Eclipse (9 page)

Look at the scene at Epsom on Derby day. The Queen surveys the Downs from her box in the Royal Enclosure. In a nearby box are the Dubai royal family, the Maktoums, who have significant racing interests. Their neighbours in the enclosure are grandees, trainers, racehorse owners, tycoons and celebrities; the men here are in top hats and tails, and the women are in designer dresses and hats. In the next enclosure, where lounge suits and high-street fashions are the order, congregate the professional classes, some of them enjoying corporate entertainment. On the other side of the course, packed into double decker buses, are rugby club members on a day out, and women on hen parties. Further away, in front of the cheaper stands, are families with picnics, and men and women who have come mostly to enjoy a sustained drinking session in the sun. Amid the funfair rides and market stalls on the Downs swarm gypsies and other travellers, touts and card sharps, bookmakers and hucksters.

There is proximity here, but very little interaction. Commingling across the social strata was greater in Dennis O'Kelly's day. Dennis and the Duke of Cumberland probably met on the racecourse, and in other gambling venues too; Dennis and Cumberland's great-nephew, the Prince of Wales (later George IV), were certainly racing acquaintances, and might almost be said to have been close, because ‘Prinny' was a regular at gatherings at Dennis's Epsom home. Charlotte Hayes's business also brought her into contact with a great many esteemed clients,
and William Wildman came to racing through transactions with Lord Bolingbroke and others.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Englanders needed to have sharper antennae than the man in Seymour Harcourt's anecdote (chapter 3) who confused his Bath acquaintance with a social equal. You did not presume that, because a gentleman or lady might condescend to socialize with you on certain occasions, he or she was your new best friend. Wildman shot game on the Duke of Portland's estate, but he did not join the Duke's shooting parties: he went at other times, with a companion from his own circle.
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We think of the memoirist and rake William Hickey as belonging to the Georgian smart set, but Hickey, the son of a prosperous lawyer, did not move in aristocratic company. Dennis O'Kelly owned the greatest and most celebrated racehorse of the age, and many other fine horses besides; he was a prominent personage at the leading race meetings; and he was himself a celebrity, much discussed in the public prints. But beyond certain portals he could not go. Lacking the sense of deference that comes more naturally to the English, he was enraged by the exclusion.

Relationships on the racecourse between owners, trainers, jockeys, stable staff and members of the public give the most comprehensive picture of class relationships that a single location can show. It is a picture that has changed only superficially since the 1760s. As the Queen, from her supreme vantage point at Epsom, surveys the variegated scene, she can see too, through the woods on the other side of the course, the house where Dennis O'Kelly stabled his racers. The present merges with the past in this panorama: with all the other Derby days she has witnessed; with the Derby days before that, of Hyperion, Persimmon, Gladiateur and Diomed; and before that, with a day in May 1769, when five horses rode on to the Downs from nearby Banstead, and leading them was a chestnut with a white blaze.

²⁹
From
Lloyd's Evening Post
, 30 March – 2 April 1764

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The last annular eclipse above Britain was visible from north Scotland, Orkney and Shetland in 2003.The next one will be in 2093.The last total eclipse in Britain took place in 1999, and the next one is due in 2090.

³¹
There are further uncertainties in Eclipse's pedigree. See Appendix 2.

³²
The auctioneer went on to confuse Eclipse's pedigree with that of another horse. See Appendix 2.

³³
Now the Givons Grove estate.

³⁴
There is no crowd and the stand is shuttered, indicating that the race is a trial.

³⁵
From Bracy Clark's
A Short History of the Celebrated Race-horse Eclipse
(1835).

³⁶
Racing people use the name of the sire (father) as a kind of adjective. They might describe contemporary horses as a ‘Kingmambo colt' or a ‘Montjeu filly'. The sire, for reasons to do with how breeding operates rather than with the science of genetics, gets more credit for a racehorse's prowess than the dam (mother).

³⁷
The general point stands even if Wildman is not the figure in Stubbs's portrait of the gentlemen's outing on the estate – see chapter 18.

T
HE QUALITIES THAT
William Wildman and Lord Bolingbroke saw in Eclipse were not obvious. He was leggy, and possessed, experts thought, an ugly head. His croup was as high as or higher than his withers,
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a characteristic that was reckoned to be undesirable in a racer. He was ‘thick-winded', breathing at disconcerting volume as he exercised. And his pedigree, on his sire's side, seemed to be no more distinguished than his appearance. Marske, his father, was worth only twenty-six guineas, and had been covering mares at the derisory fee of half a guinea.

Moreover, Eclipse was bad-tempered and unruly, so much so that his handlers at William Wildman's stables at Mickleham considered gelding him. Castration, a common procedure in the racing world, has a calming effect – but of course you avoid doing it to an animal who might become a valuable stallion. Fortunately for the history of horseracing, the Mickleham team entrusted Eclipse instead to a ‘rough-rider', whose speciality was taking charge of untrained horses. George Elton, or ‘Ellers', would don stout leathers to protect his legs and ride Eclipse into the woods
on night-time poaching expeditions. It was good discipline for the horse, though a dangerous transgression for the rider. Later, Ellers was prosecuted for poaching, and transported.
³⁹

The Mickleham team had time on their side. Eclipse and his contemporaries belonged to the last generation of racers who were not expected to see a racecourse until they were four or five years old. (Many of their sons and daughters would begin racing at the age of two.) The tests they faced demanded physical maturity. Races were over two, three or more commonly four miles, and many events involved heats. Horses might have to run, in a single afternoon, four races of four miles each, with only half-hour intervals in which to get their breath back. To emerge triumphant at the end of that, they had to call on great reserves of courage and stamina – what the Georgians admiringly called ‘bottom'.

During the winter and spring of 1768 and 1769, as Eclipse enters his fifth year, he begins to be subjected to an ever harsher training regime. As contemporary manuals show, he spends his nights, and the portions of each day when he is not at exercise, in an enclosed, windowless, heated stable. It is warm in winter and suffocating in summer, and he wears thick rugs. Sweating is good, believe the early trainers, who regularly turn up the heating and subject the horses, rugged and hooded, to saunas. As the racing season approaches, Eclipse is given purgatives, consisting of aloes or mercury.

Eclipse has his own ‘boy', or groom, John Oakley, who sleeps in lodgings above the stable. Oakley gets up at about four each morning, sometimes earlier. After a breakfast of porridge, with perhaps cold meat from the previous day as well as cheese, bread and beer, he mucks out the stable, removes Eclipse's rugs and rubs him down, gives him a breakfast of oats, clothes him again, puts on his saddle and bridle, and mounts him. The pair then join the rest of the string for morning exercise on the Downs.
They are under the supervision of the trainer, who is also commonly described as a groom.

Or perhaps Oakley was the trainer? It is a sign of the humble roles of trainers and jockeys at this time that we know so little about the handlers of even so famous a horse as Eclipse. By the end of the century, training was recognized as a specialist role, and trainers were ascending the social ladder. Men of the Turf in the eighteenth century would be surprised to discover that modern trainers, such as Sir Michael Stoute, are rather grand.

Once on the Downs, Oakley and Eclipse start off at an easy gallop.
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After half a mile or so they come to an incline, and Oakley begins to urge Eclipse to go faster. They race uphill for another half mile before Oakley pulls on the reins. They walk back, and Eclipse gets a moderate drink of water – the Georgians do not believe that horses should be allowed very much refreshment. They gallop gently again, and then walk. Then they have another fast gallop, and then another walk. All this while, Eclipse has been burdened by heavy rugs. Every week or ten days, he wears this clothing on a ‘sweat', a gallop of four miles or more. But even on less gruelling days he is sweaty enough.

At about nine o'clock, they return to the stables. Oakley leads him back to his stall, ties him up, rubs down his legs with straw, removes his rugs, and brushes and ‘curries' him (with a metal currycomb). He clothes the horse again, and gives him some more oats or hay.
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The stables are then shut up.

Jockeys, too, had to be hardy individuals. When Oakley joined the stable, and was about to ride his first race, he went through a fearful initiation. His colleagues told him that the best way to get his weight down to the eight and a half stone required was to borrow as many waistcoats as he could, go on a three-mile run, strip naked on his return, and immerse himself in the hot dung hill outside the stable boxes. He dutifully obeyed. As he emerged, caked with ordure, he heard a chorus of laughter. Suddenly he was surrounded by his gleeful fellow grooms, all carrying pails; they drenched him in freezing water.

Today, as Eclipse nears his racecourse debut, that episode is far enough in the past for Oakley to have had the fun of playing the same joke on several new recruits. He is an established member of the Mickleham team, and a valued rider of William Wildman's horses at race meetings. From now until mid-afternoon he and the other boys have time off. They play gambling games, many of them now obscure: fives, spell, null, marbles, chuck-farthing, spinning tops, and holes.
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At four o'clock, they return to the stables and take the horses out for another round of exercise. Then there is more rubbing down, brushing and combing; feeding, of horses and boys; preparing the horse's bed. The stables are shut up again, with horses and boys inside, at nine.

Albeit physically demanding, lowly in status and derisorily paid, working in an eighteenth-century stable is not a bad job. In an enlightened establishment such as Wildman's, Oakley is well looked after, and enjoys the responsibility of being the most important person in the life of a horse he realizes may be special. Eclipse trusts him as he does no other human. Oakley knows that the horse requires special treatment: he will respond only to the most deferential of suggestions, and will rebel against the whippings and spurrings that are normal practice in race-riding.

For the horses, however, the regime is brutal. It is not surprising that early racing paintings show animals that are etiolated and apparently long in the back: they are trained until every ounce of ‘condition' – spare flesh – is sweated away. Twenty-five years after Eclipse was in training, a jockey called Samuel Chifney wrote a memoir with the modest title of
Genius Genuine
, and showed himself to be ahead of his time both in his attempt to market himself as a racing personality (while holding a job regarded as socially insignificant), and in his view that the accepted training practices of his era were ‘ignorant cruelty'. Chifney described a horse returning from a sweating exercise:‘It so affects [the horse] at times, that he keeps breaking out in fresh sweats, that it pours from him when scraping, as if water had been thrown at him. Nature cannot bear this. The horses must dwindle.' In spite of his words, most racehorses continued to be trained in this way until well into the nineteenth century.
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Yet Eclipse thrives. He has an unusual way of galloping: he carries his head low, and he spreads out his hind legs to such an extent that, one observer said later, a wheelbarrow might have been driven through them. Even so, he eats up the ground. Oakley has never sat on a horse so fast. Eclipse is – though Oakley does not describe him in these terms – the most brilliant representative to date of a new type of running horse, the fastest the world has ever seen: the Thoroughbred.

During the previous half a century, some mysterious alchemy had been taking place in the breeding sheds of England. The horses that were emerging were blessed with an unprecedentedly potent combination of speed and stamina. How these qualities came
about is the subject of much debate, hampered (though not dampened) by the haphazard standards of early record keeping. If you want to take a patriarchal view, you can give most of the credit to just three stallions. Their status has brought to their biographies various fanciful and romantic accretions; what is a matter of historical fact is that every contemporary Thoroughbred descends in the male line from the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian or the Godolphin Arabian.