Eclipse (11 page)

W
ILLIAM WILDMAN DID NOT
get where he was in business without the talent of foresight. If, he reasoned, Eclipse turned out to be the superstar that the Mickleham team thought he was, the horse's unfashionable sire, Marske, would suddenly become a valuable property. Breeders would pay good money to send their mares to Marske, hoping to produce Eclipse mark two. So Wildman travelled down to a farm near Ringwood in Hampshire, where Marske's progenitive worth had risen to three guineas a covering, and offered to buy the stallion for twenty guineas. At eighteen, Marske was getting on a bit and might not have many fertile years left; his owner accepted Wildman's offer. Wildman returned to Mickleham with his purchase, and advertised him in the 1768
Racing Calendar
at five guineas – a fee that would soon rise.

The window of opportunity for taking advantage of such inside information was not open for long. Others saw the chestnut with the white blaze speeding over the Downs. It is likely that these observers included Dennis O'Kelly.

Dennis by this time had graduated from blackleg to racehorse owner. In 1768, he entered his horse Whitenose in a £50 plate at Abingdon, and there he met Wildman, who had a chestnut
filly in the same race. In spring 1769, Dennis owned four horses in training at Epsom, and made regular visits to the town to check on their progress. As he watched them go through their paces, he spotted another horse, head held low, galloping with awesome power.

It was as momentous an occasion in Dennis's life as his first meeting with Charlotte Hayes, and probably more romantic. For an owner or trainer, the first sight of a young and exceptionally talented horse is very like falling in love. You know that this is the real thing; you know, too, that what you recognize is potential, and that much can go wrong. Adrenalin courses through your system; you are exhilarated, insanely hopeful, and scared. ‘He really filled my eye, ' trainer Vincent O'Brien said of the yearling Nijinsky, who two years later, in 1970, would win the 2, 000 Guineas, Derby and St Leger.
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‘When he was working, you would just see that he would devour the ground, ' Simon Crisford of Godolphin said of the two-year-old Dubai Millennium, who went on to win the 2000 Dubai World Cup. This is what Dennis saw on the Epsom Downs. A recently established owner, ambitious to acquire champion racers, he had found the embodiment of his hopes.

He learned that the chestnut belonged to William Wildman. Dennis, the boisterous adventurer, and Wildman, the solid member of the middle classes, became friendly. Wildman outlined Eclipse's history: how the horse had been bred by the late Duke of Cumberland, had got his name because a solar eclipse had taken place at the time of his birth, had come up for sale following Cumberland's death. Dennis congratulated his neighbour on such a splendid acquisition, and offered to help prepare Eclipse for his first race: he would lend a competitor for a trial.

William Wildman and Dennis O'Kelly were interlopers in the upper levels of horseracing. The men who bred the Thoroughbred
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and whose names were to be immortalized in racing bloodlines, were the likes of the Lords Darley and Godolphin; the distinguished soldier and MP Byerley; the royal stud master Darcy (the Darcy Yellow Turk, the Darcy White Turk); and the landowner Leedes (the Leedes Arabian). All these stallions appear in the pedigree of Eclipse; and Eclipse was bred, as was fitting, by a royal duke. He was not, in the normal scheme of things, the kind of possession suited to a commoner. But society was changing. As the eighteenth century wore on, humbly born, entrepreneurial tradesmen were acquiring the means to take part in pursuits that had belonged exclusively to the gentry. When Eclipse came up for sale, Wildman had the contacts and the money to take advantage. His ownership of a horse who was to win five King's Plates in his first racing season was curious enough; what really astonished the Turf establishment was the champion horse's connection with an Irish adventurer whose companion was a brothel madam.

Dennis's progress to Epsom Downs would have seemed even more improbable eight years earlier, when he and Charlotte Hayes emerged from the Fleet prison. Yet by spring 1769 they had reportedly amassed £40, 000 – a colossal sum, worth, if the website Measuring Worth is a guide, nearly £4.5 million in today's money. You have to back an awful lot of winners, and sleep with an awful lot of men, to earn that sort of cash. Still, there is no doubt that the couple did extraordinarily well. Charlotte set up a brothel in Soho, and moved on to the fashionable environs of St James's. Dennis hit the coffee houses and the racecourses.

There were – historians' figures vary – between five hundred and two thousand coffee houses in London, and men spent substantial portions of their days in them. The rudimentary spaces, murky with pipe smoke, contained communal benches and tables, counters, and fires above which coffee bubbled in giant pots; the overbrewed beverage must have tasted disgusting. Some had booths, as well as private rooms upstairs. Coffee houses offered
newspapers to their customers, and so contributed to the rise of the press. They had particular clienteles: marine insurers met at Lloyd's, the clergy at Child's, authors at Button's, actors and rakes at the Bedford. And blacklegs congregated at Munday's.

The Coffee-house Politicians
by an anonymous artist (1772).This is an elegant establishment. Dennis O'Kelly's favourite haunt, Munday's, was probably more rough-and-ready.

Munday's was at New Round Court, near the Strand, until in the late 1760s or early 1770s it moved nearby to number 30, Maiden Lane. It became notorious briefly in the mid-1760s as a source of sedition, when a writer styling himself ‘Junius' left at the counter the latest instalments in a series of letters satirizing George III and members of the Grafton administration. But it was more lastingly notorious for its association with Dennis O'Kelly, Dick England, Jack Tetherington, and their gang. Anyone inexperienced in gambling was advised to stay clear of Munday's. One day, a butcher at the table made the mistake of accusing England of thievery, and the even bigger mistake of referring disparagingly to the blackleg's background. England, who was as prone to violent rages as a psychopathic Mafioso in a Martin Scorsese film, beat him up until he recanted.

In spite of this edgy atmosphere, professional men and ‘persons of quality' would also drop in, knowing that they would be able to find sportsmen willing to bet to hundreds of pounds. The equestrian writer John Lawrence was, some years later, among these more refined regulars. He found the proprietor, Jack Medley, an amusing fund of sporting anecdotes, though he sensed that Medley's knowledge of racing was not deep. The proprietor was popular with his customers, providing a four-shilling dinner each Sunday at 4 p.m., after some of them had been for their ride in Rotten Row. On Munday's closure, Medley lived on a retirement income of £50 a year provided by, according to Lawrence, the coffee house regulars.
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Medley's general line, that his customers' racing conduct
was not entirely scrupulous, was well informed enough. When he heard that O'Kelly's horse Dungannon had been well beaten in a race, after starting at odds of 7-4 and 6-4 on, he exclaimed, ‘Pshaw, tis false it was
not three
, the horse has only
two pails of water
before starting!'This anecdote, which appeared in
The Times
, is not entirely transparent (what has ‘three' got to do with it?), but in general alleges that the water was meant to hinder Dungannon's progress. Dennis, Medley is implying, wanted either to bet against Dungannon, or to ensure that the horse would, on the back of a loss, start at longer odds next time.

That was in the future. Meanwhile, Dennis was growing wealthy from gambling, on horses and on cards. We can be sure that his sportsmanship was often dubious, but also that mostly he made money from horses because he understood them. He could spot the good ones to back, and he could spot ones that were not ready to run their best – ones that he could lay (a layer takes others' bets). Once he and Charlotte had started to make money, he was confident that he could use his knowledge to get wealthier still, and to acquire social status. He determined to become a racehorse owner, and not in a small way: he wanted to own the stables and the stud too.

Dennis's aim was not simply to acquire a few racehorses and to land prizes and betting coups with them. The real money, he saw, was in breeding. He would send his best racers to stud, hype up their achievements, and promise owners of mares the prospect of breeding offspring of similar ability. A fashionable stallion might cover forty mares or more in a season, at fees for his owner of upwards of twenty-five guineas a time. The owner might also mate his own mares with the stallion, and then sell the offspring, or – with a view to finding further stallions and mares for the stud – race them. In pursuing this ambition with dedicated professionalism, Dennis was ahead of his time. His methods anticipated the business philosophy of Coolmore, the Irish bloodstock empire that is the most powerful force in the racing world today. Coolmore
has a training centre, Ballydoyle, run by Aidan O'Brien; but the real money rolls in when O'Brien's champions (and other horses in Coolmore ownership), such as Galileo and Montjeu, transfer to the firm's stud farms. Winning races is merely the means to an end, as it was for Dennis.
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The base Dennis was considering for his stud was in Epsom, Surrey – then, as now, one of the racing centres of the south of England. Like Newmarket, Epsom is a racecourse with a raw quality. It does not belong to a park, an area of regulated space; it is a route through a landscape. The horses gallop over downs that, beyond the course, roll into the distance. The running rails describe a horseshoe: one tip is past the finishing post below the grandstand; the other, opposite, is where the runners set off at the start of the Derby, the most famous horse race in the world.

The starting stalls clang open, and the Derby runners begin their mile-and-a-half journey with a steep uphill climb. There are thick canopies of trees on their right until, after two furlongs, a gap reveals Downs House, once Dennis O'Kelly's stables. The course continues to climb until beyond the mile marker; then it curves left and descends towards Tattenham Corner, where during the 1913 Derby the suffragette Emily Davison stepped in front of King George V's horse Anmer, with fatal consequences. Some horses hate this bend. The 1986 Derby favourite Dancing Brave, later to prove himself one of the greats, raced downhill so awkwardly that by the time he had entered the finishing straight he was at the back of the field and many lengths behind the leaders. He came storming down the outside, but just failed to catch the winner, Shahrastani. Five years earlier, Shergar had put up a similar performance in the straight, but with the advantage of starting his
acceleration from near the front of the field: he won by ten lengths, the biggest margin in Derby history. The ground here has a camber, sloping down to the far rail, and, with just over a furlong to go, it begins a final ascent. Only at this point, having coolly delayed, did Lester Piggott urge his mount Sir Ivor to chase and overtake Connaught to win the Derby of 1968.

There is grandeur about a classic race in such a setting. History is a presence here. The horses racing for the Derby join that history, and indeed represent bloodlines tracing back through Sir Ivor and other great winners to Diomed, who won the first Derby, in 1780, and further back still, to a time before the Derby course was laid out, when Eclipse galloped to the Epsom finishing post from nearby Banstead, with his rivals a distance behind.

In the dry summer of 1618, a herdsman called Henry Wickes, or Wicker – those unreliable early spellings again – stopped with his cattle at a spring on Epsom Common, but found that the animals would not drink. The water was loaded with magnesium sulphate. Wickes and the cows had chanced upon Epsom Salts.
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Soon, Epsom was famed as a spa town, and visitors were swarming in to take the waters, experiencing the natural distaste that Wickes's cows had shown but suppressing it in the name of health. Samuel Pepys managed to force down four pints of the stuff when he stayed in 1667. He had returned to Epsom despite having found the society there rather vulgar four years earlier, and enjoyed himself a lot more this time: there was ‘much company', and next door to his lodgings at the King's Head a party including Nell Gwynn – soon to be Charles II's mistress – kept a ‘merry house'.

The patronage of the smart set was fickle. In the early eighteenth century, a man called Livingstone damaged the town's reputation by setting up his own well as a rival to the original,
which he managed to close; visitors decided that Livingstone's water was less invigorating, and they began to stay away. There was hope of a revival of fortunes when Mrs Mapp, also known as Crazy Sally but nevertheless in strong demand for her marvellous powers as a bone-setter, lodged in the town. But Epsom's worthies could not persuade her against moving to London, and when, in the 1750s, Dr Richard Russell promoted the benefits of bathing in the sea, he put an end to the career of Epsom as a resort, inspiring health-conscious pleasure-seekers to head for Brighton instead. Epsom Salts endure of course, even though ingesting them has unsurprisingly gone out of fashion, and even though the name no longer indicates provenance. The Epsom Salt Council, an American organization, recommends dissolving the crystals in your bath, with advertised benefits including an improvement in heart and circulatory health, and a flushing away of toxins.