Eclipse (13 page)

All we hear of Oakley (c.1736–1793) is that he was ‘a very celebrated rider, in great repute'; we cannot even be sure, because the racing calendars do not tell us,
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that he was Eclipse's regular partner. John Lawrence, who saw Eclipse at stud, stated, ‘We believe, Oakley, a powerful man on horseback, generally, or always rode Eclipse', and there is a J. N. Sartorius painting entitled
Eclipse with Oakley Up
. But a catalogue entry for George Stubbs's portrait of Eclipse at Newmarket identifies the jockey as ‘Samuel Merrit, who generally rode him'. This was written more than twenty years later, when Stubbs made a copy of his original work, but it presumably reflects an accurate memory for such details. Merriott (as he is more usually spelled), who has in the painting the long, lugubrious face of the comic actor and writer Eric Sykes, is also associated with Eclipse's two 1770 races at York. Nevertheless, the earliest report we have asserts that Oakley was Eclipse's jockey on 3 May 1769.
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Jockeyship required nervelessness and aggression. Some contests permitted ‘cross and jostle', meaning you could hamper your opponents. At a race at York, ‘Mr Welburn's Button and Mr Walker's Milkmaid, in running the last heat, came in so near together, that it could not be decided by the Tryers [stewards]; and the riders showing foul play in running, and afterwards fighting on horseback, the plate was given to [the owner of the third horse] Mr Graham.' Jockeys wore spurs, and used them; in the days before whip rules, they beat their mounts without restraint. But no jockey ever spurred or whipped Eclipse.

There were four rivals for the Epsom Noblemen and Gentlemen's Plate: Mr Castle's Chance and Mr Quick's Plume, both six-year-olds; and the five-year-olds Gower (Mr Fortescue) and Trial (Mr Jennings).There was no starting tape, or even a flag; there was simply a starter, who shouted ‘Go!'

The five set off, well out of the viewing range of the Epsom crowd, and with only a gathering of local spectators lining their route, as at an early section of a stage of the Tour de France. Oakley and Eclipse took the lead, galloping easily and waiting until they approached the Epsom Downs, with about a mile to go, to pick up the pace. From their perspective, the banks of people swelling forward on either side of the course ahead formed converging lines, narrowing at the finishing post almost to a point.

While his rival jockeys began to wield their spurs and whips, Oakley, who wore no spurs, sat motionless in the saddle. He knew that his mount would rebel against any urging. The racers sped through the banks of spectators, and Eclipse, seemingly cantering, eased further ahead. As the field went by, local gentlemen on horseback peeled away from the crowd and galloped behind, braying encouragement.
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Eclipse passed the post first without having
at any point stepped up from a low gear; Gower, Chance, Trial and Plume followed, in that order. Oakley offered his mount a tactful hint that they should pull up. But this was not the end of the contest. It was only the end of the first heat.

Plate races – the most important contests – were staged in heats, and if three different horses won three heats, they would meet again in a decider. The way to settle the matter earlier was to do what Eclipse did several times, and win two heats; or to take advantage of another rule, centring on the distance post, 240 yards from the finish: as the winner passed the finish, horses that had not reached the distance post were declared to have been ‘distanced', and were eliminated. Adding to the ordeal of up to four races in an afternoon, each was a marathon by modern standards, two, three and more commonly four miles in length, and had been so ever since medieval times.
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Most Flat races in Britain today are contested at distances between five furlongs (five-eighths of a mile) and twelve furlongs (the Derby distance). The Ascot Gold Cup distance of two and a half miles is unusual. The Queen Alexandra Stakes, which also takes place at Royal Ascot, is the longest race in the Flat calendar, at two miles and six furlongs. In the US, the emphasis on speed is greater still. The twelve-furlong Belmont Stakes, the third leg of the Triple Crown,
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is regarded as a stamina-sapping anomaly.

Why did the Georgians subject their horses to these gruelling tests? The answer is their admiration for ‘bottom'. If men
had bottom, they were sound fellows; if horses had bottom, they were sound horses. Dennis O'Kelly was remarkable, in the fond words of John Lawrence in
The Sporting Magazine
in 1793, ‘for his attachment to horses of bottom'. In other words, Dennis valued staying power; and, Lawrence may also have meant, he profited in his betting from horses with the ability to cope with racing in heats. If they lost one heat, by design or otherwise, they could win the next. Eclipse had superlative bottom, and never lost either a heat or a race.

However, within ten years of his racing career – and thanks in part to his siring of speedier, more precocious racers – the priorities of men of the Turf started to change, and heat racing died out. New types of races, run over shorter distances, were introduced, the most prestigious ones acquiring the status of ‘Classics'. Breeders aimed to produce horses that might win these races, and no longer wanted stout stayers, unless they were breeding for the emerging sport of steeplechasing.

Eclipse was speedy, and would have excelled, as his sons and daughters were to do, at these new contests. But on 3 May 1769, and throughout his career, he needed stoutness too. After heat one, he and John Oakley retired to the rubbing-house for a break of just half an hour. Perhaps William Wildman joined them there, to check on the well-being of his horse. Oakley got on the scales, with his saddle, to assure the stewards that he had ridden with the required weight, while another ‘boy' tended to Eclipse with a special sponge or cloth – special in that it had been soaked in urine and saltpetre, and then dried in the sun. At some meetings, but probably not at a reputable one such as Epsom, the horses enjoyed tots of alcoholic refreshment, as long as no one in authority was about. The rules from 1666 at the Duke of Newcastle's course at Worksop stated, ‘If any other relieve their horses with any thing but faire water … the offender shall lose the Cup. 'The five horses were then walked back to Banstead. This retracing of a four-mile course seems an odd arrangement, and one would be inclined to
suspect that the plate was run over a different, circular Epsom course were it not for the fact that local historians imply that the Banstead one was in more common use.
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Meanwhile, the Epsom crowd may have been entertained by boxing matches. There were probably cock fights, the enjoyment of which by people ‘of all ranks' bemused Monsieur Grosley, who considered them to be ‘after all, no more than children's play'. Gypsies, who had set up an encampment on the Downs for race week, offered to tell your fortune. Other attractions at the course included food and drink stalls, and gambling booths at which you could play EO, an early form of roulette (the wheel consisted of compartments marked ‘E' and ‘O'), as well as card and dice games, which the inexperienced were well advised to avoid. At Doncaster in 1793, the EO tables, which had been producing results suspiciously biased towards the operators, were seized and burned in front of the Mansion House. Six years later, at Ascot, a gentleman's servant who had lost all his money, as well as his watch, denounced those who had got the better of him as rogues and thieves; a brawl ensued, and then a riot, which was quelled only by the arrival from Windsor of a party of the Light Horse Brigade. Racegoers also had to keep their eyes open for pickpockets, who themselves had to take care that they were not caught: they risked summary judgment by the crowd, who would cut off their pigtails, duck and beat them. A report from 1791 described a pickpocket's death ‘from the severe whipping the jockey boys gave him'.

Dennis O'Kelly thought that there was more gambling to be done on the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Plate, in spite of the apparently foregone conclusion of the contest, and returned to the betting post. You get a flavour of the scene from a caricature by Thomas Rowlandson featuring Dennis as well as his later
acquaintance the Prince of Wales. Mounted men crowded round. They roared, pointed and waved their arms, somehow in the confusion hoping to find layers or backers at their chosen prices.
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Dennis, who knew how to make himself heard, got the assembly's attention when he put in his bid: he would name, he shouted in his rough Irish accent, the finishing positions of the horses in the second heat. He tempted three layers, who offered him even money, 5-4 and 6-4. Then he made his prediction: ‘Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere.'

It is the most famous quotation in racing, the line that summarizes Eclipse's transcendent ability. It was not a simple piece of hyperbole, of the ‘the other horses won't know which way he went' or ‘they'll have to send out a search party for the others' kind: it had a precise meaning. Dennis was predicting that Eclipse would pass the post before any of his rivals had reached the distance marker; they would not receive placings from the judge, who would make the bare announcement ‘Eclipse first.' Gower, Chance, Trial and Plume would be, in the context of the official result, ‘nowhere'.

Dennis's words have proved telling in other contexts too. Reviewing a new (1831) edition of James Boswell's
Life of Johnson
, the historian Thomas Macaulay wrote, ‘He [Boswell] has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.' As ever in our story, however, there are alternative versions. One has Dennis saying, ‘Eclipse first, and the rest in no place'; another, ‘Eclipse, and nothing else. 'There are also reports that he made the bet before a race at Newmarket. It was a neat piece of blackleg's trickery: an interpretation of the letter, if not the spirit, of the bet. At the later, Newmarket race, Eclipse faced only one rival after the first heat,
and was backed heavily to win heat two by a distance. Dennis is certain to have been among the backers. He would not have referred to ‘the rest' then, but he may have predicted something along the lines of ‘Eclipse first, the other nowhere'.

Over at the Banstead start, Eclipse, Chance, Plume, Gower and Trial set off in the second heat. Once again Eclipse set a steady gallop, and after three miles, as the horses came into distant view, the layers may have been feeling confident: the field was tightly grouped. Then Eclipse began to draw clear. Reports say that Oakley was pulling back the reins ‘with all the strength [he] was master of'. Dennis, who needed Eclipse to put more than an eighth of a mile of daylight between himself and his rivals within the next mile, cannot have been pleased at these efforts at restraint. But he had no cause for concern. Eclipse continued to extend his lead. He raced through aisles of bellowing spectators, head low, his long stride devouring the ground. When he passed the post, his nearest pursuer was more than a distance away.

The judge's summary was terse: ‘Eclipse first!' A mass of people surged towards horse and jockey, cheering. ‘The victor, ' Pierre-Jean Grosley wrote, ‘finds it a difficult matter to disengage himself from the crowd, who congratulate, caress, and embrace him, with an effusion of heart, which it is not easy to form an idea of, without having seen it.' (How the temperamental Eclipse responded to this adulation, we do not hear.) It is like this today at the Cheltenham Festival, particularly when there is an Irish winner. The ‘effusion of heart' unites the racegoers: owners, trainers, jockeys, gamblers; royalty, grandees, middle classes, working classes. William Wildman felt it. Dennis O'Kelly felt it too. In the latter's case, there were unsentimental reasons for the excitement: he had just won a good deal of money. And he had set his sights on the means of making a good deal more.

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Charles, in an ironic prefiguring of his fate, viewed the action from a specially erected scaffold.

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They did not list jockeys' names until 1823.

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For further discussion of Eclipse and his jockeys, see Appendix 1.

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Early representations of horse races are confusing at first sight. The course is not clearly delineated; various horses and riders are in motion, and it is not obvious whether all or some of them are racing. Gradually, you realize that the posse behind the leading horses consists of sporting gentlemen, not contestants.

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There is a reference to a three-mile race in the medieval romance of Bevis of Hampton. The earliest chronicler of British horseracing is Fitzstephen, who during the reign of Henry II described a contest at Smithfield market:‘The horses on their part are not without emulation; they tremble and are impatient and are continually in motion. At last, the signal once given, they strike, devour the course, hurrying along with unremitting velocity. The jockeys, inspired with the thought of applause and the hopes of victory, clap spurs to their willing horses, brandish their whips, and cheer them with their cries.'

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Following the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

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At Newmarket, matches were run over the dog-legged Beacon Course, but races run in heats were staged on the Round Course.

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You cannot lay horses in a modern betting ring unless you are a licensed bookmaker, and you are supposed to offer prices about an entire field. But the internet has revived the Georgian way of gambling: customers of betting exchanges such as Betfair can back or lay individual horses.