A few months later, Bentinck died of a heart attack. He was forty-six.
Gladiateur (b. 1862)
Eclipse – Pot8os – Waxy – Whalebone – Defence – The Emperor – Monarque – Gladiateur
By the mid-nineteenth century, England had been exporting Thoroughbreds, to Europe and to the New World, for more than a hundred years. Racehorses went to Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Switzerland, the Netherlandsand Scandinavia; they went to North and South America; they went to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. In 1730, Bulle Rock, a son of the Darley Arabian, emigrated to Virginia, and similarly bred racers followed him across the Atlantic, among them the first Derby winner Diomed, who had a grandson called American Eclipse. Sons and daughters of Whalebone, in the Eclipse male line, also made the journey. In France, the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux en France (Society for the Improvement of French Bloodstock) promoted the importation of English stock, and the French Stud Book referred to the Thoroughbred as the Pur-Sang Anglais (Pureblooded English). The English, meanwhile, continued to assume that their bloodstock was the best. Gladiateur, ‘The Avenger of Waterloo’, shattered that illusion.
The one claim that the English could make of Gladiateur was that an Englishman, Tom Jennings of Newmarket, trained him. Jennings did a skilful job, because Gladiateur suffered from navicular disease, an inflammation of the bones in one of his front feet, and was often unsound. He was unfit when he raced for the 2, 000 Guineas, but won, at odds of 7-1. For the Derby, he was in much better shape, and he came from behind – he was in tenth place as the field rounded Tattenham Corner – to pass the post in front by two lengths. It was a sensational result, and a French newspaper played up the Anglo-French rivalry, reporting that Gladiateur had required protection from six hundred hired bouncers, and that there had been a plot by the English to seize his jockey, Harry Grimshaw, and bleed him, so that he would be too weak to perform at his best.
In fact, Gladiateur’s triumph was popular, as triumphs by favourites tend to be. The colt next crossed the Channel to his homeland, and in front of 150, 000 spectators won the Grand Prix de Paris. After two victories at Goodwood came the St Leger, the third leg (after the 2, 000 Guineas and the Derby) of the Triple Crown, won previously only by West Australian (in 1853). Twodays before the race, Gladiateur was lame. But he defied his infirmity to defeat the Oaks winner, Regalia. His only defeat that year came when Grimshaw, who was short-sighted, allowed him to get too far behind the leaders in the Cambridgeshire handicap, in which he was unplaced.
Though increasingly unsound, Gladiateur won all his six races the following season, his greatest victory coming in the Ascot Gold Cup. It was another race in which Harry Grimshaw allowed his rivals – there were just two, Regalia and Breadalbane – to get away from him, and at halfway he was some three hundred yards in arrears. Then he gave Gladiateur his head. The colt, oblivious to the effect on his suspect foreleg of pounding over the bone-hard ground, swallowed up the others’ lead, overtook them before the turn into the straight, and passed the post forty lengths clear. Regalia finished exhausted, and Breadalbane was pulled up. ‘The Vigilant’, writing in The Sportsman, described it as ‘the most remarkable race I have ever seen, or ever expect to see … The style in which the great horse closed up the gap when he was at last allowed to stride along was simply incredible.’
Some great racehorses – Eclipse, Highflyer, St Simon – become great sires. Some racehorses below that rank – Phalaris, Sadler’s Wells, Storm Cat – also become great sires. And some great racehorses – Sea Bird, Brigadier Gerard, Secretariat – do not become great sires. Gladiateur, who retired to stud at the end of the 1866 season, fell into this last category. He has, nevertheless, an immortal place in racing history, as the most notable tribute to him, a life-size statue at the entrance to Longchamp racecourse, recognizes.
The erosion of the status of the English as breeders and owners of the best racing stock did nothing but accelerate thereafter. In the next twelve years, there were four further French winners of the Ascot Gold Cup, and French colts and fillies had won five more English Classics by 1880. During the twentieth century, champions came from all over. By common consent, thethree greatest horses of the century were Sea Bird, Secretariat and Ribot – respectively, French, American and Italian. The last winner of the English Triple Crown was Nijinsky (in 1970): bred in Canada, owned by an American, and trained in Ireland.
Other racing powers arose. Japan sent over El Condor Pasa to finish second to Montjeu in the 1999 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. In 2006, five thousand Japanese fans converged on Paris to cheer on their hero, Deep Impact, in the Arc; they bet on him so enthusiastically that at one stage his price was 10-1 on. In a race that was not run to suit him, he finished only third, although he was arguably the best horse in the field.
Today, the two most influential owners on the British Turf are not British. They are Coolmore, the Irish bloodstock operation run by John Magnier, and Darley, owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai.
Hermit (b. 1864)
Eclipse – Pot8os – Waxy – Whalebone – Camel – Touchstone – Newminster – Hermit
Henry Weysford Charles Plantagenet Rawdon Hastings, fourth Marquess of Hastings, was a wastrel, and he knew it. ‘Money with me oozes away; in fact, it positively melts, ’ he observed. Unable to be contented, he could divert himself only with the fleeting thrills of gambling and drinking, and of making off with Florence Paget, the belle of her day and the fiancée of Hastings’s contemporary Henry Chaplin.
The jilted Chaplin consoled himself by purchasing racehorses. Among them was Breadalbane, left trailing by Gladiateur in the 1865 Derby and the 1866 Ascot Gold Cup; and a chestnut yearling, later named Hermit. After a promising season as a two-year-old, Hermit emerged as one of the favourites for the Derby of 1867.
Whatever infatuation Hastings may have felt for FlorencePaget did not last long. A revealing photograph shows him lying on a chaise longue, languidly perusing a book, while by his side Florence bends her head over some embroidery; in another, Florence is seated, while Hastings lies at her feet, facing away from her, with a newspaper. Neither image conveys marital bliss. Florence was soon sending little notes to Chaplin, and Hastings developed an obsession with inflicting a further defeat on his rival. He bet against Hermit as if, Florence noted in alarm, the colt ‘were dead’.
From a week before the race until a few moments before it reached its climax, Hastings appeared certain to collect. On 15 May, Hermit broke a blood vessel on the gallops, and his jockey switched to another colt, with a less celebrated rider taking the mount in his place. Confidence in his chances deteriorated further on the atrociously cold Derby Day, 22 May, when amid a collection of forlorn horses parading in the paddock before the race, Hermit looked the most forlorn of all. You could back him at the desperate price of 66-1. Hail pelted down as the runners and riders prepared to race, and they endured ten false starts before getting underway. As they came round Tattenham Corner into the home straight, the leaders were Marksman, Van Amburgh, and the 6-4 favourite Vauban. With just under a furlong to go, the 10-1 shot Marksman gained a clear lead; then Hermit, coming from way back, swooped, catching Marksman a few strides from the line to win by a neck.
At the unsaddling enclosure, Hastings gave the victorious Hermit a pat. He had lost £120, 000 on the race, £20, 000 of it to Henry Chaplin.
Hastings’s fortunes never recovered. He sold his Scottish estates, and soon fell into the clutches of Henry Padwick, a moneylender dubbed by Roger Longrigg as ‘the most evil man of the 19th-century Turf’. Padwick’s speciality was destroying the lives of his clients. He and his bookmaking associate Harry Hill, having laid heavily against Hast
ings’s colt The Earl for the 1868 Derby, ensured that the bets would come good by getting Hastingsto withdraw The Earl from the race. No matter, Hastings thought. I still have the favourite, the filly Lady Elizabeth. What he did not know was that, because he had over-raced Lady Elizabeth in an effort to claw back his debts, he had ruined her as a top-class racer. She ran unplaced. She ran again, also unsuccessfully, in the Oaks a few days later, when Hastings was hissed by the crowd for putting her through this gruelling schedule. Demonstrating the mistake into which Hastings had been led, The Earl went on to win the Grand Prix de Paris, as well as three races at Royal Ascot. Had he taken part in the Derby and run to that form, he would almost certainly have won.
It was at this stage that the third Dictator of the Turf, Admiral Henry John Rous (1791–1877), entered the story. Rous was vigorous, enthusiastic, opinionated and inflexible. He was the first public handicapper, devising a new weight-for-age scale (under which young horses received weight from older rivals) and assessing the merits of racers with the aid of his notebook and old naval telescope. He was enraged by The Earl and Lady Elizabeth affair, feeling certain that Padwick and John Day (trainer of both horses) had, for their own gain, misled Hastings about the horses’ well-being. Without stopping to think about his evidence, Rous wrote to The Times to allege that ‘Lord Hastings has been shamefully deceived’, and, explaining Hastings’s compliance, asked the rhetorical question, ‘What can the poor fly demand from the spider in whose web he is enveloped?’ Hastings denied that he had been deceived, or that he had acted under influence, and Day sued. But the case did not get to court. Rous withdrew his letter, because the principal witness died.
Hastings, aged only twenty-six, suffered a drastic deterioration in health in autumn 1867. At the St Leger, he was walking with crutches. It is not known exactly what was wrong with him; only that he was a broken man. He met his end, like fellow Old Etonian Captain Hook, while reflecting on Good Form. ‘Hermit’s Derby broke my heart, ’ he said. ‘But I didn’t show it, did I?’St Simon (b. 1881)
Eclipse – King Fergus – Hambletonian – Whitelock – Blacklock – Voltaire – Voltigeur – Vedette – Galopin – St Simon
Like Eclipse, St Simon was effortlessly superior to his rivals on the racecourse, and was never extended; he became a great sire; he was higher at his croup (his rump) than at his withers; and he had a difficult temperament. One day, in an effort to calm him down, his handlers introduced him to a cat. But this was not to be a love affair such as the one between the Godolphin Arabian and Grimalkin.164 Rather, it was like introducing a mouse to a rattlesnake. St Simon picked up the cat and threw it against the roof of his box; the impact was fatal.
Towards the end of St Simon’s two-year-old career, his experienced trainer, Matthew Dawson, predicted that he would ‘probably make the best racehorse that has ever run on the Turf’. His jockey, Fred Archer, was similarly impressed. Riding him in a training exercise on an April morning, Archer decided that the colt was performing a little sluggishly, and gave him a touch with his spur. St Simon took off; Archer regained control of him only as they neared the entrance to Newmarket High Street. ‘He’s not a horse, ’ the shaken jockey reported. ‘He’s a steam engine.’
Under the rules of racing, St Simon could not compete in the Classics, because of the death of the Hungarian-born Prince Batthyany, who had bred him and made the entries. Instead, he proved his greatness most vividly in the Ascot Gold Cup. With the field nearing the home turn, St Simon was cantering behind the leader, Tristan (winner of the race the previous year). His jockey, on this day Charlie Wood, merely had to shake the reins for St Simon to sail past; he won by twenty lengths, and kept galloping for a further mile. The next day, Tristan won the Hardwicke Stakes. St Simon went on to win races at Newcastle and Goodwood, the latter again by twenty lengths, before retiring to stud.
Fred Archer (1857–1886) won greater fame than has been accorded to any other English jockey. Sir Charles Bunbury and other men of the Turf of Eclipse’s day, when jockeys were ‘boys’ and when the upstart Sam Chifney got his comeuppance, would not have approved of this adulation, and Admiral Rous would have regretted it too. Rous ‘was courteous and considerate to jockeys, but nothing would have induced him to invite one to his dinner table’.165 This, though, was a new era, of mass communication; an era that nurtured celebrity. Horseracing, which had featured only patchily in the public prints until the mid-nineteenth century, was widely reported, and jockeys were the public faces of the sport. Archer was the finest of them, a man of unmatchable talent and willpower. Only Gordon Richards, in the first half of the twentieth century, and Lester Piggott, in the second half, have come close to achieving the same level of public recognition. ‘Archer’s up!’ people would say, to indicate that all was well with the world.
All, however, was not well with Archer. He was obsessively determined, as top jockeys must be, and he earned the nickname ‘The Tinman’ owing to his relish for making money. In his seventeen seasons, he rode a third of his eight thousand mounts to victory; he won the Derby five times, the Oaks four times, and the St Leger six times. But he put himself through some terrible punishment to gain these successes. A tall man, he could keep himself under nine stone only by restricting his lunch to a biscuit and a small glass of champagne, sometimes resorting also to a fierce purgative known as ‘Archer’s Mixture’. When, in autumn 1886, he contracted a fever after wasting down to 8st 7lb to ride in the Cambridgeshire handicap, he lacked the physical resources to fight the illness. Delirium compounded the depression he had sufferedsince the recent death of his young wife, and on 8 November he shot himself.
St Simon sired Persimmon, the best horse to be raced by a member of the British royal family. When Albert Edward (‘Bertie’), the Prince of Wales, led in the victorious Persimmon after the 1896 Derby, top hats filled the air, and the cheering echoed round the Epsom Downs. A film of the finish of the race was projected in London theatres to thrilled audiences, who demanded several repeats and sang ‘God bless the Prince of Wales’. Persimmon went on to win the St Leger, and the following season won the Ascot Gold Cup as well as a new, prestigious race: the Eclipse Stakes. Fabergé later modelled him in silver.
This was the moment at which the supremacy of the Eclipse line was ensured. ‘[St Simon] and his descendants, ’ the Thoroughbred Heritage website asserts, ‘[dominated] global racing at the turn of the 20th century and for decades after.’ St Simon’s greatness confirmed Eclipse as the greatest sire of all.
155 Seabiscuit, the American folk hero of the 1930s, descended on the side of his sire, Hard Tack, from the Godolphin Arabian and Matchem – although his dam, Swing On, was from the Eclipse line.
156 From The Sporting Magazine, quoted by Judy Egerton in George Stubbs, Painter. Different standards of behaviour towards the horse prevailed then. Today, there are no spurs of course, and jockeys get punished for excessive use of the whip.
157 From the Biographical Encyclopaedia of British Flat Racing.
158 The enclosures that house betting rings on racecourses are often known as Tattersalls, or ‘Tatts’.
159 Longrigg’s candidate for the top spot is Henry Padwick. See the essay on Hermit, coming up.
160 Quoted in Derby Day 200 (1979).
161 Some historians say that he was the third. The first, by their count, was Charles II, and the second was Tregonwell Frampton, the eccentric ‘Keeper of the running horses at Newmarket’ under William III, Queen Anne, George I and George II.
162 The Derby is for three-year-old colts and fillies. Goodman’s cheat was not unprecedented. The trainer for five-times Derby winner Lord Egremont admitted that he had twice won the race with four-year-olds.
163 A four-year-ol
d competing against three-year-olds at this time of year would normally carry 11lb more on his back, to compensate for his greater maturity.
164 See chapter 6.
165 From the Biographical Encyclopaedia of British Flat Racing.
20
Eclipse’s Legacy – the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
LISTS OF THE GREATEST horses in history are male-dominated. Does that mean that fillies and mares are not as good? Overall, yes it does. But five fillies have, albeit with weight allowances, beaten the colts to win the Derby. Sixteen fillies, most recently the outstanding Zarkava, have won Europe’s richest race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Three fillies have won the Kentucky Derby. In 2007, the filly Rags to Riches won the Belmont Stakes, defeating Curlin – and Curlin went on to win the world’s two richest races. Fillies and mares are certainly as popular as their male counterparts, and often more so: racing fans tend to ascribe special qualities of pluck and fortitude to females doing battle with male rivals.
Sceptre (born in 1899)
Eclipse – King Fergus – Hambletonian – Whitelock – Blacklock – Voltaire – Voltigeur – Vedette – Galopin – St Simon – Persimmon – Sceptre
Pretty Polly (b. 1901)
Eclipse – Pot8os – Waxy – Whalebone – Sir Hercules – Birdcatcher – Oxford – Sterling – Isonomy – Gallinule – Pretty PollyTwo of the best and most popular female racehorses raced in the early years of the twentieth century. Sceptre won four Classics, but may be best known for a race she lost. Pretty Polly acquired such a formidable reputation that she started favourite for twentythree of her twenty-four races, and in twenty-one of them was at odds-on.
Sceptre needed a big supply of pluck and fortitude, because she had an owner, a gambler called Robert Sievier, who put her through an exceptionally gruelling schedule. From April to June 1902, she ran in the 2, 000 Guineas, 1, 000 Guineas, Derby, Oaks, Grand Prix de Paris, and two races at Royal Ascot. In the autumn, she cemented her position as ‘the country’s sweetheart’ with victory in the St Leger. But Sievier, on a winning streak as a punter when he bought Sceptre, hit a losing one that her exploits could not offset, and he sold her the following spring. Under new ownership, she lined up in July 1903 for the ten-furlong Eclipse Stakes at Sandown. Over the next ninety-seven years, only a few contests would challenge this one for the title of race of the century.
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