Eclipse (33 page)

‘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.

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 Netherlands
and 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). Two
days 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, the
three 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 Florence
Paget 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 Hastings's colt The Earl for the 1868 Derby, ensured that the bets would come good by getting Hastings
to 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.