Eclipse (20 page)

The Jockey Club, which evolved into an administrative body and later moved into estate management, is not what we normally understand by the word club, and it has no jockeys in it. In the eighteenth century, groups of men meeting frequently, such as those taking regular rooms in coffee houses or taverns, tended to call themselves clubs. Jockeys were owners and others connected to the Turf. At first, the noblemen and gentlemen probably thought of the JC as a forum for socializing, drinking, and challenging each other to races, but soon they began giving instructions on how races were to be run, and they gradually assumed the status of the governing body at Newmarket. Later, they were to govern the whole of British racing, with responsibilities such as compiling the fixture list, controlling the rules of the sport, disciplining miscreants, licensing trainers and jockeys and other staff, and ensuring proper veterinary care; they also
acquired a good deal of land, as well as various racecourses.
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In 1762, the Jockey Club announced the official colours that members would use consistently thenceforth. The men who registered their colours included a royal duke (Cumberland – riders of his horses wore purple), five other dukes, a marquess, five earls, a viscount, and a baron. A historian of the JC wrote that the members were ‘almost to a man, of royal or noble or hereditarily gentle birth; and they were, almost to a man, either hereditary or elective legislators, for nearly all the commoners, or at any rate a large proportion of them, were Members of Parliament'. (That was exactly the profile of the clientele at Charlotte Hayes's King's Place nunnery.) An industrialist commented, perhaps with bitterness, that ‘To become a member of the Jockey Club you have to be a relative of God – and a close one at that.'

Such breeding did not mean that JC members were not rackety. They gambled, they drank and they womanized. Their first home, the Star and Garter, was where Lord Byron (great-uncle of the poet) killed a man called Chaworth following an argument about dealing with poachers, and where Lord Barrymore bet successfully that he could find a man who would eat a live cat. (It was also where, in 1774, the rules of cricket were refined.) In 1792, a member called Charles Pigott broke ranks to write
The Jockey Club: Or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age
, a scandalous collection of portraits of contemporaries from the Prince of Wales down. Pigott was expelled.

One member who remained above reproach, however, was
the baronet Sir Charles Bunbury, the man who cemented the JC's position as the authority of racing. Uninspiring both as an MP and as a husband, Bunbury did not allow the elopement of his wife Lady Sarah to deflect him from his real passion, Turf affairs. (He had, briefly, entertained the notion of challenging Sarah's lover Lord William Gordon to a duel, until it was pointed out to him that if adultery were to be the grounds, he might have to issue challenges to quite a few other men as well.) He immersed himself in racing and in his role as steward of the Jockey Club, of which he was later recognized as perpetual president, or ‘Dictator of the Turf'.

Bunbury's sturdiness was the making of the Jockey Club. When the Prince of Wales became involved in a racing scandal, Bunbury did not hesitate to instruct the heir to the throne on how he was expected to behave.
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His inflexible nature could cause him to be mean, however. When his colt Smolensko, ridden by Tom Goodisson, won the 1813 Derby, Bunbury and others won a considerable amount of money from a bookmaker called Brograve. Unable to honour the bets, Brograve shot himself. Paying Goodisson, who had ridden Smolensko to three victories, Bunbury handed over just a modest sum; Brograve's drastic default, he explained, meant that it was all he could afford.

Today, Eclipse's peerless status has biblical authority in the racing world. He is one of the rare historical figures to achieve a reputation beyond dispute. Sport, in which achievement is usually measurable, arouses just as much disagreement among aficionados as do more subjective matters such as the arts – tennis fans, for example, differ about the relative merits of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, in spite of the existence of records, and even head-to-head results, that might settle the issue. But at least there is a record of Eclipse's achievements: we know the races he won, who
his opponents were, in some cases how easily he won, and how favoured he was in the betting. We can also trace his extraordinary influence as a stallion.

The man largely responsible for introducing authority to racing records, as Bunbury brought it to the sport's governance, was James Weatherby. A Durham solicitor, Weatherby came to Newmarket in 1770 as keeper of the match book – the record of match races arranged and run – and secretary of the Jockey Club. We do not know a great deal about him, except that he was quite an operator.

The first ‘racing calendar', John Cheny's
An Historical List of All Horse Matches Run, and of All Plates and Prizes Run for in England
, had appeared in 1727. Before that, when record keeping was in the hands of keepers of private stud books, accounts of races were rare – a fortunate exception being this glimpse, from the Duke of Devonshire's stud book, of the brilliance of Flying Childers: ‘Chillders [
sic
] & Fox run over ye long course, Chillders carried 9 stone, Fox 8 stone. Chillders beat Fox a distance and a half.' Cheny's and subsequent calendars included race results, notices of rules, selected records of cock fights, advertisements promoting stallions, and advertisements for medicines such as ‘Watson's Cambridge horse balls'. However, when Weatherby arrived on the scene, during Eclipse's second season, there were rival calendars, one edited by Mr B. Walker, the other by William Tuting and Thomas Fawconer.

After Walker withdrew from the market, Weatherby, who had supplanted Tuting as keeper of the match book and Fawconer as Jockey Club secretary, set about supplanting their racing calendar as well. He persuaded Tuting to abandon Fawconer; then he seized and concealed 1, 600 copies of Fawconer's calendar before it came out. Why were Fawconer's subscribers not furious with him? Whatever Weatherby's tactics were for deflecting the blame for the disappearance of the books, they worked, and in 1774 he found a healthy collection of subscribers for his own publication (a
record of the 1773 season). Fawconer carried on nonetheless, but died in 1777. At this point, Weatherby announced brazenly that Fawconer's 1772 edition, ‘having hitherto been distributed to but a few of the subscribers, the rest of the subscribers, and others, are hereby informed that the same may be had of Mr Weatherby'.

Racing results were only half of the records that racing, if it were to be an efficient industry, required. They needed to be supplemented by, and linked to, pedigrees. In the words of a modern historian, a fair market in horses requires accurate pedigrees as surely as the motor market requires vehicle registration documents. Anyone making a commercial decision about bloodstock will ask: what is a horse's breeding, what were the performances of its ancestors, and what does that evidence suggest about the horse's potential? The answers, until Weatherby came along, were usually vague.

Weatherby's nephew, also called James, set about producing a comprehensive account of racing bloodlines, commissioning an author called William Sydney Towers to research in old racing calendars and in whatever private stud books he could lay his hands on. In 1791,
An Introduction to a General Stud Book
(compiled by Towers) began the job of rescuing the Turf ‘from the increasing evil of false and inaccurate pedigrees'; it was succeeded by further introductions, until the volume regarded as the definitive first edition of the
General Stud Book
appeared, in 1808.

The
GSB
listed mares with their offspring. Looking for Eclipse in the index, we are directed to Spilletta, ‘Bred by Sir Robert Eden, foaled in 1749, got by Regulus, her dam (Mother Western) by Smith's Son of Snake – Lord D'Arcy's Old Montagu – Hautboy – Brimmer.' (These last three names are the damsires in the tail female line – the bottom line of the pedigree, from mother to her mother, and then to her mother's mother, and so on.) Spilletta's foals are a bay filly (foaled in 1759) by the Duke of Cumberland's Crab; Eclipse (1764) by Marske; Proserpine (1766)
by Marske; Garrick (1772) by Marske; and Briseis (1774) by Chrysolite.
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We can trace further male lines in the pedigree by looking for Eclipse's sire Marske (out of the Ruby Mare) in the index, and then for Marske's sire Squirt (out of Sister to Old Country Wench), and so on. A later volume of the
GSB
authorized Eclipse's date of birth as 1 April 1764: ‘Eclipse was so called, not because he eclipsed all competitors, but from having been foaled during the great eclipse of 1764.'

Assembling this information, from inconsistent calendars and private records of fitful reliability, must have been a painstaking and frustrating job. But Weatherby and Towers performed it with remarkable accuracy. There were further, even thornier problems for compilers of later editions, as more and more horses came up for inclusion. Who should be in, and who out? The editors explained that ‘half-bred' animals were not eligible; and in 1821, they first mentioned the implied contrasting term, ‘Thoroughbred'. By it, they meant a horse descended from a particular group of mares, accepted as the foundation mothers of the breed.

One of the earliest quandaries concerned a horse who was, like his grandfather Eclipse, a national celebrity. Copenhagen was Wellington's charger at the Battle of Waterloo. He had inherited the Eclipse temperament: when Wellington dismounted following the battle and gave him a pat, Copenhagen lashed out, nearly achieving the fatal blow that Napoleon's forces had failed to land. Not bearing a grudge, Wellington said of him, ‘There may have been many faster horses, no doubt many handsomer, but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.' The problem was Copenhagen's inheritance from Lady Catherine, his mother. Lady Catherine's owner, General Grosvenor, had lobbied to get her included in the
GSB
, and Copenhagen appeared in one edition as well. But the editors later removed them, on the grounds that
among Lady Catherine's ancestors was ‘a hunting mare not thorough-bred'.

There were more incendiary issues than this to come, with implications for international diplomacy. The term ‘Thoroughbred' evolved to mean, in effect, ‘horses granted admission to the
General Stud Book
'. But that caused a problem when racing developed as an international sport and industry, because Weatherbys could not trace back a good many American horses, for example, to the English foundation mares. Much ill feeling ensued: while English bloodstock experts argued that ‘the pages of the
Stud Book
should be zealously safeguarded', American breeders thought that the dastardly British were closing off the market by stigmatizing American horses as half-bred. The dispute did not begin to be resolved until the middle of the twentieth century, and a more practical definition of ‘Thoroughbred' at last appeared in 1969.
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More recently, Weatherbys has granted admission to horses traced to sources in the stud books of other countries. The ancestry of the Thoroughbred is no longer exclusively English.
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Dealing with such matters is more than a simple publishing job. Weatherbys, which is still in business and still a family firm (and which, after James Weatherby's initial shenanigans, has maintained a fine reputation for integrity), continues to compile the
Racing Calendar
and
General Stud Book
, and also manages race entries, issues lists of runners and riders, allocates weights, registers horses and owners, and collects and distributes prize money. It is a kind of civil service of British racing.

Our third influential man of the Turf left us the race that was to represent the summit of Thoroughbred achievement, as well as one of the most widely used of all eponyms: Derby.

From the 1770s, racing's organizers began to introduce new kinds of contests, both to encourage the speediness that stallions such as Eclipse were engendering, and to offer better spectacles to the public. Four-mile heats went out of fashion, and in came shorter races, which you might be able to see from start to finish if you had a decent vantage point, and which took a few minutes, rather than a whole afternoon, to decide
¹⁰¹
(they were to heat races roughly what limited-overs cricket matches are to five-day Tests). Racecourses also staged races that encouraged ordinary people to bet. At matches and plates, huge sums were bet by racing insiders and their friends, who felt that they knew what was going to happen. Now handicaps, which assigned weights to horses according to their abilities, created – at least in theory – a more open betting market. In 1791, forty thousand people gathered at Ascot to watch the Oatlands Stakes, in which the bottom weight and officially least able horse carried 5st 3lb (it is hard to form a mental image of his jockey), and the top weight and officially best horse carried 9st 10lb. The winner, at 20-1, was
Baronet,
¹⁰²
owned by the Prince of Wales. As a betting magnet, the race was a huge success, with £100, 000 staked on the result; as an enricher of punters, however, it was a disaster. So few people had backed Baronet that, a contemporary wrote, ‘Horses are daily thrown out of training, jockeys are going into mourning, grooms are becoming EO [roulette] merchants and strappers are going on the highway.'

Some of the most venerable races in the calendar followed the Oatlands Stakes model: the Ebor, the Cambridgeshire and the Grand National are among the examples. The Melbourne Cup, the race that stops Australia, is also a handicap. The Santa Anita Handicap is the event that Seabiscuit's owner, Charles Howard, most wanted to win. However, it is the Classics and prestigious weight-for-age races (older horses carry more weight, but otherwise the weights are level) that reveal the greatest champions: the St Simons, Nijinskys and Secretariats. These races have also revealed the supremacy of the Eclipse line.