by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
p. 60: She habitually carried her father’s revolver around
Příběhy předmětů claims that Count leopold spent a long time searching for the revolver on his return from war and eventually found it in the back of the carriage in which Lata had abandoned it. The story is attributed to Petr Jaroševský.
p. 60: history’s last true cavalry battle
Other contenders for this title include the battle of beersheba (1917); the battle of komarów, in 1920 (in the Polish-Soviet war); the Polish cavalry’s charge at Tuchola Forest in 1939; and the battles of Poloj and Izbushensky (both in 1942). Jaroslavice was a proper large-scale cavalry vs. cavalry confrontation, with the Dragoons and Ulans of the Imperial army’s 4th Cavalry Division taking on Cossacks, Dragoons, Hussars and Ulans of the russian 10th Cavalry Division. It’s hard to describe the outcome succinctly, beyond the observation that lots of men and horses were killed.
p. 61: Linguistic barriers between the Emperor’s subjects
Mobilisation posters are said to have been printed in fifteen different languages.
p. 61: Half of the regular army had been killed before 1915
A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, p. 398; The Decline and Fall of the Hapsburg Empire 1815–1918, p. 258.
p. 61: shot . . . while rescuing a wounded comrade
norbert, a three-time winner of Pardubice’s officers’ steeplechase, was killed on 13 October – around the time the Velká Pardubická is usually run. He was in the 11th Uhlan regiment (in Czech, ‘Hulán’).
p. 61: considered by many to be the deadliest arena of all
The Italian campaign would cost more than 30,000 austro-Hungarian lives before end of 1914.
p. 63: began to recruit tens of thousands of young women
See: ‘becoming austrian: Women, the State, and Citizenship in World War I’, by Maureen Healy, Central European History, Vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 29ff.
p. 64: Countess Brandisová . . . sold about 150 hectares
The plots sold were all in an area called násada. Villagers who already lived on the land were given priority. local families who took advantage of the sale included the Mudrs, the Mašeks, the Šírls and the Sobotkas. See: Řitka v minulosti.
p. 66: daily per capita consumption of flour
See: A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, pp. 399–401.
p. 68: ‘Don’t be afraid and don’t steal’
In Czech: ‘nebát se a nekrást.’
p. 69: more than a third of Bohemian land had been owned by 362 families
like other startling statistics in this chapter about aristocratic land ownership, this one is taken from Noble Nationalists: the transformation of the Bohemian aristocracy. Glassheim’s much-cited book offers a definitive account of the nobility’s contrasting experiences in the First republic, with a particular focus on land reform and its ramifications.
p. 69: Řitka would be exempt from confiscation
The reason for the exemption is not clear from the correspondence (in the Pospíšil papers) but presumably related to the estate’s relatively modest size. The exemption did not prevent the loss of a small amount of land – the ‘Mnišecka’ field – in 1933. (See: Řitka v minulosti.)
p. 70: ‘not a single lady . . . who speaks or writes correct Czech’
Quoted (along with the other quotes in this paragraph) in Glassheim. Mayer’s remark about ‘settling accounts’ was made some years earlier, in ‘Die nationalen und sozialen Verhältnisse im böhmischen Adal und Grossgrundbesitz’, Čechische Revue 2 (1908), but was no less chilling for being old.
p. 71: ‘enemies of the people’ were being executed at a rate of about 500 a week
See: Lenin’s terror: the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence, by James ryan (routledge, 2012), p. 114.
p. 71: bequest to a long-time servant, Václav Širl
Johanna actually used the German form of his name, Wenzel; I have used the Czech form in the interests of consistency.
p. 72: ‘first and foremost the equality of woman and man’ . . . etc.
The first three quotations in this paragraph are from, respectively: Appeal to youth, 1906; Masaryk a ženy, p. 130; and a talk given in boston in October 1893, printed in Naše doba, I, no. 1, pp. 46–9. The fourth is from an anonymous Moravian activist writing in 1905. all four are quoted in T. G. Masaryk: Against the Current 1882–1914.
p. 72: Czechoslovak declaration of independence
Published in Paris on 18 October 1918, this is also known as the Washington Declaration. The full text can be found at: https://archive.org/details/ declarationofind00czec.
p. 72: Františka Plamínková . . . rejoiced
Quoted in ‘Democracy at Home’, by Melissa Feinberg, in New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History, pp. 76–96.
p. 74: a large dung heap, packed around the water pump
It was Petr Jaroševský who pointed this out. It subsequently emerged that the tenant farmer (first Hugo Polák and then, from 1937, Vladimír Daneš) was contractually required to supply the necessary manure.
p. 74: ‘Today the Czech woman is free . . . as if by magic’
‘Žena ve státě československém’, by krista nevšimalová, Ženský obzor Vol. 17, no. 3, p. 66; quoted in ‘Democracy at Home’.
p. 75: Female civil servants . . . were no longer required to be unmarried . . . a quarter of women had jobs
The landmark details cited in this paragraph are from ‘The Czech 1930s through Toyen’, pp. 61–2.
p. 75: a tenant farmer called Hugo Polák
Traces of Polák’s tenancy can be found in the Pospíšil papers and (with some discrepancies) in Řitka v minulosti. I think Polák’s family must have comprised the three Jewish people recorded as having lived in Řitka in 1930 (but not after the Second World War). They presumably moved away when the tenancy ended in 1937. I have not been able to discover their subsequent fate.
p. 77: Kristýna, too, seems to have spent time away
at one point in Řitka v minulosti, František Šírl seems to suggest that krístýna moved away, to Dehlem, berlin. Family members are baffled by this: krístýna was certainly living with Lata before, during and after the Second World War. but perhaps she made an extended trip there at some point.
p. 77: ‘One should not wait for a miracle from God . . . ’
letter from Lata to lori kinský, 22 July 1941; in kinský archive at Zármsk.
p. 77: a racehorse-owning neighbour
Lata mentions this in ‘Die Dame im rennsattel’ . It is conceivable that she was referring to Hanuš kasalický, although in her account the neighbour came from Velká Chuchle, which is several miles away from Všenory.
p. 78: kept hens, ducks, geese, turkeys . . .
like most of my details about Šmejda, this comes from a family account, originally from Šmejda’s daughter, passed on by his grand-daughter, božena Osvaldová.
p. 78: her head close to its as she patted it softly on the neck
Lata’s patting habit was pointed out to me by Vlasta klabíková, now living in líšnice, who worked with Řitka’s horses in Lata’s time; the point about her head position was observed from photographs.
p. 79: the British trainer Gay Kelleway
kelleway gave a shocking account of the harassment she had endured to the Daily Mirror in 2017. at one point she insisted on travelling to races only in horse-boxes, rather than accepting lifts from potential attackers. See ‘Horse racing rocked by sex scandal as female rider claims top jockey attacked her’, by David Yates, Daily Mirror, 3 november 2017.
p. 80: ‘direct, hearty smile’
The quotes in the first half of this paragraph are either (like this one) from Vladimír Štědrý’s ‘V sídle amazonky’; or from ‘Ein besuch bei Maria Immaculata Brandis’, a 1937 interview by Hilde Hojer in an unidentified German-language newspaper.
p. 80: ‘But of course, a female!’
Lata quoted in ‘Žena a její svět’,
Express-Praha, 20 October 1937. The term she uses is ‘ženská’, a colloquial and sometimes slightly derogatory term for ‘žena’ (‘woman’) – which might equally be translated as ‘bird’, ‘dame’, ‘chick’, ‘girl’, etc.
p. 81: no official records survive: just a photograph
The photograph is in Martin Cáp’s collection.
p. 81: racing itself . . . was an impossibility
In some accounts of her life, Lata had been racing for five years by now. Search for Lata brandisová online, and what little you find will probably include some version of the claim that she rode in three races in 1921, coming first once and second twice; and that before that she rode in a handicap in Pardubice in 1916 but fell and bruised herself badly. I don’t think either claim is true. both can usually be traced – via kovář – to Šírl’s Řitka v minulosti. but Šírl, though conscientious, is not infallible, especially where horse-racing is concerned.
There are all sorts of reasons for doubting the 1916 claim: racing was suspended at all the established tracks from early in the First World War; horses were requisitioned for war work; women were ineligible to compete in official races. It is arguably conceivable that Lata took part in some kind of private contest with the kinskýs in the lucice meadows – but most of the kinskýs were away at war too. as for the alleged races in 1921, Lata certainly rode publicly, but I am sure that, if she did tell Šírl that she had raced, she was referring to harness-races. She herself stated repeatedly (for example, in ‘Die Dame im Rennsattel’, and in her Český rozhlas interview in november 1937) that she first raced officially a few months before her first Velká Pardubická attempt. Indeed, Šírl himself quotes Lata in Řitka v minulosti as saying that ‘I had never tried a horse-race’ when she was first asked to ride nevěsta (i.e., in 1926 or 1927).
keen students of such matters may notice that in Berühmte Reiter erzählen Lata does appear to claim that she took part in a women-only ‘gallop race’ (i.e., a flat race) at Velká Chuchle in 1921. This must be a mistake. Lata states that it was the only such race in which she ever took part – yet we know for certain that she took place in such a race in 1927, and came third, as she claims to have done in this one. She also discusses, just a few sentences later, the controversy in 1927 over whether or not it was permissible for women to participate in a public race. I assume that she hand-wrote this autobiographical account, which she would have posted to Germany, and that whoever typeset it misread her ‘1’ as a ‘7’ (easily done with traditional German handwriting). It is also worth mentioning that Lata appears to have had a poor memory for dates.
p. 83: Surviving records do not portray him in a flattering light
Papers relating to kasalický can be found in the state archives in Prague and Dobříchovice, and in Všenory library. In fairness to kasalický, most of them – apart from a few pages in Všenory z minulosti blizké a vzdálené – are from obviously hostile sources, including an aggrieved wife, and locals who stood to gain from the confiscation of his property after the war. Still, he clearly had many enemies – in marked contrast to Lata.
p. 83: Kasalický’s grand friends
The four men appear together in a photograph in Illustrierte Sportzeitung, March 1925.
p. 84: horses, tennis and parties
The best source of information about Ra’s incessant social whirl is his own memoir, Zu Pferd und zu Fuss, from which all my direct quotes from ra are taken.
p. 89: the modern Czech breeder Petr Půlpán
Petr Půlpán, vice-chairman of the Czech Society of breeders of kinský Horses (Svaz chovatelů koní kinských), runs the equus kinský stud at Hradištko u Sadské, not far from the Ostrov site (near Chlumec and Pardubice) where the kinský family originally bred many of their horses.
p. 89: In 1838 . . . he bred one of his mares with a British thoroughbred
Oktavian opened his first stud-book in 1832. The mare in question, Themby I, was bred with Whister in 1838, and the questionable isabella foal, Themby II, was born on 27 March 1839.
p. 90: primary bloodline passes down through the female line
kinský horses are not unique in this; but Petr Půlpán is among those who consider it an important distinguishing feature.
p. 90: the conventions for naming the horses reflect this
For example – to focus on the most important bloodline in our story – the kinský mare, nancy, was bred with one of Themby II’s eleven foals, Caesar. From this breeding can be traced the following line of mares: nelly, nedejse, nepal, norma. The “n”s continue in norma’s own female progeny.
p. 91: Ra saw Obora as an almost spiritual haven
at the end of Zu Pferd und zu Fuss, ra makes this point explicitly in a short elegiac poem about his childhood memories of Obora.
p. 93: a population of around 40,000
Demografie města Pardubice, ed. Veronika Šindlerová (DHV Cr, spol. s r.o., March 2013), p. 9.
p. 94: ‘might as well be at a public hanging’
‘a race called Pardubicka’, by brian James, The Times, 8 October 1988.
p. 94: ‘that near-death thing’
First quoted – I believe – in That Near-Death Thing, by rick broadbent (Orion, 2012).
p. 95: appears to have been something of a sex symbol
Williamson features heavily in Baroness Daisy, David Dunford’s reconstruction of the scandalous life of Daisy, baroness de buren – to whom Williamson was married for a while.
p. 95: The Hotel Střebský . . . The Veselka
There is a detailed description by Velká Pardubická jockey and historian Miloš Svoboda in Taxis a ti druzí.
p. 95: whose owner was father of the daredevil aviator
The Veselka was owned by František kašpar. His son, Jan kašpar, used Pardubice’s race-course as a starting point for some of his pioneering flights, adding to his home-town’s claim to be europe’s pre-eminent destination for fans of extreme sports.
p. 95: ‘a constant coming and going of racegoers . . . ’
This and the ‘disturbed ant-hill’ quote in the following paragraph come from an unsigned article in Monatliche Mitteilungen der Deutschen Reiterverbandes, Vol. 5, no. 11, p. 215.
p. 97: as dashing and fearless a cavalry officer as it was possible to imagine
There is a good chapter on rudolf Popler (in english) in Velká Pardubická a Velká Národní Liverpoolská. In Czech, the fullest biography is Josef Pávek’s Tisíc a jeden skok.
p. 97: in the process of becoming one of Europe’s finest
See: ‘Mjr Franjo aubrecht (1896–1985) a jeho boj proti totalitám’, Zprávách KPP, 2009, pp. 7–8.
p. 99: knocked its trainer to the ground and attacked its jockey with a whip
The incident was reported in, among other places, the Yorkshire Evening Post (6 June 1893, p. 1).
p. 99: for Czech nationalists there was a particular pleasure to be had from seeing a Czech victor
The first stirrings of Czech nationalism at the Velká Pardubická meeting were reported in 1884. (See Velká Pardubická a Velká Národní Liverpoolská, pp. 58–9.) The difference in the late 1920s was that some members of the nobility had begun to share such sentiments.
p. 100: Hector Baltazzi, an Austrian-Levantine banking heir
Baltazzi’ s father is generally referred to as a levantine Greek, but Hector, one of four sons, seems to have had most of his roots in Vienna. He subsequently owned a vast mansion at Jevišovice in Southern Moravia, near the austrian border.
p. 102: his favourite spruce
The tomb is still there, but the spruce – remembered by Františka Mašková – is not.
p. 102: the transfer of Johanna’s remains
The trouble with family tombs in the woods is that after a few decades have passed it is often impossible to determine who is in them and who is not. The nearest thing I have found to a full summary of the contents of the brandis tomb is in the article ‘Řitka’, by Jan krejčí, former parish priest of M
níšek (published on the parish website at http://farnost.mnisek. cz/historie/ritka/).
p. 103: Růžena Mašková
I have not been able to trace any further information about this woman. The name is far more common among Czechs than it might appear to english eyes.
p. 103: talented women were achieving fame on a grand scale
‘The Czech 1930s through Toyen’ is particularly good on this period – and, obviously, especially so on Toyen. See also: ‘Olympic Women: a Struggle for recognition’; and Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany, a biography of anny Ondra’s husband that also sheds fascinating light on her, and on the role of sport in central european politics during this period.
p. 104: his/her birth gender
I apologise to anyone who is offended by the combined pronoun. It seems to me that the easy modern ‘their’ does not do justice to the awkwardness that such self-identification involved back in the inter-war years – especially in a language that placed so much emphasis on gender (see below).
p. 104: the Czech language’s obsession with gender
I should probably apologise for this too, since some Czechs will disagree with it. Obviously there are many languages in which gender plays a far greater role than in english. but the role seems particularly pronounced in Czech, in which actual as well as grammatical gender constantly affects the form of nouns, participles, adjectives and proper names, and in which descriptions of people that do not specify gender (for example, the fourth paragraph of the epilogue of this book) appear to be impossible. Czech may not be unique in this, but it certainly does not lend itself to gender fluidity. It is also striking, to english eyes, that official forms in Czech never require people to specify their gender, which is self-evident from their name. (In the Communist era, however, they did have to specify their class.) even if the charge of ‘obsession’ is unfair, I am not the only english-speaker to have been struck by this thought. karla Huebner makes the same observation in ‘The Czech 1930s through Toyen’.
p. 105: ‘I proved that a woman can work her way up to the same level as the best of men’
Quoted in ‘Czechs in History – eliška Junková: The Czech racing queen of the Jazz Age’, by brian kenety, Czech radio 7, radio Prague, 29 September 2004; http://www.radio.cz/en/article/58631.
