Eclipse
Authors: Nicholas Clee
Nicholas Clee
LONDON
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TORONTO
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SYDNEY
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AUCKLAND
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JOHANNESBURG
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409080794
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First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Nicholas Clee 2009
Nicholas Clee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780593059838
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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
12Â The Most Glorious Spectacle
17Â The Decline of the Jontleman
19Â Eclipse's Legacy â the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
20Â Eclipse's Legacy â the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Appendix 1:
Eclipse's Racing Career
Appendix 4:
Racing Terms, Historical and Contemporary
For Nicolette, Rebecca and Laura
Also by Nicholas Clee
D
ON'T
S
WEAT
THE
A
UBERGINE
G
O TO THE RACES
, anywhere in the world, and you'll be watching horses who are relatives of Eclipse. The vast majority of them are descended from Eclipse's male line; if you trace back their ancestry through their fathers, their fathers' fathers, and so on, you come, some twenty generations back, to him. He is the most influential stallion in the history of the Thoroughbred. Two and a half centuries after his imperious, undefeated career, he remains the undisputed paragon of his sport.
The story of this career begins on a spring morning in 1769, at a trial on Epsom Downs. Scorching across the turf towards a small group of spectators is a chestnut with a white blaze. Toiling in his wake is a single rival, who will never catch him â not if they race to the ends of the earth.
Among the witnesses at this awe-inspiring display are two men who, according to the tradition of the Sport of Kings, should not be associated with the horse who will become its greatest exponent. One, Eclipse's owner, is a meat salesman, William Wildman. The second, who wants to own Eclipse, is an Irish adventurer and gambler.
Dennis O'Kelly arrived in London some twenty years earlier, full of energy and optimism and ambition. He has had his ups
and downs, including an affair with a titled lady and a spell in prison, but at last â thanks to his gambling abilities and to the remarkable success of his companion, the leading brothel madam of the day â he is starting to rise in the world.
What Dennis does not know is that certain sections of the establishment will never accept him. What he does know, as with quickening pulse he follows the progress of the speeding chestnut, is that this horse is his destiny.
L
ONDON
, 1748. The capital is home to some 650, 000 inhabitants, more than 10 per cent of the population of England. What image of Georgian metropolitan life comes to mind? You may have a Canaletto-inspired view of an elegant square. Bewigged men and women with hooped skirts are strolling; there are a few carriages, and perhaps a wagon; the gardens are trim; the houses are stately. Or you may be picturing the London of Hogarth. The street is teeming, and riotous: drunks lie in the gutter, spewing; dogs and pickpockets weave among the crowd; through a window, you can see a prostitute entertaining her client; from the window above, someone is tipping out the contents of a chamber pot.
Both images are truthful.
1
London is a sophisticated city of fashion, an anarchic city of vice, and other cities too. In the West End are the titled, the wealthy, and the ton (the smart set); in the City are the financiers, merchants and craftsmen; prostitutes and theatre folk congregate in Covent Garden; north of Covent Garden, in St Giles's, and in the East End and south of the Thames,
are the slums, where an entire family may inhabit one small room, and where disease, alcoholism and crime are rampant. âIf one considers the destruction of all morality, decency and modesty, ' wrote Henry Fielding, the author of the exuberant comic novel
Tom Jones
, âthe swearing, whoredom and drunkenness which is eternally carrying on in these houses on the one hand, and the excessive poverty and misery of most of the inhabitants on the other, it seems doubtful whether they are most the objects of detestation or compassion.' Among the native populations of these districts is a substantial admixture of Irish immigrants. A new arrival, with some modest savings and a sunny determination to make a name for himself, is a young man called Dennis O'Kelly.
Dennis was born in about 1725. His father, Andrew, was a smallholder in Tullow, about fifty miles south-west of Dublin. Dennis and his brother, Philip, received little education, and were expected to start earning their livings almost as soon as they entered their teens. (There were also two sisters, who made good marriages.) Philip began a career as a shoemaker. Dennis had grander ambitions. Soon, finding Tullow too small to contain his optimistic energy, he set out for Dublin.
The discovery that Dubliners regarded him as an uneducated yokel barely dented his confidence. Charm, vigour and quick wits would see him through, he felt; and he was right, then and thereafter. A few days after his arrival in the city, he saw a well-dressed woman slip in the street, and rushed to her aid. There was no coach nearby, so Dennis offered his arm to support the woman's walk home, impressing her with his courtesy. She asked Dennis about his circumstances and background. Although he gave as much gloss to his answer as he could, he was heard with a concerned frown. You must be careful, the woman advised him: Dublin is a very wicked place, and a young man such as you might easily fall into bad company.
People who give such warnings are usually the ones you need to avoid. But this woman was to be one of several patronesses
who would ease Dennis's passage through life. She was a widow in her thirties, and the owner of a coffee house, where she hired Dennis as a waiter. Under her tutelage he lost, or learned to disguise, his rough edges, grew accomplished in his job, and graduated to become her lover. There was supplementary income to be earned by defeating the customers at billiards. It was a pleasant arrangement. It could not satisfy Dennis, though. Once he had amassed a fortune of £50 (about £6, 500 in today's money, but then a modest annual income for a middle-class provincial household), he said farewell to his mistress and made his way to London.
This account of Dennis O'Kelly's early progress comes from a sketch âby our ingenious correspondent D.L.' that appeared in
Town & Country
magazine in 1770, just before the end of Eclipse's racing career. It offered the fullest portrait of Dennis until the publication in 1788, a year after his death, of a racy work entitled
The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O'Kelly, Esq: Commonly Called Count O'Kelly
. The book belonged to a thriving genre of brief lives, hastily produced and written by hacks (the term âmemoirs' applied to biography as well as autobiography). Their tone was often cheerfully defamatory, and entirely suited to portraying the riotous, scandalous, vainglorious Dennis. But while no doubt legendary in spirit, and certainly unreliable in some details, the
Genuine Memoirs
do tell in outline a true story, verifiable from other sources, including primary ones. It must be admitted, however, that the anecdotes of Dennis's adventures in his younger days seem to be the ones for which âD.L.' and the author of the
Genuine Memoirs
(who sometimes differ) allowed their imaginations the freest rein.