Eclipse (37 page)

¹⁶⁶
If a male passes on his X rather than his Y chromosome, his offspring is female. So Eclipse's daughters – according to the ‘X factor' theory – got the chromosome with the gene that expressed a large heart. Some of his sons were pretty good racers – but not because of that characteristic, unless they had inherited it from their mothers.

¹⁶⁷
They still do. National Hunt horses do not further the breed, because almost all of them are, like Arkle, geldings. Sometimes, Flat-bred racers turn out to excel at steeplechasing; among them was Red Rum, winner of three Grand Nationals.

¹⁶⁸
Some racing historians argue that the first Grand National was in 1836.

¹⁶⁹
The King George is usually held on Boxing Day, but had been delayed because of frost and snow.

¹⁷⁰
Engelhard, who spoke in a gravelly voice produced with almost no movement of the facial muscles, was rumoured to be the model for Ian Fleming's villain Goldfinger.

¹⁷¹
Liam Ward rode Nijinsky in Ireland. Lester Piggott rode nine Derby winners during his career, a record.

¹⁷²
2, 000 Guineas, Derby, St Leger.

¹⁷³
The winner, Lorenzaccio, was, as Piggott said, ‘not remotely in the same league as Nijinsky in his prime'. But Lorenzaccio did have some importance as a sire, maintaining one of the rare male lines that endures from the Byerley Turk and Herod.

¹⁷⁴
Dancing Brave's brilliant Arc victory in 1986 showed that it was possible to make up ground in the Longchamp straight.

¹⁷⁵
Among them: Troy (1979 Derby, Irish Derby, King George), third in the Arc; Shergar (1981 Derby, Irish Derby, King George), fourth in the St Leger; Nashwan (1989 2, 000 Guineas, Derby, Eclipse, King George), third in the Prix Niel; Generous (1991 Derby, Irish Derby, King George), eighth in the Arc; Authorized (2007 Derby, Juddmonte International), tenth in the Arc.

¹⁷⁶
Mill Reef's owner was Paul Mellon, who endowed the Yale Center for British Art. Mellon's collection of work by Stubbs included the painter's first study of Eclipse; he donated it to the Royal Veterinary College. Mill Reef was trained by Ian Balding, father of Clare, the BBC television and radio presenter.

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.

E
CLIPSE 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 that
Eclipse'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 made
them 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 facilities
for 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 copy
¹⁸⁹
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 his
Majesty does possess one of Eclipse'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 in
our 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.