Eclipse

by Nicholas Clee

  177 The Queen’s filly Dunfermline won the 1977 Oaks and St Leger.

  178 Some tracks, but not the Triple Crown ones, have introduced artificial surfaces such as Polytrack, also in use at the English courses Lingfield, Wolverhampton and Great Leighs.

  179 Five years later, Turcotte fell from his horse in a race at Belmont, and was left a paraplegic.

  180 See the essay on Phar Lap.

  181 He became ruler of Dubai in 2006.

  182 It is still the case. Lammtarra, the 1995 winner, was trained by Godolphin but ran in the colours of Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew. In 2008, New Approach raced to victory at Epsom in the colours of the sheikh’s wife, Princess Haya – he had given her the horse as a present.

  183 The popular jockey at last broke his Derby duck in 2007, on Authorized.

  184 In the past few years alone, they have included Giant’s Causeway, Galileo, High Chaparral, Hawk Wing, Rock of Gibraltar, Dylan Thomas, Henrythenavigator and Duke of Marmalade.

  185 The Green Monkey is a Barbados golf course to which Coolmore has ties.

  21

  The Skeleton

  ECLIPSE STANDS, SKELETALLY, in a glass case in the small museum of the Royal Veterinary College in Hertfordshire. Opposite him, misdated to c.1750 rather than to c.1769, is his portrait, Stubbs’s first study of him. Eclipse has had a tortuous and often undignified journey here, and he has survived questions about his identity as well as several attempts at impersonation. Now, he is back in his rightful, starring role; and he is for the second time at the centre of pioneering research.

  The first research took place following his death in 1789, when Charles Vial de Sainbel, the French veterinarian, anatomized him. Sainbel, and his English wife, were back in England – where he had earlier failed to set up a veterinary college – escaping from the dangers of revolutionary France. His friends had gone to the guillotine or had emigrated, and his estates had been confiscated. A tall man with a dark complexion and prominent cheekbones, he was amiable, ambitious, egotistical and punctilious. Getting his college off the ground was now a pressing need. Perhaps he made Andrew O’Kelly an offer to examine Eclipse, having seen that the great horse would be the means of furthering his cause.

  Sainbel skinned the body and removed the organs. One of his first services to subsequent researchers was the discovery thatEclipse’s heart was abnormally large, at 14lb.186 Then Sainbel set about measuring the skeleton. This is not a straightforward job. You cannot do it simply with a tape measure, because you do not know how the angles of the joints would have been affected by half a ton of bodyweight. Sainbel’s solution was to take the straightforward measurements and to deduce the rest in proportion to them. The results are odd. He gives the length of Eclipse’s head as twenty-two inches, which is short, and the horse’s height as three times that figure, sixty-six inches, which is exceptionally tall. It translates to 16.2 hands – a good height for a twenty-first-century racehorse but giant by the standards of Eclipse’s era. (Racing historians reckon Eclipse’s true height to have been about 15.3 hands.) There are dubious details in Sainbel’s portrait of Eclipse too. He shows a white blaze extending down Eclipse’s face and covering his muzzle, and a white stocking covering his hock, whereas in the Stubbs and Sartorius portraits the blaze is only on the front of Eclipse’s head, and the top of the stocking is below the hock. These discrepancies have led to questions about whether Eclipse really was the horse that Sainbel studied.

  Sainbel calculated that Eclipse’s stride could cover twentyfive feet, that he could complete two and one-third galloping actions a second, and that he could cover four miles in six minutes and two seconds. That all seems somewhat theoretical. More impressive is the vet’s account of the mechanics of the gallop: Sainbel described the motions, involving lead legs and brief elevation from the ground, that Muybridge was to photograph some ninety years later. However, despite his hope of offering ‘a surer guide to the brush or chisel of the artist, who commonly only employs them in opposition to nature’, he failed to influence the conventions of horse painting. Artists, until visual evidence madethem change their ways, carried on depicting the ‘rocking horse’ gallop.

  Whatever the flaws in Sainbel’s study, it impressed the men he wanted to influence. They approved his proposals and came up with his financing, and the Veterinary College, London, 187 the first British school for veterinarians, welcomed its first students in January 1792. Sainbel was the inaugural professor.

  He enjoyed the fruition of his campaign only briefly. In August the following year, Sainbel developed a fever, and died at the age of forty. (His symptoms, of severe shivering, hint that his fatal condition was the infectious disease glanders, which can be transmitted from animals.) Sainbel’s testament, and one of the few sources of income for his widow, was Essays on the Veterinary Art: Containing an Essay on the Proportions of the Celebrated Eclipse. He had concluded that, while Eclipse had ‘never been esteemed handsome’, the horse’s frame was ‘almost perfect’. Even if Eclipse’s offspring had made no impression on Thoroughbred history, his role as the figurehead in Sainbel’s campaign to further animal welfare would have confirmed him as one of the most important of all Thoroughbreds.

  Eclipse’s skeleton now began its wanderings. Its first owner was Edmund Bond, who was the O’Kellys’ vet and who had attended Sainbel’s dissection of the corpse. Bond kept it in his own small museum in Mayfair. When he died, he left behind a debt of £500 to a fellow vet called Bracy Clark, who received payment from Bond’s widow in the form of Eclipse.

  Bracy Clark, while writing the first attempt at a full account of Eclipse’s career as well as other studies of equestrian matters, was a man of varied interests, also assembling an insect cabinet that earned him membership of the Linnaean Society, and founding the first cricket club in Worcester. But he lacked ideal facilitiesfor keeping a skeleton. Eclipse was, literally, Bracy Clark’s skeleton in the cupboard – or rather, the limbs were in two adjoining cupboards, with the torso and head stashed on top. At last recognizing that this arrangement was unsatisfactory, he donated Eclipse for display in a cabinet in Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, where at various times the exhibits also included Egyptian artefacts, a family of Laplanders ‘complete with house and reindeer’, and a pair of eighteen-year-old Siamese twins.188 The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons offered to take the responsibility off his hands for sixty guineas, but got a brusque response – ‘a hundred being demanded for this invincible monarch of the racecourse’. Bracy Clark also rebuffed the first rumours (‘very ungenerous and ridiculous’) that his possession was fake. ‘The bones themselves, which are remarkable, would sufficiently evince their genuineness to any person not wilfully blind or prejudiced, ’ he insisted.

  Meanwhile, other parts of Eclipse’s anatomy were acquiring the status of religious relics (see colour section). The royal family took possession of a couple of his hooves, and in 1832, at the climax of a grand dinner, William IV presented one of them to the Jockey Club. It was mounted on a salver, and had an inscription carved in gold. The club instituted it as the trophy for an annual race, the Eclipse Foot, staged at Ascot. The hoof is still in the Jockey Club Rooms in Newmarket, along with the Newmarket Challenge Whip – into which are reputed to be woven hairs from Eclipse’s mane and tail – and Stubbs’s copy189 of his painting of Eclipse at the Newmarket Beacon Course rubbing-house. So Eclipse has a hallowed place at an institution that never admitted Dennis O’Kelly, his owner.

  What happened to the second royal hoof is a mystery. When Theodore Cook was writing Eclipse and O’Kelly, he received the following letter: ‘Lord Knollys, Balmoral Castle, 1906: Dear Mr Cook, I have submitted your letter to the King, and I find that hisMajesty does possess one of Eclipseâ€
™s hoofs. Yours very truly, Knollys.’ However, my enquiries at The Royal Collection drew a blank, with no record showing up on the collection’s database – unless for some reason Eclipse’s was the unmarked hoof inscribed ‘Xmas 1902’. A third hoof, converted into a snuff box, was last recorded in Jamaica. The last report of the fourth placed it in Leicestershire. A William Worley was said to have owned a tie-pin made from material from one of the hooves. In 1910, there was a proposal that the Jockey Club hoof travel to Vienna, so that the Emperor of Austria could take snuff from it at a lunch to mark the opening of a field sports exhibition.190

  Portions of Eclipse’s hide went hither and thither too. Theodore Cook, writing his biography of Eclipse and O’Kelly in 1907, reported that there was a section of chestnut hide, together with a letter saying that it had come from Andrew O’Kelly, at The Durdans, a grand house in Epsom. When the light shone on it, Cook enthused, it produced ‘that extraordinary iridescent effect which makes a true chestnut the loveliest colour in the world’. A letter in Cook’s possession from a man who was friendly with the son of Thomas Plumer, who had bought Cannons from Andrew, said that the younger Plumer could remember playing with Eclipse’s skin in the Cannons loft. Then there was a story that a portion of Eclipse’s hide was being kept in pickle at a tanner’s in Edgware; another of Cook’s correspondents cut off a bit and sent it to him.

  In 1860, just three weeks before he died at the age of eightynine, Bracy Clark got his 100 guineas. His customer was John Gamgee, who thought that Eclipse would bring lustre to his new veterinary college in Edinburgh. ‘The skeleton of Eclipse now inour possession, still connected by its ligaments, is proof that Eclipse was a horse of most perfect symmetry, ’ wrote Gamgee’s father, Joseph, in the Edinburgh Veterinary Review, while noting that ‘some very important errors’ had crept into Sainbel’s original measurements. Despite this prize attraction, Gamgee struggled to make an impact with his college. He transferred to London, where he called his venture the Albert Veterinary College, but again got into difficulties. Packing it in, and preparing to head off to America in search of better fortune, Gamgee donated the skeleton to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

  Eclipse’s new home was the RCVS museum in Red Lion Square. It was not hospitable. In the early 1900s, a member of the RCVS council noted with dismay ‘the dirty and dusty state [the skeleton] is in … if it is not kept in a clean state there will soon be no skeleton of Eclipse at all’. Another said, ‘I was in the museum this morning and I think it more a place to set potatoes in than anything else.’ Nevertheless, the college did not take any remedial action until 1920: converting its dark and dusty museum into a library, it handed over the skeleton to the Natural History Museum, which had first put in a request for it eighteen years earlier.

  By this time, there was another point of comparison between bits of Eclipse’s anatomy and religious relics: they were unfeasibly numerous. In 1907, when Theodore Cook was trying to unravel the story, ‘Six “undoubted” skeletons of Eclipse claimed my bewildered attention. No less than nine “authentic” feet were apparently possessed by this extraordinary animal. The “genuine” hair out of his tail would have generously filled the largest armchair in the Jockey Club. The “certified” portions of his hide would together have easily carpeted the yard at Tattersalls.’

  Lady Wentworth, the dogmatic Thoroughbred historian, doubted the credentials of the skeleton in the Natural History Museum. She noted the conflicting measurements, as well as the differences between Sainbel’s portrait and Stubbs’s, and sheargued that the task of reassembling a skeleton from separate parts, kept by the vets Edmund Bond and Bracy Clark among the remains of other horses, was akin to ‘solving a Greek crossword puzzle’.191 In her view, the bones were those of ‘a common crossbred horse’. The marketable value of the skeleton was an incentive to fraud, Lady Wentworth alleged. ‘Eclipse’s skeleton, like Caesar’s wife, would have to be above suspicion before we could base any theories on it.’

  Nevertheless, this skeleton continued to enjoy official status, if not appropriate prominence. In 1972, the racing paper the Sporting Life ran a sad story about how ‘The Turf’s greatest horse lies forgotten in a museum basement.’ That neglect ended eleven years later, when Eclipse travelled to Newmarket to join the exhibits at the new National Horseracing Museum, opened by the Queen. He stayed in Newmarket for twenty years, although his ownership changed in 1991, when the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons – much to the disappointment of the Natural History Museum, which holds the skeletons of other Thoroughbreds including St Simon, and which had come to regard Eclipse as its natural possession – donated it to the Royal Veterinary College as a 200th birthday gift. At the same time, the American collector Paul Mellon gave the college his Stubbs portrait – the one that Stubbs used as a model for Eclipse with William Wildman and His Sons and Eclipse at Newmarket, with a Groom and Jockey – as well as a bronze statue of Eclipse by James Osborne.192

  Eclipse completed his travelling in 2003, when he moved from Newmarket to join the portrait and statue at the opening – again by the Queen – of the Eclipse Building at the RVC in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

  *

  I glance up from my computer screen, and I see above my desk my print of Eclipse, as painted by Stubbs, preparing to race against Bucephalus. I click on a folder named ‘Pics’, and there is Eclipse with William Wildman and his sons, or Eclipse at stud painted by Garrard, or Eclipse by Sartorius walking over the course for the King’s Plate. Now, it is time to enter the great horse’s physical presence.

  I take the train to Potters Bar, and a taxi beyond the suburban streets into the Hertfordshire countryside. We pull up at the Royal Veterinary College’s Eclipse Building, and I go into a reception area overlooked, from the floor above, by Eclipse’s statue. The RVC receptionist, informing a colleague of my arrival, announces herself as ‘Pam in Eclipse’. I look to my left; through an open door, at the opposite end of a modestly sized room, is the skeleton. I go in.

  Panels on the wall tell the stories of Eclipse and Sainbel. I turn round; there is the Stubbs painting. It requires a conceptual leap to link skeleton and portrait: the bones, fleshless, appear to be those of a smaller animal than a Thoroughbred. Are they linked? Or is the RVC’s proudest possession a fake? Dr Renate Weller, of the RVC’s Structure and Motion laboratory, joins me, and we look at the skeleton. This certainly seems to be the skeleton of an animal who stayed constitutionally sound into old age, showing only a fusion of the last thoracic and first lumbar vertebrae, and of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae. But did Sainbel anatomize the horse whom Stubbs painted? We look at the portrait. Dr Weller, who has a nicely sceptical sense of humour, is inclined to dismiss Stubbs, despite his reputation for verisimilitude, as a source of anatomical evidence. She points to the angle of the fetlock, and says that it is too steep; the angle of the shoulder is ‘much too steep’; the angle of the tarsus (the joint on the hind leg) ‘looks bizarre’; and Eclipse’s neck appears to be too short. ‘I don’t like this picture, ’ she concludes.

  We move to Dr Weller’s narrow, shared office, where, weighing down the papers in a tray on a filing cabinet, are two resin models of Eclipse’s humerus (the bone at the top of the forelimb). She tells me about the RVC’s research. The college has examined seven hundred horses, and eighteen horse skeletons. Its aims are to further the understanding of equine anatomy, and to gain insights into the relationship between the conformation of a horse and equine injuries.

  Dr Weller and her colleagues in the RVC’s Structure and Motion team removed Eclipse’s right (off) front leg and put it through a CT scanner, taking care that the met
al pins used to mount the skeleton did not overheat the apparatus. They loaded the CT images into a program called Mimics, which reproduced them in 3D; a further piece of software, Magics, combined the images of the individual bones to produce a complete 3D image of the leg. The Mimics file guided a laser to carve a replica of the leg in a tank of resin. Yet another piece of software, which had been developed for such uses as simulating the effect of surgery on children with cerebral palsy, depicted the mechanics of the limb.

  The Structure and Motion team’s conclusions have a ring of bathos. Eclipse, they found, was by contemporary standards a small, light-framed Thoroughbred, ‘with average bone measurements without any outstanding features’. But maybe that was the horse’s secret? As Muybridge showed with his photographic sequence of the gallop, a running horse, weighing some 500kg, hits the ground first with just one leg; only briefly are all four legs bearing the half-ton or more. Did Eclipse’s averageness keep him sound? Dr Weller and her colleagues have since looked at other skeletons, among them the Natural History Museum’s St Simon and Brown Jack. Brown Jack: now there, indisputably, was a sound horse. From 1929, he won six consecutive runnings of Royal Ascot’s Queen Alexandra Stakes – at two and three-quarter miles, the longest Flat race in the calendar. Dr Weller, unsentimental about the RVC’s Eclipse association, says, ‘Brown Jack impressed me more.’

  This opinion notwithstanding, Eclipse has a key role in theRVC’s promotional and educational activities. In 2004, the college sent its reproduction leg to the Royal Society Summer Exhibition. The leg is also the star prop in the RVC’s educational outreach programme to schools and colleges. Seeing a physical specimen, the RVC says, teaches more about anatomy, and inspires more enthusiasm for the subject, than any number of diagrams and textbook explanations. The college, which is lobbying for the financial support to create an entire replica of Eclipse’s skeleton, believes that its Eclipse project can be the prototype for the creation of similar teaching aids. The project may also show the way towards modelling of human subjects, so that replicas can give evidence of the likely outcome of surgery.