle – he shared Sándor’s penchant for riding his horses indoors, especially up the grand staircase of his magnificent baroque-gothic castle, Karlova Koruna. He would also race his coach around the castle’s high terrace-balcony, allegedly turning corners so fast that the outer wheels hung in the air. No doubt he would have driven it into a swimming pool, had any of his castles possessed one. In short, he was a hellraiser, whose favoured tool of mayhem was the horse. Yet there was a bond of affection between master and horses that seems incompatible with deliberate cruelty, or even with neglect. When Kinský lay on his deathbed in 1896, his horses were led into his room, one by one, for him to bid them farewell.
Oktavian was by no means the only Kinský to make his mark on the horse-racing world. His family had been breeding horses for centuries, and had officially done so for the imperial cavalry since 1723. Their rewards included fabulous wealth, vast estates and power and prestige on a scale more usually associated with monarchs. (One branch of the family, from Choceň, had been elevated to the rank of princes.) The Kinskýs had access to some of the finest horses and stables in Europe, and most members of the family knew how to use them. For example: Count Rudolf Kinský, an early promoter of races in Pardubice; Count Zdenko Kinský, Oktavian’s nephew and adopted heir and an influential owner and jockey in his own right; and the more flamboyant Count Karel Kinský, who caused a sensation in the UK in 1883 by becoming the first foreigner to win the Grand National. His horse, Zoedone (purchased with winnings from a bet on the 1882 Cesarewitch), was fancied to carry him to a second Aintree victory in 1885; instead, it was nobbled by a mystery poisoner. Karel, a diplomat in the Austro- Hungarian embassy in London, honed his remarkable jumping skills by hunting in Northamptonshire, and also found the time and energy to conduct a sizzling love affair with Winston Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill.
It is worth dwelling on Oktavian Kinský in particular, because without him there would be no story. Born in 1813, ‘Taffy’ , as his intimates called him, was a lanky, longarmed, bushy-moustached man, with dark hair and wild blue eyes. Some considered him brutish in appearance (‘It is impossible that we had such apes in our family!’ protested a later count, Norbert), and his behaviour often compounded the impression. His temper was explosive, his appetite for thrills insatiable, his sensitivity to the needs of others limited. He loved practical jokes. Cruder examples included convincing a guest that he had just cleaned his teeth with Oktavian’s personal ‘arse-brush’; filling another’s pillow with live frogs; and tricking an untrustworthy horse-dealer into submerging himself in a barrel of muck. At the more sophisticated end of his repertoire, he announced his own death at least once, to see how people reacted. He is said to have particularly enjoyed the moment when an estranged relative, who had returned from Vienna specially in the hope of claiming an inheritance, came bounding up the steps of Kinský’s castle – to be greeted at the top by the grinning face of Oktavian himself.
He must have been quite annoying to know, and had he been a poorer man his humour might have found a less indulgent audience. Yet there was also something lifeaffirming about his devil-may-care exuberance – and he was never more exuberant than where animals were concerned. Reckless with their wellbeing, he none the less cared about them deeply. He once leaped from his horse and wrestled a stag by its horns because it was attacking his dogs. As for horses, he believed that they were there to be ridden; and that riding wasn’t proper riding unless it included jumping; and that it was hardly worth going to the trouble of jumping unless the obstacles were challenging. Riding, in other words, meant steeplechasing, formal or informal, the more dangerous the better. Nor was he satisfied with making these the guiding principles of his own horsemanship. He wanted all riders to join his adrenaline cult.
His introduction of the Pardubice hunt has already been mentioned. Three years later, in 1839, he was responsible for the creation of the Hunter Stakes, Prague’s first steeplechase; while in 1842 he helped ensure that there were several races over jumps at Pardubice’s first race meeting. When that wasn’t enough to satisfy his appetite, he started his own annual steeplechase, in 1846, in the sloping Lučice meadows near Chlumec nad Cidlinou.
Soon Europe’s richest and grandest, including several crowned heads, were flocking regularly to central Bohemia to enjoy Oktavian’s exotic new sports – and the spectacular hospitality of Karlova Koruna. The surrounding countryside, most of which Oktavian owned, was perfectly suited to the hunts he organised on the days in between race meetings. And his insistence that all involved in those hunts wore traditional English ‘pink’ added an extra layer of impenetrable exclusivity to the already elite proceedings. Outside observers were both baffled and impressed; and, then as now, the fads of the super-rich trickled down to become the aspirations of wider society.
For Oktavian, however, even this was not enough. And so it was that, at the age of sixty-one, he devised a more extreme form of sporting entertainment . . .
4.
The dance of death
They call it the Devil’s Race. It is not clear if they have a particular devil in mind. If they do, it may well be Oktavian. But he wasn’t its only creator. Several aristocratic friends accompanied him on the trip to the British Grand National, in 1865, during which the seed of the infernal idea was sown. By the time it reached fruition, on an autumn day in Pardubice in 1874, he had two partners in devilry: Prince Emil Fürstenberg and Count Max Ugarte. The time lag is partially explained by a digression for a brief, shambolic war with Prussia. But it may have taken nine ye
ars to work out just how far back the frontiers of common sense could be pushed in pursuit of the ultimate test of horsemanship.
The answer was: quite far. Even today, the Velká Pardubická – the Grand Pardubice – is considered the world’s most dangerous steeplechase, and that is despite decades of modifications to make it safer. ‘The world’s craziest’ might be a better description. The raison d’être of the race is to test recklessness. It takes place just once a year, over a squiggling four-and-a-bit mile course, with thirty-one obstacles, some terrifying and some much worse than that. A strong, well-ridden horse can complete it in ten minutes – or, just as likely, fail to complete it at all.
Even viewed on foot, many of the jumps make your blood run cold. In the heat and rush of the actual contest, with the muscle-melting effect of miles of muddy galloping factored in and the added danger from fellow competitors, they verge on the suicidal. That’s the whole point. They are there, Oktavian would have said, to sort out the men from the boys. You don’t have to be unhinged to attempt them, but it helps.
Perhaps ‘unhinged’ is too crude a diagnosis. But only just. The race has thrived for a century and a half because there are enough people in horse racing who regard labels such as ‘toughest’ , ‘most dangerous’ and ‘most extreme’ as red rags, the only acceptable response to which is to charge towards them. ‘People think I’m mad,’ said the English jockey Charlie Mann, who rode in it in 1994 and 1995, ‘but they don’t see it the way I do.’ Mann had been declared unfit to ride in the UK after breaking his neck in a fall, but insisted, with succinct eloquence: ‘If I want to kill myself in Czechoslovakia, that’s my business.’ To Velká Pardubická aficionados, such an attitude was commendable but in no way out of the ordinary. The race’s most famous champion, Josef Váňa, rode to eight victories from twenty-five starts between 1985 and 2011 – the last at the age of fifty-eight. A series of catastrophic falls along the way left him with a permanent limp, a missing part of a lung, half a dozen fewer ribs than he started out with and too many broken bones to list, but failed to dilute the enthusiasm with which he came back for more. Even clinical death – for fifteen minutes in 1994 – only kept him out of the saddle for two months. Why? He could no more explain than a normal person could understand. But Oktavian would have understood. The race was designed with such competitors in mind.
