Or perhaps Oakley was the trainer? It is a sign of the humble roles of trainers and jockeys at this time that we know so little about the handlers of even so famous a horse as Eclipse. By the end of the century, training was recognized as a specialist role, and trainers were ascending the social ladder. Men of the Turf in the eighteenth century would be surprised to discover that modern trainers, such as Sir Michael Stoute, are rather grand.
Once on the Downs, Oakley and Eclipse start off at an easy gallop.40 After half a mile or so they come to an incline, and Oakley begins to urge Eclipse to go faster. They race uphill for another half mile before Oakley pulls on the reins. They walk back, and Eclipse gets a moderate drink of water – the Georgians do not believe that horses should be allowed very much refreshment. They gallop gently again, and then walk. Then they have another fast gallop, and then another walk. All this while, Eclipse has been burdened by heavy rugs. Every week or ten days, he wears this clothing on a ‘sweat’, a gallop of four miles or more. But even on less gruelling days he is sweaty enough.
At about nine o’clock, they return to the stables. Oakley leads him back to his stall, ties him up, rubs down his legs with straw, removes his rugs, and brushes and ‘curries’ him (with a metal currycomb). He clothes the horse again, and gives him some more oats or hay.41 The stables are then shut up.
Jockeys, too, had to be hardy individuals. When Oakley joined the stable, and was about to ride his first race, he went through a fearful initiation. His colleagues told him that the best way to get his weight down to the eight and a half stone required was to borrow as many waistcoats as he could, go on a three-mile run, strip naked on his return, and immerse himself in the hot dung hill outside the stable boxes. He dutifully obeyed. As he emerged, caked with ordure, he heard a chorus of laughter. Suddenly he was surrounded by his gleeful fellow grooms, all carrying pails; they drenched him in freezing water.
Today, as Eclipse nears his racecourse debut, that episode is far enough in the past for Oakley to have had the fun of playing the same joke on several new recruits. He is an established member of the Mickleham team, and a valued rider of William Wildman’s horses at race meetings. From now until mid-afternoon he and the other boys have time off. They play gambling games, many of them now obscure: fives, spell, null, marbles, chuck-farthing, spinning tops, and holes.42 At four o’clock, they return to the stables and take the horses out for another round of exercise. Then there is more rubbing down, brushing and combing; feeding, of horses and boys; preparing the horse’s bed. The stables are shut up again, with horses and boys inside, at nine.
Albeit physically demanding, lowly in status and derisorily paid, working in an eighteenth-century stable is not a bad job. In an enlightened establishment such as Wildman’s, Oakley is well looked after, and enjoys the responsibility of being the most important person in the life of a horse he realizes may be special. Eclipse trusts him as he does no other human. Oakley knows that the horse requires special treatment: he will respond only to the most deferential of suggestions, and will rebel against the whippings and spurrings that are normal practice in race-riding.
For the horses, however, the regime is brutal. It is not surprising that early racing paintings show animals that are etiolated and apparently long in the back: they are trained until every ounce of ‘condition’ – spare flesh – is sweated away. Twenty-five years after Eclipse was in training, a jockey called Samuel Chifney wrote a memoir with the modest title of Genius Genuine, and showed himself to be ahead of his time both in his attempt to market himself as a racing personality (while holding a job regarded as socially insignificant), and in his view that the accepted training practices of his era were ‘ignorant cruelty’. Chifney described a horse returning from a sweating exercise:‘It so affects [the horse] at times, that he keeps breaking out in fresh sweats, that it pours from him when scraping, as if water had been thrown at him. Nature cannot bear this. The horses must dwindle.’ In spite of his words, most racehorses continued to be trained in this way until well into the nineteenth century.43
Yet Eclipse thrives. He has an unusual way of galloping: he carries his head low, and he spreads out his hind legs to such an extent that, one observer said later, a wheelbarrow might have been driven through them. Even so, he eats up the ground. Oakley has never sat on a horse so fast. Eclipse is – though Oakley does not describe him in these terms – the most brilliant representative to date of a new type of running horse, the fastest the world has ever seen: the Thoroughbred.
During the previous half a century, some mysterious alchemy had been taking place in the breeding sheds of England. The horses that were emerging were blessed with an unprecedentedly potent combination of speed and stamina. How these qualities came about is the subject of much debate, hampered (though not dampened) by the haphazard standards of early record keeping. If you want to take a patriarchal view, you can give most of the credit to just three stallions. Their status has brought to their biographies various fanciful and romantic accretions; what is a matter of historical fact is that every contemporary Thoroughbred descends in the male line from the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian or the Godolphin Arabian.
The horse known as the Byerley Turk may not have been a spoil, as the early histories relate, of the Siege of Buda (1686), because recent research suggests that Colonel Robert Byerley of the Sixth Dragoon Guards was not there. The Turk may rather have been captured at the Siege of Vienna (1683) – the ‘browne’ horse, the least valuable among three Vienna captives, that John Evelyn saw parade in St James’s Park in 1684:‘They trotted like does as if they did not feel the ground. Five hundred guineas was demanded for the first; 300 for the second and 200 for the third, which was browne. All of them were choicely shaped but the last two not altogether so perfect as the first. It was judged by the spectators among whom was the King, the Prince of Denmark, Duke of York and several of the Court … that there were never seen any horses in these parts to be compared with them.’
Colonel Byerley certainly owned the Turk by 1689, when he took him to Ireland. In spring 1690, they won a silver bell at a meeting held by the Down Royal Corporation of Horsebreeders. That July, Byerley fought at the Battle of the Boyne against the Jacobite forces of the deposed James II, riding the Turk on reconnaissance missions and narrowly escaping capture thanks to the horse’s speed. After his side’s victory, Byerley returned to England, retired from the army, married, sat as the MP for Knaresborough in Yorkshire, and put his horse to stud. Despite covering what historians consider to have been indifferent mares, the Byerley Turk established an enduring bloodline. He is the great-great-grandfather of the Duke of Cumberland’sHerod. And he appears three times in the pedigree of Eclipse.44
The second of the three lauded founding fathers of the new breed was by repute a pure-bred Arabian. He was descended on his mother’s side – for Arabs, this is the important part of the pedigree – from a mare called the Mare of the Old Woman.45 While few Englishmen at this time were bothering with the pedigrees of their horses, the Arabs had long been punctilious about them. The Duke of Newcastle wrote, ‘The Arabs are as careful and diligent in keeping the genealogies of their horses, as any princes can be in keeping any of their own pedigrees.’ Giving false testimony about a horse’s background would bring ruin on oneself and one’s family.
We have to assume, then, that the patter given to Thomas Darley, a merchant and British Consul in Aleppo, was genuine. Darley bought his Arabian from Sheikh Mirza II in 1702, and in a letter to his brother a year later described the horse’s three white feet and emblazoned face, adding that he was ‘of the most esteemed race among the Arabs both by sire and dam … I believe he will not be much disliked; for he is highly esteemed here, where I could have sold him at a very considerable price, if I had not designed him for England’. The problem
was that the War of the Spanish Succession was raging, and Darley was having trouble securing a sea passage for his purchase, although he was hopeful that his friend Henry Brydges, son of Lord Chandos, would be able to take the horse with him on board a ship called the Ipswich. Then another problem emerged: the Sheikh changed his mind about the sale. Nevertheless, Brydges made off with the Arabian, who arrived in England at roughly the same time as a letter from the Sheikh to Queen Anne furiously alleging that his possession had been ‘foully stolen’. The protests had no effect. The Darley Arabian stood at the family estate, Aldby Park near York, until his death in 1730.
Like the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian covered mostly unexceptional mares. One of the few good ones was called Betty Leedes, owned by Leonard Childers – pronounced with a short ‘i’, not as in ‘child’ – of Cantley Hall, Doncaster. Betty Leedes returned to her paddock in Doncaster, and eleven months later gave birth to ‘the fleetest horse that ever ran at Newmarket, or, as generally believed, the world’, Flying Childers. Here was the horse that demonstrated what this new breed, the descendants of Eastern stallions on British soil, could do. His portrait by James Seymour shows a prancing, compact, muscular colt, of a type we would assess as a sprinter. But Flying Childers had to race over long distances. In a match against two horses called Almanza and Brown Betty at Newmarket, he was reported to have completed the three-and-three-quarter-mile Round Course in six minutes and forty-eight seconds – about a minute faster than par. He later ran the four miles-plus Beacon Course at Newmarket in seven and a half minutes, ‘covering 25 feet at every bound’. These reports come from the early 1720s, before the publication of John Cheny’s first racing calendar (an authoritative record of race results), and may be exaggerated; but we do know that Flying Childers beat Fox, one of the best racers of the day and a winner of three King’s Plates, by a quarter of a mile, despite carrying a stone more on his back than did his rival.
By this time, Flying Childers had passed from Leonard Childers’s hands to the Duke of Devonshire, and he retired to the Duke’s stud at Chatsworth. However, the best racehorses do not necessarily become the best stallions.46 Flying Childers sired some good horses, but his younger brother, who never raced, sired more, and continued the male line that dominates the bloodstock industry today. Bartlett’s Childers, also known as Bleeding Childers because he would break blood vessels in hard exercise, sired Squirt, who sired Marske, who sired Eclipse.
On the maternal side of Eclipse’s pedigree is the third of these famous stallions, the one with the most colourful story of all – although some of the colour may be the result of artful tinkering. The Godolphin Arabian was foaled in the Yemen in the mid-1720s, exported to Tunis, and given as a present by the Bey (Governor) of Tunis to Louis XV of France. The horse failed to please the King, and had been reduced (legend has it) to pulling a water-cart through the streets of Paris when he was spotted by a man called Edward Coke, who paid £3 for him. Coke returned to England, but did not enjoy the company of his acquisition for long, dying at the age of only thirty-two. The horse then passed to Francis, the second Earl of Godolphin. The Godolphins were a racing family. Of the first Earl, a prominent politician who died in 1732, it had been said, ‘His passion for horse racing, cock-fighting, and card-playing, was, indeed, notorious, but it was equally notorious that he was seldom a loser by his betting transactions, which he conducted with all the cool calculation and wariness of a professional blackleg.’
The indignity of pulling a water-cart may have been in his past, but there were further indignities for the Arabian at the Godolphin stud at Gog Magog in Cambridgeshire. He was employed as a ‘teaser’, the horse with the job – it remains an important though unglamorous role in the breeding industry today – of perking up a mare before the main man, the stallion, came along. The main man at Gog Magog was Hobgoblin, a grandson of the Darley Arabian. But when Hobgoblin met a mare called Roxana, he decided that he did not fancy her. So the Godolphin Arabian, no doubt gratefully, covered her instead, and Roxana duly gave birth to Lath, the best racehorse since Flying Childers.The parents, having hit it off, met again, this time producing Cade – not as good a racehorse, but the sire of the outstanding Matchem, through whom the Godolphin Arabian male line continues to the present. The Godolphin Arabian also got (sired), this time with a mare called Grey Robinson, Regulus, who won eight royal plates and retired undefeated to stud. There, with a mare called Mother Western, he sired Spilletta – Eclipse’s mother.47
Later, in about 1793, George Stubbs painted the Godolphin Arabian, working from an original by David Morier. In the background, next to the barn, is the Godolphin Arabian’s friend, Grimalkin the cat. There are various stories about Grimalkin; again, you can take your pick. One is that when the Godolphin Arabian died, in 1753, Grimalkin placed herself on his carcass, followed the body to the burial ground, and after the interment crawled miserably away, never to reappear until found dead in the hay loft. Another version, even sadder, is that the Godolphin Arabian accidentally crushed Grimalkin; furious with grief, the horse would attempt to savage any other cat that came across his path.
The horse in Stubbs’s portrait has the thick neck characteristic of a horse at stud, to an exaggerated extent: his crest – the top of his neck – is so high and convex that his back appears to begin halfway between his legs. What kind of horse is he? Some equestrian writers think that he resembles a Barb, a breed of horse from North Africa, and indeed he has been known as the Godolphin Barb.
Is every contemporary racehorse descended, in male line, from a stallion of one of three different breeds, or were the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian all in fact, as some historians have argued, Arabs? We cannot be sure. The early owners applied the terms ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Barb’ with little concern for breeding; they meant only a horse of Eastern blood.
Eastern horses were not renowned racers, and of these three, only the Byerley Turk, with his cup at Down Royal, saw a racecourse. Why, then, did the early breeders – grandees and substantial landowners, largely based in Yorkshire – import them? They did so because they esteemed Eastern horses for a quality known as ‘prepotency’: the ability to breed true to type, and to maximize in their offspring the attributes of the mares with whom they mated. The theory worked too, getting its most spectacular early demonstration in the career of the Darley Arabian’s son Flying Childers.
In the years following the Restoration and in the early years of the eighteenth century, these breeders imported some two hundred stallions who were to appear in the first General Stud Book of 1791. Examination of pedigrees shows that the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian should not get all the credit, and that many others made significant contributions, even though their male lines expired. You can easily see, for example, the influence of Alcock’s Arabian: he was grey, and appears in the pedigrees of every grey Thoroughbred.48 And of course half of the credit is due to the early mares, although, as is so often the case with females in history, they are obscure figures, many of them nameless. It seems that they, too, had a good deal of Eastern blood; how high a proportion is a contentious matter. At the end of the bottom, maternal line of Eclipse’s pedigree is a mysterious ‘Royal mare’.49
What we do know is that the Thoroughbred, this cross of Eastern stallions with English mares, transcended its parentage. In the century when the English refined the rules of cricket, and a century before they compiled the rules of football and rugby, they created a new breed of sporting horse, a racer that was bigger, more powerful, and faster.50 Soon after, Thoroughbreds emigrated and founded dynasties in every horseracing country.
Flying Childers had shown what this new breed could do. But Eclipse became the horse who, in his own time and ever since, represented t
he Thoroughbred’s abilities in excelsis
38 The croup is the highest point of a horse’s hind quarters. The withers are at the base of the neck above the shoulders.
39 Transportees at this time were usually sent to Maryland or Virginia.
40 Oakley has probably ignored the pre-exercise tip of Gervase Markham: ‘Then do yourself piss in your horse’s mouth, which will give him occasion to work and ride with pleasure.’ (From How to Choose, Ride, Train and Diet, Both Hunting-Horses and Running Horses, 1599).
41 The equestrian expert John Lawrence, writing in the early nineteenth century, thought that oats and hay were a sufficient diet for racehorses. Gervase Markham had recommended also bread, malt and water mash, and the occasional raw egg; and from time to time, Markham said, you should season the horse’s meal with aniseed or mustard seed.
42 The temptation for present-day stable staff is to spend their free time in betting shops.
43 Taking care not to ‘overcook’ a horse is one of the key skills of the modern trainer. In particular, the trainer does not put a horse through vigorous exercise too close to a race. As I write, one of the favourites for a sprint race at Royal Ascot, ten days away, has had his last serious gallop. He will gallop again in five days, but will not be asked to stretch himself.
44 He appears once eight generations back in Eclipse’s pedigree, and twice nine generations back. The formula to describe this inbreeding is 8 [H11003] 9 [H11003] 9.
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