Eclipse (38 page)

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 she
argued 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 metal 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 the
RVC'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.

Eclipse is also at the heart of advanced genetic research. Matthew Binns of the RVC, Paula Jenkins of the Natural History Museum, and Mim Bower of Cambridge University have been leading a project to explore genetic variations in Thoroughbreds. The horses they have examined include, as well as Eclipse, Hermit, whose Derby victory broke Lord Hastings's heart, and St Simon, the ‘steam engine' ridden by Fred Archer. Their findings will give us our fullest understanding yet of these great horses, and may also offer information to help trace horses' genetic weaknesses. One of the great worries for the bloodstock industry is that, in an inbred animal, genetic defects may be perpetuated and become widespread.

The researchers started by encasing in wax a tooth from the Eclipse skull, and drilled it. The genetic material they extracted contained bad news. This tooth did not belong to an animal from what, according to the official records, was Eclipse's matrilineal line.
¹⁹³
In the light of the convoluted history of the skeleton, a separation of the body from its proper head, and the replacement of the head with a substitute, are not surprising occurrences. The Natural History Museum, when it possessed the skeleton, displayed it headless, and has in its archives a letter from a man who had heard that Eclipse's head was kept in a grotto – destroyed by fire in 1948 – in Weybridge.

As I write, results of tests on the body are yet to appear, though I am hopeful that they will conform to the accepted pedigree and thus indicate, with near incontrovertibility, that the RVC's skeleton really is Eclipse's. If the tests reveal a different pedigree, however, they will not prove fakery. Rather, I should be inclined to suspect that the pedigree was inaccurate. The skeleton seems to be the one that Sainbel studied. How could he have stripped and anatomized the wrong horse? He knew what Eclipse looked like: he said that he had seen him alive.
¹⁹⁴
It is hard to imagine a set of circumstances that could have compelled him, with the O'Kellys' connivance or at their instigation, to pass off a fake as the real thing. I remain convinced that the skeleton in the RVC, or most of it, is Eclipse.

No other racehorse has done this much. Eclipse was a supreme champion, who easily defeated the best racehorses of the day. His bloodline was to dominate the bloodstock industry. In alliance with Herod, his genetic influence transformed racing into a spectacle of thrilling speed, for masses of people to enjoy. He is the icon of the sport, its unquestionable symbol of greatness: its Jesse Owens, or Michael Jordan, or Donald Bradman, or Pele. The Eclipse Stakes and the Eclipse Awards, along with various other
institutions named after him, are tributes to his status. Not only does he endure as ancestor of every Thoroughbred alive today, but as an inspiration to veterinary research and education.

I mentioned Owens, Jordan, Bradman and Pele. But they are only human. There is something otherworldly, as Stubbs knew, about a great horse; something belonging to the realm of legend.

From the distance over the Downs, a chestnut Thoroughbred appears: galloping with head low, jockey motionless, the rest nowhere.

¹⁸⁶
See chapter 20 for more on the theory that the characteristic was passed on, through female offspring, to great racehorses including Phar Lap and Secretariat.

¹⁸⁷
It began styling itself ‘Royal' in 1826.

¹⁸⁸
Also known as the London Museum, the hall was demolished in 1905.

¹⁸⁹
Made for the
Review of the Turf
. See chapter 18.

¹⁹⁰
Eclipse's skeleton, notwithstanding a request from Edward VII that it be part of the exhibition, was not entrusted to the journey. The grand lunch was delayed a week, because news of Edward's death came through on the day it had been due to take place. It is not clear whether the hoof was part of the occasion.

¹⁹¹
She does not appear to have had any evidence that the skeleton was in separate bits when in Bond's care. John Orton, writing in 1844, said that Bond exhibited it.

¹⁹²
There is a replica of this statue next to the paddock on the Rowley Mile course at Newmarket.

¹⁹³
The researchers examined mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the distaff line and which can therefore identify Thoroughbred ‘families'. (In the bloodstock world, the term ‘family' indicates the bottom, female line of a pedigree.) Thoroughbred families were first classified by the nineteenthcentury Australian historian Bruce Lowe, who gave them numbers. Eclipse belongs to family number 12.

¹⁹⁴
Dr Weller does not think that the inconsistency between Stubbs's and Sainbel's portrayals of Eclipse's white markings is significant. ‘Since horse passports were introduced, vets have had to draw horse's markings, ' she says. ‘The differences between what two vets will draw are amazing.'

Chapter 1

Anon.,
The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O'Kelly, Esq
Anon.,
Nocturnal Revels
Cook,
Eclipse and O'Kelly
Gatrell,
City of Laughter
Hitchcock,
Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London
Picard,
Dr Johnson's London
Porter,
English Society in the 18th Century
Weinreb and Hibbert (eds),
The London Encyclopaedia
Williams,
History of the Name O'Kelly Town & Country
magazine (September 1770)
Fleet prison debtors' schedules, London Metropolitan Archives

Papers of Colonel Andrew Dennis O'Kelly, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull

Chapter 2

Anon.,
The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O'Kelly, Esq
Anon.,
Nocturnal Revels
Archenholz,
A Picture of England
Brown,
A History of the Fleet Prison, London
Burford,
Wits, Wenchers and Wantons
Burford and Wotton
Private Vices – Public Virtues
Clayton,
The British Museum Hogarth
Hickey,
Memoirs
Linnane,
Madams, Bawds and Brothel-Keepers of London
Porter,
English Society in the 18th Century
Rubenhold,
The Covent Garden Ladies
Thompson, The Meretriciad
Weinreb and Hibbert (eds), The London Encyclopaedia
Fleet prison debtors' schedules, London Metropolitan Archives
Fleet records, National Archives
Noble Collection, Guildhall Library

Chapter 3

Anon.,
Nocturnal Revels
Sexual Life in England
Blyth,
The High Tide of Pleasure
Burford and Wotton,
Private Vices – Public Virtues
Chinn,
Better Betting with a Decent Feller
Cook,
Eclipse and O'Kelly
Egan,
Sporting Anecdotes
Harcourt,
The Gaming Calendar and Annals of Gaming
Linnane,
Madams, Bawds and Brothel-Keepers of London
Oxford English Dictionary
Picard,
Dr Johnson's London
Pick,
An Authentic Historical Racing Calendar
Porter,
English Society in the 18th Century
Prior,
Early Records of the Thoroughbred
Rice,
The History of the British Turf
Rubenhold,
The Covent Garden Ladies
Steinmetz,
The Gaming Table, Its Votaries and Victims
Thompson,
The Meretriciad
Thompson,
Newmarket
Thormanby, Sporting Stories
(1909)
The Sporting Magazine
(1792, 1795)