The GSB listed mares with their offspring. Looking for Eclipse in the index, we are directed to Spilletta, ‘Bred by Sir Robert Eden, foaled in 1749, got by Regulus, her dam (Mother Western) by Smith’s Son of Snake – Lord D’Arcy’s Old Montagu – Hautboy – Brimmer.’ (These last three names are the damsires in the tail female line – the bottom line of the pedigree, from mother to her mother, and then to her mother’s mother, and so on.) Spilletta’s foals are a bay filly (foaled in 1759) by the Duke of Cumberland’s Crab; Eclipse (1764) by Marske; Proserpine (1766)by Marske; Garrick (1772) by Marske; and Briseis (1774) by Chrysolite.98 We can trace further male lines in the pedigree by looking for Eclipse’s sire Marske (out of the Ruby Mare) in the index, and then for Marske’s sire Squirt (out of Sister to Old Country Wench), and so on. A later volume of the GSB authorized Eclipse’s date of birth as 1 April 1764: ‘Eclipse was so called, not because he eclipsed all competitors, but from having been foaled during the great eclipse of 1764.’
Assembling this information, from inconsistent calendars and private records of fitful reliability, must have been a painstaking and frustrating job. But Weatherby and Towers performed it with remarkable accuracy. There were further, even thornier problems for compilers of later editions, as more and more horses came up for inclusion. Who should be in, and who out? The editors explained that ‘half-bred’ animals were not eligible; and in 1821, they first mentioned the implied contrasting term, ‘Thoroughbred’. By it, they meant a horse descended from a particular group of mares, accepted as the foundation mothers of the breed.
One of the earliest quandaries concerned a horse who was, like his grandfather Eclipse, a national celebrity. Copenhagen was Wellington’s charger at the Battle of Waterloo. He had inherited the Eclipse temperament: when Wellington dismounted following the battle and gave him a pat, Copenhagen lashed out, nearly achieving the fatal blow that Napoleon’s forces had failed to land. Not bearing a grudge, Wellington said of him, ‘There may have been many faster horses, no doubt many handsomer, but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.’ The problem was Copenhagen’s inheritance from Lady Catherine, his mother. Lady Catherine’s owner, General Grosvenor, had lobbied to get her included in the GSB, and Copenhagen appeared in one edition as well. But the editors later removed them, on the grounds thatamong Lady Catherine’s ancestors was ‘a hunting mare not thorough-bred’.
There were more incendiary issues than this to come, with implications for international diplomacy. The term ‘Thoroughbred’ evolved to mean, in effect, ‘horses granted admission to the General Stud Book’. But that caused a problem when racing developed as an international sport and industry, because Weatherbys could not trace back a good many American horses, for example, to the English foundation mares. Much ill feeling ensued: while English bloodstock experts argued that ‘the pages of the Stud Book should be zealously safeguarded’, American breeders thought that the dastardly British were closing off the market by stigmatizing American horses as half-bred. The dispute did not begin to be resolved until the middle of the twentieth century, and a more practical definition of ‘Thoroughbred’ at last appeared in 1969.99 More recently, Weatherbys has granted admission to horses traced to sources in the stud books of other countries. The ancestry of the Thoroughbred is no longer exclusively English.100
Dealing with such matters is more than a simple publishing job. Weatherbys, which is still in business and still a family firm (and which, after James Weatherby’s initial shenanigans, has maintained a fine reputation for integrity), continues to compile theRacing Calendar and General Stud Book, and also manages race entries, issues lists of runners and riders, allocates weights, registers horses and owners, and collects and distributes prize money. It is a kind of civil service of British racing.
Our third influential man of the Turf left us the race that was to represent the summit of Thoroughbred achievement, as well as one of the most widely used of all eponyms: Derby.
From the 1770s, racing’s organizers began to introduce new kinds of contests, both to encourage the speediness that stallions such as Eclipse were engendering, and to offer better spectacles to the public. Four-mile heats went out of fashion, and in came shorter races, which you might be able to see from start to finish if you had a decent vantage point, and which took a few minutes, rather than a whole afternoon, to decide101 (they were to heat races roughly what limited-overs cricket matches are to five-day Tests). Racecourses also staged races that encouraged ordinary people to bet. At matches and plates, huge sums were bet by racing insiders and their friends, who felt that they knew what was going to happen. Now handicaps, which assigned weights to horses according to their abilities, created – at least in theory – a more open betting market. In 1791, forty thousand people gathered at Ascot to watch the Oatlands Stakes, in which the bottom weight and officially least able horse carried 5st 3lb (it is hard to form a mental image of his jockey), and the top weight and officially best horse carried 9st 10lb. The winner, at 20-1, wasBaronet, 102 owned by the Prince of Wales. As a betting magnet, the race was a huge success, with £100, 000 staked on the result; as an enricher of punters, however, it was a disaster. So few people had backed Baronet that, a contemporary wrote, ‘Horses are daily thrown out of training, jockeys are going into mourning, grooms are becoming EO [roulette] merchants and strappers are going on the highway.’
Some of the most venerable races in the calendar followed the Oatlands Stakes model: the Ebor, the Cambridgeshire and the Grand National are among the examples. The Melbourne Cup, the race that stops Australia, is also a handicap. The Santa Anita Handicap is the event that Seabiscuit’s owner, Charles Howard, most wanted to win. However, it is the Classics and prestigious weight-for-age races (older horses carry more weight, but otherwise the weights are level) that reveal the greatest champions: the St Simons, Nijinskys and Secretariats. These races have also revealed the supremacy of the Eclipse line.
The first of these races, which came to be known as the Classics, was the St Leger. In 1776, a group of sportsmen subscribed to a new sweepstakes – a relatively recent innovation, in which several owners advanced entry fees that formed the prize money – at Doncaster. The race was over two miles (later reduced to its current distance of an extended one mile, six furlongs), and it was won by Lord Rockingham’s Allabaculia.103 In 1778, the sportsmen voted to name their race after one of their number, General Anthony St Leger, an Irish-born, Eton and Cambridge-educated former MP who bred and raced horses from the nearby Park Hill estate.
The catalyst for the next two Classics was another Eton andCambridge man. Edward Smith-Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby, began his association with Epsom in 1773, when at the age of twenty-one he took over the lease of a nearby house called The Oaks. A year later, he married Lady Elizabeth Hamilton. The wedding was grand. General John Burgoyne, who had owned the property previously and who three years later was to surrender to American forces at Saratoga, played host and wrote a masque, The Maid of the Oaks, for the occasion; David Garrick, the actor and impresario, stage-managed the drama; Robert Adam, the great architect, designed the dance pavilion. But despite this splendid inauguration, and the arrivals of two daughters and a son, the marriage foundered. While playing cricket at The Oaks, Lady Derby met the Duke of Dorset, fell in love, and ran off with him. Lord Derby declined to divorce her, so preventing her from marrying the Duke, but also preventing himself from marrying the woman he loved, the actress Elizabeth ‘Nellie’ Farren. Lady Derby’s death in 1797 cleared the way. This second union was much happier, even though Lord Derby’s new bride did draw the line, the historian Roger Mortimer wrote, ‘at cock-fights staged in her drawing room’.
In other respects, Derby was a jovial, convivial figure. He hosted regular house partie
s, and at one of them the company agreed to establish on nearby Epsom Downs a new race, over a distance of a mile and a half, for three-year-old fillies. In tribute to the hospitality that brought it about, they named the race the Oaks. It was a sweepstakes, and the first running, in 1779, attracted seventeen subscribers contributing fifty guineas each to the prize fund, with twelve fillies eventually going to post. One of them, a daughter of Herod called Bridget, was Derby’s; she was the 5-2 favourite, and she won. Down the field was an Eclipse filly with the bare name Sister of Pot8os. She was owned by Dennis O’Kelly.
Reconvening at The Oaks, Derby and his guests agreed that their fillies’ race had been a great success, and that they should supplement it with another new sweepstakes, this time for both colts and fillies and over a mile, the following year. But what to call the race? Sir Charles Bunbury was among the party, and he, intent on encouraging speedier Thoroughbreds, had been a great promoter of these shorter races, for younger horses, carrying lighter weights. Perhaps the race should be named after him? And so we come to another racing legend: Bunbury and Derby competed for the honour by tossing a coin, and Derby won.104 Had Bunbury called the toss correctly, we assume, the great race would have been named the Bunbury; the ‘Run for the Roses’ at Churchill Downs would be the Kentucky Bunbury; a football match between Arsenal and Tottenham would be a North London bunbury; and motor cars would crash into one another in demolition bunburys. As it is, we remember Sir Charles with the Bunbury Cup, a seven-furlong handicap at the Newmarket July meeting.105
Lord Derby’s house The Oaks, after which the classic race for fillies was named, and where, reputedly, Derby and Charles Bunbury agreed the naming of the Derby Stakes on the toss of a coin.
A year later, on 4 May 1780, Bunbury gained compensation when his colt Diomed (6-4 favourite) became the first winner of the Derby Stakes. Second was Dennis O’Kelly’s Boudrow (4-1), by Eclipse. The nine competitors raced over the last mile of the course that Eclipse had graced eleven years earlier. This race was even more popular than the Oaks, attracting thirty-six subscribers who each contributed fifty guineas to the prize fund, Bunbury’s winning share of which was 1, 150 guineas.
Diomed, by a son of Herod called Florizel, was not at first a shining advertisement for the Derby Stakes. His subsequent racing record was mixed, and his stud career was so undistinguished thatby 1798, when he was twenty-one years old, he was commanding a fee of only two guineas for each mare he covered. Bunbury gave up on him, and sold him to America. As the horse crossed the Atlantic, so did a message from James Weatherby’s secretary: ‘Mr Weatherby recommends you strongly to avoid putting any mares to [Diomed]; for he has had fine mares to him here, and never produced anything good.’ Diomed also had a reputation for firing blanks, semen-wise.
However, just as there was a wonderful alchemy when Arab stallions met English mares on English soil, so was there when Diomed met American mares in Virginia. The stallion would emerge from his stable at a gallop, and set about his procreative task with the enthusiasm and vigour of a horse half his age.106
Diomed sired numerous champions, right up until his thirtieth year, by which time his covering fee was $50. He died at thirtyone. ‘Without Diomed, ’ a US historian observed, ‘the most brilliant pages of our Turf story could never have been written.’ Four generations down his male line came Lexington, a stallion who by the end of the nineteenth century was to saturate the pedigrees of the best American racehorses – and who created a headache for the compilers of the General Stud Book, because, like Copenhagen, he had dubious ancestry on his dam’s side.
Several of Lord Derby’s guests, and particularly Sir Charles Bunbury, would have been dismayed if the rogue Dennis O’Kelly had won the first running of the Derby Stakes. But Dennis had come close, and in 1781 he won the second running, with Young Eclipse. ‘Jontlemen, ’ he told the Munday’s coffee house crowd in the weeks before the race, ‘this horse is a racer if ever there was one. ’Alas, the Derby turned out to be Young Eclipse’s finest hour, as it had been Diomed’s; and Young Eclipse was not a successful stallion. Describing the horse as ‘not a bit too honest’, a writer – probably John Lawrence – noted in The Sporting Magazine, ‘O’Kelly on first training this horse for the Derby, which he won, was certainly deceived, having flattered himself that fortune had favoured him with another Eclipse! Vain expectation, that two such phenomena should appear together in the world! Between Flying Childers and Eclipse, there was an interval of between 40 and 50 years, and we shall be in high luck, indeed, if we can produce a third to those – what a trio! – within 50 years of the latter.’
The writer went on to note that it was not always possible to take the inconsistent form of Dennis’s horses at face value: ‘race-horses, more particularly in hands such as those of Dennis O’Kelly, are extremely apt to run according to the immediate pecuniary interests of their proprietors’. If the owner wanted to lay against a horse, the horse was apt to run slowly; next time, with the owner’s money down at a bigger price, the horse would show miraculous improvement. Such practices, or at least suspicions of them, have not gone away.
Dennis’s horses were probably all trying in the Derby, though. It was too valuable a race to mess about in. He had the Derby second again in 1783, when Dungannon, later to stand at his stud, lost out to Saltram, also by Eclipse; and he won for the second time the following year, with another son of Eclipse called Sergeant.107
Lord Derby triumphed in his own race in 1787. He and Lady Elizabeth were still married, but living apart, and he and Nellie Farren were conducting a relationship of apparently irreproachable propriety. ‘The attachment, ’ James Boswell wrote, ‘is as fine as anything I have ever seen: truly virtuous admiration on his part, respect on hers.’ One of Nellie’s most celebrated roles was Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal. LordDerby ran a filly called Lady Teazle in the 1784 Oaks, finishing second; three years later, Sir Peter Teazle, his only Derby winner, gave Derby’s virtuous admiration an enduring symbol in the sporting record books. He later turned down a bid for the colt of 500 guineas from, according to The Times, the Duke of Bedford and Dennis O’Kelly.108
Sir Charles Bunbury was to win the Derby twice more. There was Smolensko, whose jockey was so meanly rewarded, and before that, in 1801, a filly called Eleanor. Some time before the 1801 race, Bunbury’s trainer Cox fell mortally ill. Close to death, with a parson standing by, Cox indicated that he had something to say. The parson bent low; Cox breathed in his ear, ‘Depend upon it – that Eleanor is the hell of a mare.’ He was right: Eleanor beat the colts in the Derby, and a few days later won the Oaks as well. She is one of only four fillies – ‘filly’ is a more usual term than ‘mare’ to describe a horse of three – to achieve the double.109
The Derby was not yet the most important race in the calendar, but it was getting there. The founding in 1809 of the 2, 000 Guineas (one mile, for three-year-old colts and fillies) and in 1814 of the 1, 000 Guineas (one mile, for three-year-old fillies) facilitated the rise in prestige, because these races became preludes to the Derby and the Oaks, which in turn led to the St Leger. The five races became the English Classics, the prizes that all owners dreamed of winning, and that were the highest goals of the breeding industry. By 1850, the Derby was stopping the nation: Parliament adjourned during the week of the race. ‘We declare Epsom Downs on Derby Day to be the most astonishing, the mostvaried, the most picturesque and the most glorious spectacle that ever was, or ever can be, under any circumstances, visible to mortal eyes, ’ the Illustrated London News asserted.
The Derby – At Lunch by Gustave Doré (1872).‘The Derby is emphatically, all England’s day, ’ wrote Blanchard Jerrold in his accompanying t
ext.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the owner and breeder Federico Tesio – who bred the champion Nearco – could say, ‘The Thoroughbred racehorse exists because its selection has depended not on experts, technicians or zoologists, but one piece of wood: the winning post of the Epsom Derby.’ And it was this piece of wood that reinforced Eclipse’s dominant role in racing history. Five of the ten Derby winners in the 1850s, when the Illustrated London News hailed the glorious spectacle, were from the Eclipse male line. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the figure had risen to nine out of ten. In the past fifty years, all but three Epsom Derby winners have been Eclipse’s male-line descendants. The history of racing’s greatest race is a tribute to the sport’s greatest horse.
95 By Phil Bull, the founder of the ratings organization Timeform.
96 Having argued that horseracing reflects society, I must concede that sometimes the adaptation to wider influences is sluggish. The Jockey Club, a self-selecting body, ran British racing, the tenth largest industry in the country, until 1993, when it transferred its administrative responsibilities to the British Horseracing Board. In 2006, the JC handed over the policing of the sport to the Horseracing Regulatory Authority. A year later, the BHB and HRA merged, to form the British Horseracing Authority. Now, the JC concentrates on the administration of its racecourses and other estates.
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