These notes are the best evidence we have to solve one of the enduring mysteries in racing. When Eclipse became the most famous racehorse in the land, rumours began to circulate that his pedigree was fraudulent. His real father, some said, was not Marske but a stallion called Shakespeare. A painting by J. N. (John Nost) Sartorius showed Shakespeare and Eclipse together – though, to my inexpert eye at least, it is hard to spot the implied likeness between the bulky stallion and the fine-boned racehorse. John Lawrence, an equestrian writer who had seen Eclipse in the flesh, was told by Dennis O’Kelly’s groom that Shakespeare, as well as Marske, had covered Spilletta in 1763; others told Lawrence that this double covering was ‘well-known fact’, and hinted that bribery had taken place to ensure that Shakespeare be expunged from the story. The connections of Marske, sceptics hinted, had a great deal to gain by promoting their horse as Eclipse’s father. Lawrence himself observed that Eclipse ‘strongly resembled’ members of Shakespeare’s family.
Shakespeare was a good horse, the winner of two King’s Plates, and would certainly have been a worthy mate for a mare of Cumberland’s. But in 1763 he was standing as a stallion in Catterick. Would Cumberland – or rather, his stable staff – have walked Spilletta from Windsor to North Yorkshire for an assignation?
The following year, Shakespeare moved to stables belonging to Josiah Cook at Epsom in Surrey, near to where Eclipse wouldbe stabled; he was advertised as ‘15 hands 2 inches high, very strong, healthful, and as well as any horse in England; as to his performances tis needless to mention them here, he was so well known in his time of running to be the best running horse in England’. Perhaps the attempted deception was not by the connections of Marske, but by members of the Surrey racing fraternity? There was certainly no reason – unless he made a mistake – for the Duke of Cumberland, ignorant as he was of the astonishing potential of his colt, to enter a false parentage in his stud book. O’Kelly’s groom told John Lawrence the Shakespeare version, but a certain Mr Sandiver of Newmarket, citing the authority of Cumberland’s groom, assured him that it was nonsense.
The question, as Lawrence concluded, is of real significance only to those concerned with the accuracy of Thoroughbred records. Parentage by Shakespeare would not devalue Eclipse’s pedigree. It is Eclipse, the supreme racer and progenitor, who defines the value of the pedigree.31
Just over a year after Eclipse’s birth, Cumberland was dead. The royal racing stable and stud went to auction, and at the 23 December sale of the Cranbourne Lodge stud the chestnut colt (or chesnut, as was the usual spelling) was again ascribed to Marske (the description of lot 29 was ‘A chesnut Colt, got by Mask …’).32 The bidder with the most determination to get him was William Wildman.
Described as a butcher in his marriage record of 1741, William Wildman (born in 1718) was not a retailer but a livestock middleman, operating as a grazier and as a salesman at Smithfield, the largest cattle market in the world. His business, which turned over between £40, 000 and £70, 000 a year, was solid, as was he: he sat on parish committees, and supported charities. And, thanks no doubt to his contacts with the sporting landowners whose cattle he sold, he became a man of the Turf. He leased a stud farm, Gibbons Grove, 33 at Mickleham, about ten miles from Epsom. A substantial place, it consisted of 220 acres, a farmhouse sporting a clock tower and parapet, and stabling for sixty horses.
This prosperity notwithstanding, Wildman was a lowlier person than was the norm among leading racehorse owners in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet he achieved a feat that almost all his illustrious competitors failed to match: he attained ownership of three outstanding Thoroughbreds. One gets the impression of a man who was decent, determined and energetic, but essentially cautious. Having acquired these horses, he sold them all.
The first of them was Gimcrack. Commemorated each August by the Gimcrack Stakes at York, Gimcrack was a grey horse no bigger than a pony. Wildman bought him in 1763, for about £35.At first he thought he had made a bad deal, and offered, unsuccessfully, to offload his acquisition for fifteen guineas (or £15 15s). But then Gimcrack started racing. He won seven times in 1764 (when the Racing Calendar placed him in the ownership of a Mr Green, who makes no further appearances in any volume). He also won his first race in 1765, a £50 plate at Newmarket, before Wildman, taking a course he was to repeat with Eclipse, sold him. Gimcrack went to Lord Bolingbroke, a prolific racehorse owner and ferocious gambler, for 800 guineas, and was to continue to shuttle between owners. He moved next to Sir Charles Bunbury, whose wife Sarah (née Lennox, and later to elope with Lord William Gordon, an army officer) described him (Gimcrack, not Bunbury) as ‘the sweetest little horse that ever was’; then to the Comte de Lauraguais, for whom he won a wager by covering twenty-two miles in an hour; and then to Lord Grosvenor. He retired to stud at the age of eleven in 1771, having won twenty-six of thirty-six races.
Another reward of Wildman’s prosperity was his commissions from George Stubbs, Britain’s greatest equestrian artist – and, you might argue, one of the greatest British artists in any genre. Stubbs painted Gimcrack with John Pratt Up for Wildman, showing Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath. Horse and jockey are next to the Beacon Course rubbing-house, where horses were saddled and otherwise groomed, and where Stubbs would later set his most celebrated painting of Eclipse. Gimcrack shows only a grey sheen on his coat, which whitened as he got older; he and his jockey are turning their heads in the same direction, with the lonely look that athletes assume on contemplating exertions to come. The picture hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A subsequent Stubbs portrait of Gimcrack, one of the painter’s best, has the narrative technique you sometimes see in early religious paintings, with different parts of the story appearing on different parts of the canvas: in the background, Gimcrack races several lengths clear of his rivals;34 in the foreground, he is at the rubbing-house, with his jockey dismounted and two stable lads attending to him. (A version of Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, Jockey and a Stable-Lad is in the Jockey Club Rooms at Newmarket.)
Wildman, then, was well in profit on his recent racing transactions when he turned up at Cranbourne Lodge on 23 December 1765, looking to buy inmates of the late Duke of Cumberland’s stud.
Eclipse’s early life comes to us as legend. Accounts of his birth, his sale, his training, his first race – these, like a good many of the stories about Dennis O’Kelly and Charlotte Hayes, have the flavour of anecdotes that have gained embellishments with circulation. At some point, a historian has written them down. Subsequent historians have repeated them. We might be tempted to accuse eighteenth-century chroniclers of lax standards, had we reason to be complacent about our own regard for historical accuracy and truthfulness. Nevertheless, given the inclination, twenty-firstcentury reporters can try to gain access to people with memories of actual events, and they have a great deal more documentation to examine. Documentation on Eclipse’s connections is sparse, and laconic. In only a few instances are there records to provide correctives to widely published accounts. One of these instances is the Cumberland dispersal sale.
The story goes that William Wildman arrived at Cranbourne Lodge late. Eclipse, his sole reason for attending, had gone through the ring and been claimed by someone else. Brandishing his watch (‘of trusty workmanship’), 35Wildman proclaimed to the auctioneer and assembled bidders that the sale had taken place before the advertised hour, and that every lot should be put up again. John Pond, who was in charge of proceedings, did not fancy doing this; so, to try to pacify the awkward customer, he offered him a lot of Wildman’s choosing. This was exactly the compromise Wildman had been angling for. He chose the colt with the white blaze, and paid, according to the first published version of these events, seventy or seventy-five guineas.
It is a nice anecdote, but is it accurate? Wildman may well have misse
d the start of the auction: one advertisement stated that the proceedings would begin at 10 a.m., while another gave the starting time as 11 a.m. It is very likely that he was aiming particularly to buy the Marske yearling.36 The advice to do so may have come from Lord Bolingbroke, to whom Wildman had sold Gimcrack; the connection between the two is suggested by the Stubbs portrait, which shows Gimcrack in Wildman’s ownership but with Bolingbroke’s jockey, John Pratt, on his back. Bolingbroke was at the sale too, of course: he bought Marske, for twenty-six guineas. But Wildman made bids for other horses. He bought a nutmeg-grey colt by (sired by) Moro, for forty-five guineas, and a bay foal by Bazajet, for six. We know of these transactions because the sale document survives; it is in the possession of the Royal Veterinary College. It is that document that tells us Eclipse was the twenty-ninth lot to come under the hammer that day, and that his price was not seventy or seventy-five guineas, but forty-five. The sale raised 1, 663½ guineas in total.
To recap: the legends we have questioned or dismissed so far in this chapter are that Eclipse was born on the day of the 1764 annular eclipse; that his father was Shakespeare, not Marske; that he was born or was stabled in East London; that William Wildman bought him alone at the Cumberland dispersal sale; and that Wildman paid seventy or seventy-five guineas for him. There is another to consider: that the auction was conducted by Richard Tattersall. Then a thrusting young man at the start of his career, Tattersall, who came from a modest background in Lancashire, went on to found, in 1766, the firm of Tattersalls (without an apostrophe), which soon became, and remains today, the largest bloodstock auctioneers in Europe. He also went on to buy, from Lord Bolingbroke, the champion racer Highflyer (a son of Cumberland’s great horse Herod), and created numerous further champions by mating Highflyer with daughters of Eclipse. Reports cited Tattersall as one of the promoters of the rumour that Shakespeare was Eclipse’s sire. His motive for doing so is obscure. One can see, though, why he was credited with involvement in what was, in hindsight, the most significant bloodstock sale of the era. But there is no evidence that he was anywhere near it. Certainly the advertisements for the sale mention only John Pond. *We have now met the four most important people in Eclipse’s life: a gambler from a humble background in Ireland; a prostitute from Covent Garden; a royal prince; and a prosperous representative of the middle classes. The most famous of all Thoroughbreds is also the most representative of horseracing, the example of how a highly bred animal with a regal background can nevertheless bring into proximity disparate members of society. Racing is still thought of as a toffs’ pursuit, yet it offers more varied material for the social historian than any other sport.
Look at the scene at Epsom on Derby day. The Queen surveys the Downs from her box in the Royal Enclosure. In a nearby box are the Dubai royal family, the Maktoums, who have significant racing interests. Their neighbours in the enclosure are grandees, trainers, racehorse owners, tycoons and celebrities; the men here are in top hats and tails, and the women are in designer dresses and hats. In the next enclosure, where lounge suits and high-street fashions are the order, congregate the professional classes, some of them enjoying corporate entertainment. On the other side of the course, packed into double decker buses, are rugby club members on a day out, and women on hen parties. Further away, in front of the cheaper stands, are families with picnics, and men and women who have come mostly to enjoy a sustained drinking session in the sun. Amid the funfair rides and market stalls on the Downs swarm gypsies and other travellers, touts and card sharps, bookmakers and hucksters.
There is proximity here, but very little interaction. Commingling across the social strata was greater in Dennis O’Kelly’s day. Dennis and the Duke of Cumberland probably met on the racecourse, and in other gambling venues too; Dennis and Cumberland’s great-nephew, the Prince of Wales (later George IV), were certainly racing acquaintances, and might almost be said to have been close, because ‘Prinny’ was a regular at gatherings at Dennis’s Epsom home. Charlotte Hayes’s business also brought her into contact with a great many esteemed clients, and William Wildman came to racing through transactions with Lord Bolingbroke and others.
Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Englanders needed to have sharper antennae than the man in Seymour Harcourt’s anecdote (chapter 3) who confused his Bath acquaintance with a social equal. You did not presume that, because a gentleman or lady might condescend to socialize with you on certain occasions, he or she was your new best friend. Wildman shot game on the Duke of Portland’s estate, but he did not join the Duke’s shooting parties: he went at other times, with a companion from his own circle.37 We think of the memoirist and rake William Hickey as belonging to the Georgian smart set, but Hickey, the son of a prosperous lawyer, did not move in aristocratic company. Dennis O’Kelly owned the greatest and most celebrated racehorse of the age, and many other fine horses besides; he was a prominent personage at the leading race meetings; and he was himself a celebrity, much discussed in the public prints. But beyond certain portals he could not go. Lacking the sense of deference that comes more naturally to the English, he was enraged by the exclusion.
Relationships on the racecourse between owners, trainers, jockeys, stable staff and members of the public give the most comprehensive picture of class relationships that a single location can show. It is a picture that has changed only superficially since the 1760s. As the Queen, from her supreme vantage point at Epsom, surveys the variegated scene, she can see too, through the woods on the other side of the course, the house where Dennis O’Kelly stabled his racers. The present merges with the past in this panorama: with all the other Derby days she has witnessed; with the Derby days before that, of Hyperion, Persimmon, Gladiateur and Diomed; and before that, with a day in May 1769, when five horses rode on to the Downs from nearby Banstead, and leading them was a chestnut with a white blaze.
29 From Lloyd’s Evening Post, 30 March – 2 April 1764
30 The last annular eclipse above Britain was visible from north Scotland, Orkney and Shetland in 2003.The next one will be in 2093.The last total eclipse in Britain took place in 1999, and the next one is due in 2090.
31 There are further uncertainties in Eclipse’s pedigree. See Appendix 2.
32 The auctioneer went on to confuse Eclipse’s pedigree with that of another horse. See Appendix 2.
33 Now the Givons Grove estate.
34 There is no crowd and the stand is shuttered, indicating that the race is a trial.
35 From Bracy Clark’s A Short History of the Celebrated Race-horse Eclipse (1835).
36 Racing people use the name of the sire (father) as a kind of adjective. They might describe contemporary horses as a ‘Kingmambo colt’ or a ‘Montjeu filly’. The sire, for reasons to do with how breeding operates rather than with the science of genetics, gets more credit for a racehorse’s prowess than the dam (mother).
37 The general point stands even if Wildman is not the figure in Stubbs’s portrait of the gentlemen’s outing on the estate – see chapter 18.
6
The Young Thoroughbred
THE QUALITIES THAT William Wildman and Lord Bolingbroke saw in Eclipse were not obvious. He was leggy, and possessed, experts thought, an ugly head. His croup was as high as or higher than his withers, 38 a characteristic that was reckoned to be undesirable in a racer. He was ‘thick-winded’, breathing at disconcerting volume as he exercised. And his pedigree, on his sire’s side, seemed to be no more distinguished than his appearance. Marske, his father, was worth only twenty-six guineas, and had been covering mares at the derisory fee of half a guinea.
Moreover, Eclipse was bad-tempered and unruly, so much so that his handlers at William Wildman’s stables at Mickleham considered gelding him. Castration, a common procedure in the racing world, has a calming effect – but of course you avoid doing it to an anima
l who might become a valuable stallion. Fortunately for the history of horseracing, the Mickleham team entrusted Eclipse instead to a ‘rough-rider’, whose speciality was taking charge of untrained horses. George Elton, or ‘Ellers’, would don stout leathers to protect his legs and ride Eclipse into the woods on night-time poaching expeditions. It was good discipline for the horse, though a dangerous transgression for the rider. Later, Ellers was prosecuted for poaching, and transported.39
The Mickleham team had time on their side. Eclipse and his contemporaries belonged to the last generation of racers who were not expected to see a racecourse until they were four or five years old. (Many of their sons and daughters would begin racing at the age of two.) The tests they faced demanded physical maturity. Races were over two, three or more commonly four miles, and many events involved heats. Horses might have to run, in a single afternoon, four races of four miles each, with only half-hour intervals in which to get their breath back. To emerge triumphant at the end of that, they had to call on great reserves of courage and stamina – what the Georgians admiringly called ‘bottom’.
During the winter and spring of 1768 and 1769, as Eclipse enters his fifth year, he begins to be subjected to an ever harsher training regime. As contemporary manuals show, he spends his nights, and the portions of each day when he is not at exercise, in an enclosed, windowless, heated stable. It is warm in winter and suffocating in summer, and he wears thick rugs. Sweating is good, believe the early trainers, who regularly turn up the heating and subject the horses, rugged and hooded, to saunas. As the racing season approaches, Eclipse is given purgatives, consisting of aloes or mercury.
Eclipse has his own ‘boy’, or groom, John Oakley, who sleeps in lodgings above the stable. Oakley gets up at about four each morning, sometimes earlier. After a breakfast of porridge, with perhaps cold meat from the previous day as well as cheese, bread and beer, he mucks out the stable, removes Eclipse’s rugs and rubs him down, gives him a breakfast of oats, clothes him again, puts on his saddle and bridle, and mounts him. The pair then join the rest of the string for morning exercise on the Downs. They are under the supervision of the trainer, who is also commonly described as a groom.
Eclipse Page 6