147 See chapter 17.
148 See chapter 8 and Appendix 1.
149 Eclipse’s other race on the Beacon Course took place later that year, on 3 October, against Sir Charles Bunbury’s Corsican.
150 From John Lawrence’s The History and Delineation of the Horse (1809).
151 It is possible that one or both of these boys did not survive William Wildman. The nomenclature and the dates are confusing. Robert Fountain, author of William Wildman and George Stubbs, said that the elder son was called William. (Perhaps he was called John William, or William John.)
152 A ‘rotatory’ motion, or ‘cross-cantering’, involves different front and rear leads. For dogs, a rotatory motion when running is normal.Unable to find any records for William, he speculated that the boy died before his father did (in 1784). Fountain also said that James died in 1827, at the age of fifty-four; so James could not have appeared in William Wildman and His Sons, if Stubbs painted it before Wildman sold Eclipse in 1770. See chapter 11.
153 In Eclipse and O’Kelly.
154 It may be, as a badge of the land of his birth, clover.
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Eclipse’s Legacy – the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
THIS CHAPTER AND THE next are about the extraordinary influence that Eclipse has exerted, through his male line, on the development of racing. It tells the stories of the Eclipse descendants who have been at the centre of some of the most significant or dramatic events in the sport. They include the inspirer of the greatest equine painting; the Derby winner that never was; the Derby winner that avenged Waterloo; and the Derby winner that broke a gambler’s heart. There is the colt who did not run in the Derby, or in any other Classic, but who became the Eclipse of the nineteenth century. There are two of the fastest fillies on the Turf. There is the supreme steeplechaser, nicknamed simply ‘Himself’. There is the colt who was the last winner of the English Triple Crown, but who could not give of his best in the race that was supposed to confirm his greatness. There is the American champion who, in the final leg of the Triple Crown, left the rest nowhere. I might have included many others: the great Italian champion Ribot; Sea Bird, an even greater horse than Secretariat, according to some; Red Rum, the triple Grand National winner; Shergar, winner of the Epsom Derby by a record margin. Through them all, the Eclipse bloodline helped shape racing as it is today. But the horses that follow seem to me to have played important parts in Turf history.
The focus on the male line may appear to be a sexist approach. Certainly, there have been famous horses, such as Seabiscuit, who were not Eclipse’s tail male descendants.155 Some of the horses in the following pages did nothing to perpetuate the line: Running Rein, having given his name to an impostor, disappeared; Arkle was a gelding. The justification for concentrating on the male line is as mentioned earlier: that, as it continues, it multiplies, saturating pedigrees. A successful stallion sires hundreds of sons (and daughters), sometimes thousands. If a few of the sons become successful stallions, continuing the male line, they will have hundreds of sons (and daughters) too. A few generations later, these descendants will cross: multiplication upon multiplication.
According to my count, there are eighty-one instances of Eclipse in the pedigree of St Simon (born in 1881, just under a hundred years after Eclipse’s death). Thanks to St Simon’s successes as a sire, the increase in that number in succeeding generations was exponential. The Eclipse line thus became the most significant genetic factor in the history of horseracing.
Hambletonian (born in 1792)
Eclipse – King Fergus – Hambletonian
The greatest of all horseracing paintings is a tribute to the Thoroughbred, but not to the Turf. It shows the nobility of a magnificent horse; and it shows us, the spectators, to be exploiters of that nobility.
Hambletonian, stabled in Yorkshire, was a winner of the St Leger, and undefeated in races he had completed (he had once, at York, veered off the course). He was owned by a hard-drinking, hard-gambling baronet of twenty-eight, Sir Harry Vane-Tempest. In 1798, Vane-Tempest’s horse Shuttle lost a 1, 000-guineas match to Joseph Cookson’s Diamond, the Newmarket champion. Seeking revenge, Vane-Tempest challenged Cookson to race Diamond against Hambletonian, this time for 3, 000 guineas. The match would take place on 25 March 1799 (Easter Monday) over the four miles-plus of the Beacon Course at Newmarket, and Hambletonian would carry 8st 3lb, while Diamond would carry eight stone.
The quality of the horses, and the north versus south element of the contest, brought a huge crowd – ‘the greatest concourse of people that ever was seen’ – to Newmarket. Inns for miles around were packed. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were bet; Hambletonian was the favourite, and went off at 5-4 on. Vane-Tempest, a man of quick and excitable passions, found the tension on race day almost too hard to bear, confessing to Frank Buckle, as the famously unflappable jockey mounted Hambletonian, ‘By God, I’d give the whole stake to be half as calm as you!’
At the off, Buckle allowed Hambletonian to settle in behind Diamond. He kicked on ahead after a mile and a quarter, before they reached the dog-leg right turn that took them in the direction of town, towards the finishing post. Hambletonian led by about two lengths, until Dennis Fitzpatrick, Diamond’s jockey, spurred his mount forward to challenge. The two, with their riders driving them brutally, charged side by side to the line, Hambletonian just warding off his rival and getting home by ‘half a neck’. ‘Both horses were much cut with the whip, and severely goaded with the spur, but particularly Hambletonian; he was shockingly goaded.’156
Vane-Tempest was as exultant after the race as he had been nervous before. He commissioned George Stubbs to paint two pictures recording Hambletonian’s triumph, and advertised in The Sporting Magazine that ‘No artist whatever, except Mr Stubbs, has had my permission to take any likeness of Hambletonian since he was in my possession.’ Of this claim, the editor of the magazine sniffed that it ‘partakes too much of PUFF for a gentleman’s signature to accompany’. Vane-Tempest’s puff was evanescent, and he certainly did not behave like a gentleman. He refused to pay Stubbs, went to court to defend himself against the painter’s claim for 300 guineas, and lost. One of Stubbs’s paintings, of Hambletonian as he won the race, never went beyond the drawing stage, and has since disappeared. That left John Nost Sartorius to portray the scene in traditional fashion: elongated horses stretching for the winning post; gentlemen in top hats in pursuit; roaring crowds.
What we have from Stubbs is Hambletonian, Rubbing Down (see colour section). The crowds have gone. Dominating the frame, Hambletonian jerks and twists – improbably balanced on his two left legs – in nervous exhaustion. A squat, dour groom stands at his head, holding the reins; a stable lad rests one hand on the horse’s withers, and has a rubbing cloth in the other. Both figures look at us impassively. You have had your fun, they seem to imply; you are intruding now, and it is we whose concern is this battered horse. It is a long way from the celebratory scene that Vane-Tempest thought he had ordered, and one can see why he was disappointed. At the heart of racing are blood, sweat and mystery, never more powerfully depicted than in this masterpiece.
Hambletonian recovered, won more races, and retired to stud. He sired more than 140 winners, and continued an Eclipse line that descended to and beyond the greatest racehorse of the nineteenth century, St Simon.Whalebone (b. 1807)
Eclipse – Pot8os – Waxy – Whalebone
As well as breeding Eclipse, the Duke of Cumberland owned another great horse, Herod. It was the cross of Eclipse and Herod lines – male and female descendants of Eclipse mating with female and male descendants of Herod – that was ‘the strongest single factor in the successful transformation of the Thoroughbred from a typical eighteenth-century weight carrier over long distances to
the nineteenth-century carrier of weights over short distances’.157
Among the first demonstrators of this transformation were the early Derby winners Waxy and his son Whalebone, and they passed on the Eclipse/Herod genius to future generations.
Waxy, whose dam was a daughter of Herod called Maria, was one of six sons of Pot8os among the thirteen runners in the Derby of 1793. He was only fourth favourite in the betting, at 12-1, but he came home with half a length to spare over the odds-on shot Gohanna; and after he and Gohanna had fought a tremendous series of rematches, he spent most of his well-earned retirement at the Duke of Grafton’s stud at Euston Hall, Norfolk. Grafton – the undistinguished Prime Minister in the 1760s and the scandalous consorter with the prostitute Nancy Parsons – once ordered that an avenue of trees, through which he might drive to the races, be planted between Euston Hall and Newmarket, twenty miles away. The planters had to stop with six miles to go, when they came up against – Grafton had not considered this obstacle – someone else’s land.
The Duke bred Waxy’s greatest son by putting Waxy to his mare Penelope. Their offspring, Whalebone, was no looker. He was just over fifteen hands tall – a standard height in Eclipse’s day but one that now, just forty years later, was considered modest. A stud groom described him as ‘the lowest and longest and mostdouble-jointed horse, with the best legs and the worst feet I have ever seen’. Later, the racing writer ‘The Druid’ (Henry Hall Dixon), who had named Waxy ‘the modern ace of trumps in the Stud Book’, summed up Whalebone as ‘shabby’. In training, The Druid added, Whalebone’s chief occupation ‘was to rear and knock his hooves together like a pair of castanets’.
Despite these dubious traits, Whalebone went off the 2-1 favourite for the 1810 Derby, and he justified the odds easily, leading all the way. But his subsequent career on the racecourse was chequered, and his initial covering fee on retiring to stud was a modest ten guineas. His performance as a stallion proved that valuation wrong. The line through his son Camel produced numerous champions, among them the great 1930s winner Hyperion. Through another son, Sir Hercules, descend the most valuable horses in bloodstock breeding today. The historian Roger Mortimer wrote of Whalebone, ‘A very high proportion…of the great horses in racing history include his name in their pedigree.’
Running Rein (b. 1841)
Eclipse – Pot8os – Waxy – Whalebone – Waverly – The Saddler – Running Rein
The judge called Running Rein the winner of the 1844 Derby. The only problem was that Running Rein was somewhere else at the time. Another contestant in the race was also an impostor. A further was pulled by his jockey; yet another was nobbled, and then pulled as well. It was an event of almost farcical corruption.
Turf morals, never impeccable, were at their lowest in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, bookmakers had arrived on racecourses, quoting odds about every horse in a race rather than, as gamblers had done in Dennis O’Kelly’s day, striking bets individually (‘Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere’). It was during this period too that Tattersalls, thebloodstock auctioneer, opened its subscription rooms, and bookmakers who settled bets there formed themselves into a group known as the Ring.158 Many of them were, in the historian Roger Longrigg’s haughtily contemptuous phrase, ‘deplorable little men’. They corrupted stable staff and jockeys, and in notorious incidents at Doncaster and Newmarket poisoned horse troughs. One of the most feared was ‘Ludlow’ Bond, who used to be seen mounted on a grey on Newmarket Heath and who was known as ‘death on a pale horse’. Then there was Crockford, ‘the second most evil man on the 19th-century Turf’ in Longrigg’s view159 and
someone of extreme lack of physical attractiveness: ‘His cheeks, ’ the writer Sylvanus wrote, ‘appeared whitened and flabby … His hands were entirely without knuckles, soft as raw veal, and as white as paper, whilst his large, flexible mouth was stuffed with “dead men’s bones†– his teeth being all false. ’You did not want to meet an angry Crockford. You did not want to meet him cheerful either: his laugh was ‘hideous’.
Crockford enjoyed his most rewarding coup when he bribed the starter to ensure that the 1827 St Leger favourite, on whom he had taken many bets, lost. In the Running Rein Derby of 1844, he was the owner of the second favourite, Ratan. Someone got to the horse on the night before the race, however, and next morning Ratan’s coat ‘was standing like quills upon the fretful porcupine, his eyes were dilated, and he shivered like a man with ague’.160The colt nevertheless started for the race; to make doubly certain that he could not win, his jockey, Sam Rogers, pulled him. Crockford, devastated at being done to as he was in the habit of doing to others, died two days later. Gamblers who had bet with him on the Oaks propped him up in an armchair at his club, to ensure that he appeared to be alive until after the race – that way, their bets remained valid. Corpse-like in life, Crockford passed for a living person when dead.
The man who set about tackling this corruption was Lord George Bentinck. Sir Charles Bunbury had been the first Dictator of the Turf;161 Bentinck was the second. Bunbury was a rigid man of integrity; Bentinck was an arrogant, impulsive and not always scrupulous gambler. In 1840, he made £60, 000 backing his filly Crucifix, who won the 2, 000 Guineas, 1, 000 Guineas and Oaks; and then, knowing that she had broken down, he dishonestly made more money by laying against her for the St Leger. Later, he got into a duel with the best shot in England, George Osbaldeston, after he had accused Osbaldeston of cheating over a bet and had paid his £200 of losses to him slowly, note by note, asking, ‘Can you count?’ – to which Osbaldeston replied, ‘I could at Eton.’ Osbaldeston challenged Bentinck and was determined to kill him, but on the intercession of friends he settled for firing his bullet through his opponent’s hat. Bentinck survived to reform the starting system, introducing flag starts to replace the previously chaotic procedure in which a man simply shouted ‘Go!’, and in particular to pursue corrupt gamblers and their associates. The Running Rein affair was his most notable success.
Running Rein was bought as a yearling by Goodman Levy (‘Mr Goodman’), a gambler, and entered for his first race, at Newmarket, the following year. But, instead of Running Rein, the horse that ran at Newmarket was Maccabaeus, a three-year-old. What had happened to Running Rein is not recorded: you fear that it was not pleasant. Maccabaeus was backed down from 10-1 to 3-1, won the race, and made Goodman a fair deal of money. The Duke of Rutland, owner of the runner-up, protested against the result without effect. The case – in which Rutland had Bentinck’s support – came to trial, but collapsed when a stable lad (for reasons at which we can only guess) swore that the winning horse really was Running Rein.
Lord George Bentinck, who successfully pursued the chief fraudsters at ‘the dirtiest Derby in history’.
‘Running Rein’ (that is, Maccabaeus) was entered for the following year’s Derby, 162 before which Bentinck, who had been gathering evidence over the winter, got up a petition against the colt’s taking part. But the Epsom stewards made the odd decision to allow him to race, with the proviso that there would be an inquiry if he won. He did win, by three parts of a length.163 Enter m’learned friends.
‘Produce the horse! Produce the horse!’ the judge demanded at the trial – the true age of ‘Running Rein’ could have been determined by an examination of his teeth. But Goodman and his associates did not produce the horse. Rather, they withdrew from the case, and fled the country. ‘If gentlemen would associate with gentlemen, and race with gentlemen, we should have no such practices. But if gentlemen will condescend to race with blackguards, they must expect to be cheated, ’ the judge concluded.
The cheating in the 1844 Derby had not stopped at Maccabaeus and Ratan. The rider of the favourite, Ugly Buck, like Sam Rogers on board Ratan, pulled on his reins to make sure that his mount could not win. The stewards grew suspicious about the appearance of a horse called Leander, and when Leander had to be put down because Maccabaeus had struck into him and broken his leg, they ordered that his jaw be cut off and examined. The vets announced that Leander was a four-year-old. Leander’s owners, German brothers called Lichtwald, were warned off English racecourses for life. They took it badly, one of them declaring that the English were liars – Leander was not four, but six!
After all that, the winner of the 1844 Derby was announced as Orlando. His owner was Colonel Peel, brother of the Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and, unfashionably, an honest sportsman.
Bentinck’s lifelong ambition was to win the Derby. Two years later, he sold his racing stud in order to commit himself to politics. One of the yearlings in the sale was called Surplice. In 1848, Surplice won the Derby – for his new owner, Lord Clifden. Bentinck’s despair was recorded by his friend Benjamin Disraeli, who had come across him a day or two later in the House of Commons Library.
[Bentinck] gave a sort of superb groan. ‘All my life I have been trying for this, and for what have I sacrificed it?’ he murmured. It was in vain to offer solace. ‘You do not know what the Derby is, ’ he moaned out.
‘Yes, I do, it is the Blue Ribbon of the Turf.’ ‘It is the Blue Ribbon of the Turf, ’ he slowly repeated to himself, and sitting down, he buried himself in a folio of statistics.
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