Eclipse

by Nicholas Clee

  In a five-year career from 1777 to 1782, Pot8os won numerous races at Newmarket, including two Jockey Club Plates and two prizes worth 700 guineas each, and he also enjoyed three victories in a race called the Clermont Cup, all by walkovers. At ten, he retired to Grosvenor’s Oxcroft Stud in Cambridgeshire. By that age, most twenty-first-century stallions have been at stud for six seasons. Nevertheless, Pot8os had time to sire 172 winning sons and daughters, among them Waxy, who continued the Eclipse male line from which a huge majority of contemporary Thoroughbreds descend.

  Pot8os’s defeated opponents included another son of Eclipse, King Fergus. Out of a mare called Creeping Polly, King Fergus was sold by his breeder, Mr Carver, back to Dennis, and forged a racing career of moderate distinction, with highlights including several valuable matches at Newmarket. He seemedunlikely to become a prized stallion, and passed an unsuccessful spell at stud in Ireland before returning to England, where he caught the eye of an owner and breeder called John Hutchinson. Like the jockey and trainer John Singleton, 93 Hutchinson was a horseman of modest birth who had managed to climb the social rankings. Starting out as a stable boy to Sir Robert Eden, who bred Eclipse’s dam Spilletta, he went on to train for Peregrine Wentworth, owner of Eclipse’s defeated opponent Bucephalus, and rose to become an owner and breeder. He took a liking to King Fergus’s ‘wonderfully clean legs’ and ‘mak’ an’ shap’ (he meant, one supposes, the horse’s conformation), judgements that were to prove sound. The stallion sired numerous good horses, including Hambletonian – the hero of Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, widely considered to be George Stubbs’s greatest painting. Through Hambletonian, the line continued to the great and undefeated St Simon (born in 1881); the Prince of Wales’s Derby winner Persimmon (b. 1893); the Italian champion Ribot, twice a winner (in 1955 and 1956) of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe; and Alleged, another dual Arc winner (1977 and 1978).

  You can see how rare it is to make an enduring mark in bloodstock breeding. Eclipse is the most influential sire of all time thanks to only two of his hundreds of sons. While some others did well at stud, their male descendants, sooner or later, flopped, and their male lines died out.

  Breeders of the era could not foresee these developments. All they had to go on were the performances of Eclipse’s sons and daughters on the racecourse. What particularly strikes the contemporary observer is that Eclipse sired three of the first five winners of the Derby:Young Eclipse (1781), Saltram (1783), and Sergeant (1784). But the Derby was not yet the most prestigious horse race in the world. It was a new contest, and over what was, by the standards prevalent when Eclipse was racing, a short distance. For breeders, the victories confirmed the impression that although the progeny of Eclipse were speedy, they did not necessarily have ‘bottom’.

  In the 1770s, Eclipse faced competition as a stallion from highly regarded rivals such as Matchem and Snap, about whom the breeding adage went, ‘Snap for speed, and Matchem for truth and daylight’ – truth and daylight in this context meaning soundness and stamina. Then there was Marske, Eclipse’s own father. Marske was succeeded, following his two years as champion sire, by Herod, who held the title from 1777 to 1784 and who handed over the crown to his son, Highflyer, champion from 1785 to 1796, and again in 1798. (King Fergus managed to intervene in 1797; one historian thinks that Pot8os, another Eclipse son, was the true champion in 1794.) The writer John Lawrence introduced the now-insignificant Goldfinder as another competitor: ‘The produce of Eclipse ran too generally and exclusively to speed; and that, in toughness and continuance, they were greatly surpassed by their competitors on the course, the stock of King Herod and Goldfinder.’ Eclipse was in fact never champion sire, finishing runner-up to Herod and then to Highflyer every year from 1778 to 1788.

  How could this be? Eclipse’s celebrity, and the subsequent records of his descendants, make his failure to win a single sire’s championship appear extraordinary. Every contemporary reference to Eclipse indicates that he was a household name: the Seabiscuit, the Red Rum, the Desert Orchid of his day, only with a far more awesome reputation as a racer. The flamboyant, dodgy personality of his owner, Dennis O’Kelly, heightened the mystique, as did Dennis’s talent for hype. Yet the words of John Lawrence – one of Eclipse’s greatest admirers – hint that a few observers may have been able to separate their awe for Eclipse from their assessment of his progeny. There were also class considerations: some men of the Turf preferred not to do business with a scandalous Irish upstart.

  Richard Tattersall, who had supported the rumour that Shakespeare was Eclipse’s sire, was gleeful when a colt called Noble won the 1786 Derby. Noble, who had started at the huge price of 30-1, was a son of Tattersall’s stallion Highflyer, and defeated the favourite, Eclipse’s son Meteor. Eclipse had had his day, Tattersall exulted. Described in a nineteenth-century history of the Jockey Club as ‘an auctioneer, though of excellent repute’ (the same work characterized Dennis O’Kelly as ‘a disreputable adventurer’), Tattersall was hugely proud of Highflyer. He built a mansion called Highflyer Hall, and was pictured there, bluff of countenance and sporting a wide-brimmed hat, standing in front of a painting of the horse and with his hand resting on a document bearing the instruction ‘Highflyer not to be sold’ (see colour section).When Highflyer died, in 1793, Tattersall’s tribute to him – more touching than Harding’s ode to Marske – was this gravestone inscription: ‘Here lieth the perfect and beautiful symmetry of the much lamented Highflyer, by whom and his wonderful offspring the celebrated Tattersall acquired a noble fortune, and was not ashamed to acknowledge it.’

  Tattersall and his contemporaries would have expected the Herod and Highflyer male line, and that of Matchem, to have surpassed Eclipse’s in later generations. But Eclipse has come out on top – by a distance. It is estimated that 95 per cent of contemporary Thoroughbreds are Eclipse’s male line descendants. A check of the lists of top contemporary stallions suggests that the percentage may be even higher than that: the representatives of the Herod and Matchem lines are sparse. How did Eclipse become, in the words of racing historian Arthur FitzGerald, ‘the most influential stallion in the history of the Thoroughbred’?

  Herod and Highflyer have a good deal to do with it. Georgian breeders noted that uniting the Herod and Eclipse lines was a remarkably effective ‘nick’ – a cross that produced outstanding racers. At his death, Dennis O’Kelly owned nine daughters of Herod, whom he had bought to breed with Eclipseand with Eclipse’s sons. The nick also worked the other way round, when Herod covered Eclipse’s daughters, and it worked when Herod’s son Highflyer covered Eclipse’s daughters.94 ‘Send me your Eclipse mares, ’ Richard Tattersall said, ‘and you shall have the best racehorses in England as a result.’ It was no vain boast; and it offered a formula for the breeding of champions for years to come.

  88 In the TV sitcom Cheers, a husband whose broody wife was demanding constant sex complained, ‘Even Secretariat gets a break now and again!’

  89 The breeder is not the provider of the stallion. To breed is to own broodmares, and to produce a foal by sending a mare to a particular stallion.

  90 Today, when the science of breeding is more accurate, stud owners usually give a live foal guarantee, offering a free subsequent mating if the first one is unproductive.

  91 The sire whose offspring earn most money through racing.

  92 There is a fuller discussion of this painting in chapter 18.

  93 See chapter 8.

  94 I apologize for neglecting the female role in my discussion of Eclipse’s male descendants. His daughters are also significant presences in pedigrees. Horses, of course, inherit half their genes from their fathers and half from their mothers, so there is no reas
on to treat the sire as more important. However, a successful sire produces hundreds (these days, thousands) of offspring, whereas a successful dam produces, if she is particularly fertile and robust, about ten. Moreover, the Thoroughbred is an inbred animal, so the male line saturates pedigrees to an ever greater extent as the generations continue. That is why the Eclipse male line is so important.

  12

  The Most Glorious Spectacle

  IN THE LAST QUARTER of the eighteenth century, one world began to make way for another. Concepts of citizenship, alien to Britain’s royalist traditions, fuelled revolutions in America and France. Wars transformed the map of Europe. Industrialization gathered pace, bringing with it a more turbulent social structure. The press became a mass medium. There was a new imaginative atmosphere: in place of the earthy humour of Henry Fielding, there was the fine moral discrimination of Jane Austen, and the robust intellectual conservatism of Samuel Johnson was followed by the Romantic idealism of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Gentlemen and ladies were expected to behave with far greater decorum than had their scandalous predecessors. There was a new notion of personality. Observing the likes of Charles James Fox, William Hickey and even Dennis O’Kelly, you get the impression of a certain selfconsciousness, as if these men were playing a game or had adopted roles: the flamboyant statesman, the rake, the sporting dandy. While the ideal of the British sporting gentleman persisted, a new ideal, of sincerity to the true self, came to inspire people’s behaviour.

  One risks bathos by appending horseracing, aptly describedas the ‘great triviality’, 95 to this list. But remember the scene on Derby day. No other sport has so many ties to so many levels of society. It was bound to change too.

  In essence, the eighteenth-century gentlemanly pursuit became a mass entertainment, and more professional – more industrialized, if you like. Three men were at the heart of the transformation of racing, driving innovations that continue to shape the sport today; and they were all Eclipse’s contemporaries.

  In about 1750, a group of sporting gentlemen took to meeting regularly in the Star and Garter pub in St James’s. Calling themselves the Jockey Club, they established a race to be staged during the spring meeting at Newmarket, where they acquired premises: ‘A contribution free plate [the entrants did not have to pay a fee], by horses the property of the noblemen and gentlemen belonging to the Jockey Club at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, one heat on the Round Course, weight eight stone, seven pound.’

  The Jockey Club, which evolved into an administrative body and later moved into estate management, is not what we normally understand by the word club, and it has no jockeys in it. In the eighteenth century, groups of men meeting frequently, such as those taking regular rooms in coffee houses or taverns, tended to call themselves clubs. Jockeys were owners and others connected to the Turf. At first, the noblemen and gentlemen probably thought of the JC as a forum for socializing, drinking, and challenging each other to races, but soon they began giving instructions on how races were to be run, and they gradually assumed the status of the governing body at Newmarket. Later, they were to govern the whole of British racing, with responsibilities such as compiling the fixture list, controlling the rules of the sport, disciplining miscreants, licensing trainers and jockeys and other staff, and ensuring proper veterinary care; they alsoacquired a good deal of land, as well as various racecourses.96

  In 1762, the Jockey Club announced the official colours that members would use consistently thenceforth. The men who registered their colours included a royal duke (Cumberland – riders of his horses wore purple), five other dukes, a marquess, five earls, a viscount, and a baron. A historian of the JC wrote that the members were ‘almost to a man, of royal or noble or hereditarily gentle birth; and they were, almost to a man, either hereditary or elective legislators, for nearly all the commoners, or at any rate a large proportion of them, were Members of Parliament’. (That was exactly the profile of the clientele at Charlotte Hayes’s King’s Place nunnery.) An industrialist commented, perhaps with bitterness, that ‘To become a member of the Jockey Club you have to be a relative of God – and a close one at that.’

  Such breeding did not mean that JC members were not rackety. They gambled, they drank and they womanized. Their first home, the Star and Garter, was where Lord Byron (great-uncle of the poet) killed a man called Chaworth following an argument about dealing with poachers, and where Lord Barrymore bet successfully that he could find a man who would eat a live cat. (It was also where, in 1774, the rules of cricket were refined.) In 1792, a member called Charles Pigott broke ranks to write The Jockey Club: Or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, a scandalous collection of portraits of contemporaries from the Prince of Wales down. Pigott was expelled.

  One member who remained above reproach, however, wasthe baronet Sir Charles Bunbury, the man who cemented the JC’s position as the authority of racing. Uninspiring both as an MP and as a husband, Bunbury did not allow the elopement of his wife Lady Sarah to deflect him from his real passion, Turf affairs. (He had, briefly, entertained the notion of challenging Sarah’s lover Lord William Gordon to a duel, until it was pointed out to him that if adultery were to be the grounds, he might have to issue challenges to quite a few other men as well.) He immersed himself in racing and in his role as steward of the Jockey Club, of which he was later recognized as perpetual president, or ‘Dictator of the Turf’.

  Bunbury’s sturdiness was the making of the Jockey Club. When the Prince of Wales became involved in a racing scandal, Bunbury did not hesitate to instruct the heir to the throne on how he was expected to behave.97 His inflexible nature could cause him to be mean, however. When his colt Smolensko, ridden by Tom Goodisson, won the 1813 Derby, Bunbury and others won a considerable amount of money from a bookmaker called Brograve. Unable to honour the bets, Brograve shot himself. Paying Goodisson, who had ridden Smolensko to three victories, Bunbury handed over just a modest sum; Brograve’s drastic default, he explained, meant that it was all he could afford.

  Today, Eclipse’s peerless status has biblical authority in the racing world. He is one of the rare historical figures to achieve a reputation beyond dispute. Sport, in which achievement is usually measurable, arouses just as much disagreement among aficionados as do more subjective matters such as the arts – tennis fans, for example, differ about the relative merits of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, in spite of the existence of records, and even head-to-head results, that might settle the issue. But at least there is a record of Eclipse’s achievements: we know the races he won, whohis opponents were, in some cases how easily he won, and how favoured he was in the betting. We can also trace his extraordinary influence as a stallion.

  The man largely responsible for introducing authority to racing records, as Bunbury brought it to the sport’s governance, was James Weatherby. A Durham solicitor, Weatherby came to Newmarket in 1770 as keeper of the match book – the record of match races arranged and run – and secretary of the Jockey Club. We do not know a great deal about him, except that he was quite an operator.

  The first ‘racing calendar’, John Cheny’s An Historical List of All Horse Matches Run, and of All Plates and Prizes Run for in England, had appeared in 1727. Before that, when record keeping was in the hands of keepers of private stud books, accounts of races were rare – a fortunate exception being this glimpse, from the Duke of Devonshire’s stud book, of the brilliance of Flying Childers: ‘Chillders [sic] & Fox run over ye long course, Chillders carried 9 stone, Fox 8 stone. Chillders beat Fox a distance and a half.’ Cheny’s and subsequent calendars included race results, notices of rules, selected records of cock fights, advertisements promoting stallions, and advertisements for medicines such as ‘Watson’s Cambridge horse balls’. However, when Weatherby arrived on the scene,
during Eclipse’s second season, there were rival calendars, one edited by Mr B. Walker, the other by William Tuting and Thomas Fawconer.

  After Walker withdrew from the market, Weatherby, who had supplanted Tuting as keeper of the match book and Fawconer as Jockey Club secretary, set about supplanting their racing calendar as well. He persuaded Tuting to abandon Fawconer; then he seized and concealed 1, 600 copies of Fawconer’s calendar before it came out. Why were Fawconer’s subscribers not furious with him? Whatever Weatherby’s tactics were for deflecting the blame for the disappearance of the books, they worked, and in 1774 he found a healthy collection of subscribers for his own publication (arecord of the 1773 season). Fawconer carried on nonetheless, but died in 1777. At this point, Weatherby announced brazenly that Fawconer’s 1772 edition, ‘having hitherto been distributed to but a few of the subscribers, the rest of the subscribers, and others, are hereby informed that the same may be had of Mr Weatherby’.

  Racing results were only half of the records that racing, if it were to be an efficient industry, required. They needed to be supplemented by, and linked to, pedigrees. In the words of a modern historian, a fair market in horses requires accurate pedigrees as surely as the motor market requires vehicle registration documents. Anyone making a commercial decision about bloodstock will ask: what is a horse’s breeding, what were the performances of its ancestors, and what does that evidence suggest about the horse’s potential? The answers, until Weatherby came along, were usually vague.

  Weatherby’s nephew, also called James, set about producing a comprehensive account of racing bloodlines, commissioning an author called William Sydney Towers to research in old racing calendars and in whatever private stud books he could lay his hands on. In 1791, An Introduction to a General Stud Book (compiled by Towers) began the job of rescuing the Turf ‘from the increasing evil of false and inaccurate pedigrees’; it was succeeded by further introductions, until the volume regarded as the definitive first edition of the General Stud Book appeared, in 1808.