The Suffragette Derby E-Book

Michael Tanner

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

On Wednesday 4 June 1913, fledgling newsreel cameras captured just over two-and-a-half minutes of neverto-be-forgotten British social and sporting history. The 250,000 people thronging Epsom Downs carried with them a quartet of combustible elements: a fanatical, publicity-hungry suffragette; a scapegoat for the Titanic disaster and the pillar of the Establishment who bore him a personal grudge; a pair of feuding jockeys at odds over money and glory; and, finally, at the heart of the action, two thoroughbred horses - one a vicious savage and one the consummate equine athlete. Taken together, this was a recipe for the most notorious horse race in British history. One hundred years on, this particular Derby Day is remembered for two reasons: the fatal intervention of Emily Davison, a militant suffragette who brought down the King's runner, and the controversial disqualification of Bower Ismay's horse Craganour on the grounds of rough riding - the first and only time a Derby-winner has forfeited its title for this reason. The sensation of Davison's questionable interference in the name of suffrage has overshadowed the outrage of Craganour's disqualification and the intricate reasons behind it. Now, with a view to allowing this scandal the attention it deserves, Michael Tanner replays the most dramatic day in Turf history - and finally uncovers the truth of the Suffragette Derby.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Prologue

1. The Favourite

2. Lucky Loder

3. Embittered Servant

4. The American Disease

5. Hired Gun

6. The Spare

7. Black Balls and White Feathers

8. Sixes Bar the Favourite

9. No-hopers

10. Faire Emelye

11. Into the Vortex

12. The Pieces in Place

13. ‘I Will!’

14. The Bull Fight

15. ‘He Has Not Won It Yet!’

16. Rancour and Recrimination

17. Accidental Martyr

18. Surplus to Requirements

19. All Debts Settled

Appendix 1: Race Details

Appendix 2: Davison’s ‘Intimate Companion’

Appendix 3: Davison’s Flags

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

Prologue

The skies above London on the morning of Wednesday 4 June 1913 hang heavy with cloud, suggesting the forecast of bright sunshine and temperatures in the high 60s to have been misleading. The sun will eventually prevail, however, good news indeed for a quartet of men who are keener than most to inspect the heavens for signs of rain. Their business is horse racing and they desire perfect conditions for a horse race – the most famous horse race in the world. Perfect conditions to run the Blue Riband of the Turf: the Derby.

To the woman walking down Kingsway, on the other hand, the weather is of no consequence. It may rain or shine as far as she is concerned. The weather won’t make a scrap of difference to her plans for this afternoon. She has made an early start from her lodgings at 133 Clapham Road in order to call in at the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union and purchase two flags en route to Victoria station where she intends boarding a race-day ‘special’ to Epsom Downs. This race-goer has no interest in who might win the Derby. She’s setting out for Epsom to strike a blow for her cause, the suffragette cause dedicated to obtaining ‘Votes for Women’. She means to leave Epsom having written her name into the history books. But she has to be back in Kensington by early evening. She’s due to help out at the Suffragette Summer Festival in the Empress Rooms. Her name is Emily Wilding Davison.

Tall and slender, with unusually long arms that lend her an awkwardness, she’s wearing a dark blue skirt and matching blouse with a short black jacket edged with silk braid. A light grey felt hat is jammed down on her head, obscuring the mop of thick reddish-brown hair swept up into a fashionable chignon, yet it can’t hide the fact that she’s no longer in the first flush of youth. Handsome rather than pretty would best describe her looks, even as a teenager. Her face is small and rather square, featuring a strong brow and an equally strong nose separating green eyes described variously as elusive and whimsical. Her mouth is straight, wide and thin, rather severe in repose but frequently caught in a half-smile that one acquaintance compares to the mocking expression of the Mona Lisa. She appears a bit of a battleaxe. Those of a more charitable disposition might settle for frumpy, old-before-her-time, gone to seed, an impression reinforced by a braying ‘haw-haw’ accent even her friends find grating. Those friends are women. She doesn’t court male company. She prefers the companionship of her own sex. She equates men with the Establishment, the boot with its heel on the neck of womankind. She sees her sex denied entry to almost every profession; the inclusion of ‘obey’ in the marriage vows means precisely that – wives surrender personal wealth to husbands whose conjugal rights also run to sex and child-bearing on demand. Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the condition of legal slavery. But she sees herself as one of the ‘New Women’, a class of well-educated women intent on gaining their personal liberty.

Now she sits in a third-class carriage of a race-day special run by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, the hubbub swirling around her head which, as ever, tilts to one side as if locked in jaunty contemplation of life’s absurdities. Little wonder she looks worn out. The forty-year-old boasts a charge sheet few hardened criminals can match, because there’s no one more committed to the campaign for women’s suffrage than she. She’s served seven terms of imprisonment in the past four years, a grand total of eight months’ incarceration during which she embarked on seven hunger strikes and endured no fewer than forty-nine instances of forcible feeding. Her militancy has graduated from stone-throwing to firing pillar boxes, an escalating fanaticism that worries the suffragette leadership. It has labelled her ‘a self-dramatising individualist, insufficiently capable of acting in the confines of official instructions, clever but headstrong … she tends to walk alone’.

Thus Davison is more than a rebel with a cause. She is a rebel within her cause; the worst kind of rebel – a loose cannon. As a child she didn’t play ‘dolls’: she played ‘soldiers’. Now she sees herself as a ‘soldier’ of God fighting for women’s rights, a Bible never far from her hand. She’s fearless, but also wilful and impulsive, traits that frequently breed misjudgements under pressure and occasion an intimacy with self-destruction; she is a maverick marginalised by her movement as surely as her sexuality edges her toward the fringes of mainstream society. Such slights only serve to make her opposition to the established order all the more zealous and its expression all the more reckless. Indeed, many racehorse owners are becoming alarmed at the prospect of suffragettes like Davison targeting their valuable livestock following numerous arson attacks on deserted racecourse buildings. The Sporting Life spoke up for them, demanding ‘Suffragette liability in the event of any measure of the mad women proving successful. There have been so many rash acts attempted and carried out that the threats cannot be lightly dismissed.’

Davison’s turmoil mirrored that of the country. Britain was far from a nation at ease with itself. The suffragette’s leader, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, has incited her membership to ‘rebellion!’ yet their growing violence can’t compare with the explosive forces unleashed by the march of trade unionism, stoked by the yawning gap between the affluent minority and the working-class majority. Recent disputes in the coalfields and the docks have sparked mass demonstrations and rioting. The government’s deployment of troops to maintain order resulted in the shooting of three strikers in South Wales. Two warships were even sent up the Mersey. By 1913 industrial disputes are running at 150 a month and Britain’s ‘Great Unrest’ enables Leon Trotsky to crow ‘the dim spectre of revolution [is] hanging over Britain’. Across the Irish Sea more rebellion festers, as Irish Nationalism and religious strife drive the country to the brink of civil war: ‘I see terrible times ahead, bitter fighting and rivers of blood,’ confides one Irish leader. Farther afield the Balkans are already a-fire with just the kind of bloody conflict that many Britons dread will engulf the entire European continent. If this constant round of grim headlines in its daily newspapers isn’t sufficiently depressing, the nation is obliged to come to terms with the loss of the Titanic and one of its most heroic sons, Scott of the Antarctic. The various struggles of this tempestuous period are coming to a head; the protagonists know there can be no victory without a blood ‘sacrifice’. The Irish rebels know it; the suffragettes know it. But on this quintessential English morning all that may be forgotten. For today is Derby Day.

Davison is joining a cross section of Britons that has flocked to Epsom Downs in celebration of this unique occasion every year since 1780. This is the one day Belgravia rubs shoulders with Bermondsey. In a vast crowd consisting of, according to Disraeli, ‘all the ruffiansim that London and every racecourse in the kingdom can produce’, she finds viscounts mingling with villains; gypsies haggling with generals; housewives and housebreakers enjoying a well-earned day off. They have been massing since six in the morning for, albeit not the national jamboree of the Victorian era when even parliamentary business is suspended, Derby Day is still the nearest the country comes to the traditional embodiment of ‘Merrie Englande’. Epsom Downs is transformed into the Edwardian equivalent of old St Bartholomew’s Fair, brimming with entertainment and original sin. So many revellers will cram this makeshift arena by three o’clock, possibly as many as a quarter of a million, that the only visible blades of grass will be those comprising the one-and-a-half-mile horseshoe that is the Derby course itself. Browned by a week of pleasant summer sunshine, this strip of turf awaits the arrival of the fifteen thoroughbreds who constitute the cream of the current three-year-old equine generation.

It is Craganour who occupies the minds of the four men scanning the London skies. The colt is the best of his generation and the worthy favourite for the 134th renewal of the Derby Stakes.

Although separated by seven years, two of the men appear cast from the same bronze, in both appearance (soft-faced; bristling waxed moustache; centre-parted macassar-oiled dark hair) and wealthy background. They might even pass for brothers. But though the mould is similar the metal is not.

The first of them surveying the skies from his town house in Mount Street is a 46-year-old, rather stiff, unemotional and painfully shy Old Etonian, a corner-stone of the Turf, elected to the Jockey Club in 1906 and appointed Steward six years later. He is an abstemious member of a family that accepted a baronetcy in 1887 and represents ‘old money’; a former cavalry officer who never saw action; a man who has owned one Derby winner, Spearmint, and bred Craganour – but sold him before he set foot on a racecourse. As a sportsman he’s honoured and respected; as a man he’s known to very few, being as confirmed a bachelor as Emily Davison is a spinster, the temptations of the flesh seemingly either distasteful or a total mystery. He’s a man at one with the concept of hierarchy and his place in it; one who values protocol, puts logic before feelings when he speaks and expects people to listen to his words – and then act upon them. Those few hold it a privilege to regard him, and to be regarded by him, as a friend. He is unquestionably a member of the smart set. His name is listed in Who’s Who: it is Eustace Loder.

The younger man assessing the weather from his residence on the other side of Berkeley Square in Bruton Street is a handsome Old Harrovian of thirty-nine years for whom the term ‘gentleman of leisure’ might have been coined; a man who harbours no ambitions to impose his will on the Turf. He embodies Oscar Wilde’s axiom that pleasure is ‘the only thing one should live for’, he is a man-of-the-Shires with an eye for the ladies who comes from a line that rejected the offer of a baronetcy in 1897 and instead represents ‘new money’ – the ship-owning family tarred by its intimate association with the Titanic disaster. He’s a volunteer trooper who braved gunfire in the Boer War; a big-game hunter; and a progressively heavy investor in the bloodstock market. He now owns Craganour and hopes to lead in a Derby winner. The fast set rather than the smart set would be more his milieu. His name does not merit a listing in Who’s Who. It is Charles Bower Ismay.

He and Eustace Loder ought to have enjoyed each other’s company. After all, they had much in common beside their appearance and love of all things equestrian. Both entered the world with silver spoons clamped in their mouths. Both came from close-knit and rather puritanical families. Both enjoyed the intimate relationship provided by a twin. And as younger sons both were free of responsibilities, never obliged to do a proper day’s work in their lives.

Yet, close study of their portraits drawn for the society magazines of the day betrays telling differences. In Mayfair, Ismay is portrayed legs splayed, wearing a bow tie, casual brown suit with jacket unbuttoned and fashionable spats, staring at the artist while holding a lit cigarette between the fingers of one hand and thrusting the other hand inside a trouser pocket. In Vanity Fair, Loder is bowler-hatted, stiff-collared, feet rooted at nine-o-clock and grey suit tightly buttoned, his right arm angled and gloved fist arrowed into the hip in proud acknowledgement to the cavalryman, left hand leaning on his walking stick of authority. He’s pictured as a man used to telling rather than being told, the binoculars slung round his waist a covert warning to all that he has his eyes on them. Had any artist dared to depict Loder with hand in pocket he’d likely have been sued for defamation of character.

London neighbours they may have been but Loder and Ismay did not clink glasses. On the Turf they were polar opposites. As a member and, more importantly, a Steward of the Jockey Club, Loder represented those forces of the Establishment intent on continuity: the significance of his acceptance into this elite underlined by his being one of the few Jockey Club members without a title. Ismay amounted to a mere Johnny-come-lately, content to wave his cheque-book around, buying bloodstock instead of breeding his own like a true gentleman. Ismay was clearly intent on taking more from the sport than he was prepared to give back, even to the extent of playing fast and loose with the very Rules of Racing that Loder, as a Steward, was honour-bound to enforce. Earlier in the year one of Ismay’s trainers had his licence withdrawn after two Ismay horses demonstrated abnormal improvement to secure surprise victories. Ismay was guilty by association. Then Loder was forced to stand by as Ismay sacked his own jockey protégé, Billy Saxby, in the wake of the 2000 Guineas, the first of the season’s five Classics. Craganour ought to have won that race. Saxby had ridden him as if he had; many observers believed he had. The judge didn’t. He awarded the race to Louvois. Friends assured Ismay the Stewards were bound to hold an enquiry into the decision with a view to reversing the result. But they didn’t. Those Stewards included Eustace Loder. Although Bower Ismay swallowed his disappointment, he sacked his jockey.

Loder’s distaste for Ismay cuts far deeper than suspicions of foul play on the Turf. It’s acutely personal. Quite possibly, in another era they’d have settled their differences with pistols at dawn. Ismay has been brazenly conducting an affair with Loder’s sister-in-law, an affront to his own moral code and a slight on his family honour. If that alone were insufficient to label Ismay a bounder, there’s his connection with the Titanic disaster. Loder lost friends when the Ismay family’s White Star Line vessel sank the previous April with the loss of 1,500 lives – though not that of Bower Ismay’s brother Bruce, the president of the company, who managed to secure one of the precious seats in a lifeboat, an act of self-preservation that did not rest well with the public. The circles frequented by Loder still expected a ‘gentleman’ to do the ‘right thing’. Once again, Bower Ismay was smeared by association.

Edwardian society was a powerful body, built on great families bound together by generations of inter-marriage and a code of conduct. It was inclined to repel boarders with black balls or white feathers. In Loder’s estimation, Bower Ismay was a philanderer and thoroughly ‘bad egg’ who needed taking down a peg or two. And he had the connections – and the power – to do so.

Loder motored to Epsom with a trying day in prospect. It would be naïve to believe anything else. Almost instant success as a breeder and owner of racehorses earned him the soubriquet of ‘Lucky’ Loder but he isn’t feeling so lucky any more. First of all, his horses haven’t been running so well this year. Secondly, he’s brooding over recent accusations from another stud owner that threaten to destroy his good name as a breeder. Nor is he feeling himself: the disease that will kill him within fourteen months is beginning to take hold. Yet these issues must be set aside, for he is the Senior Steward on duty this coming afternoon, the man charged with the responsibility of ensuring the Rules of Racing are followed, without ‘fear or favour’. However, one nagging voice he can’t silence is that telling him he will have to be elsewhere if Craganour is led in as winner of the Derby. The successful breeder doesn’t relish having to look the successful owner in the face.

The remaining two men eager to assess the accuracy of the weather forecast will act as the instruments of these two adversaries on the track. They are jockeys. The shorter of the two boasts a baby-face belying his twenty-eight years. He’s an American who came to Europe in 1899 at the age of fourteen, feted as ‘a child wonder on the pigskin,’ only to be hounded out of English racing three years later for ‘pulling’ horses at the behest of high-rolling American gamblers labelled a cancer to the English Turf by Establishment figures like Eustace Loder. No longer the impressionable youngster, it is he, Johnny Reiff, his talents matured to perfection by a dozen seasons riding in France and Germany, who has the responsibility of riding Craganour this afternoon. The pressure will not ruffle him. It’s just another horse race to Reiff. He’s just grateful to be alive to ride in one – as the metal plate in his head testifies. And he has already won two Derbies. Today he’s been gifted the opportunity to make it three because he has, as TheSportsman puts it, ‘dropped in for another fortunate mount’.

Craganour is his only mount of the day. Highly selected raids have been Johnny Reiff’s calling card since slinking away from the English scene. With luck, it would amount to another smash-and-grab to match that of the 2000 Guineas when he and Louvois had benefitted from the judge’s error. Like his fellow Americans, Reiff doesn’t suffer from any shortage of confidence. He knows he will need to call on all that confidence in today’s Derby. He’s riding the favourite but fourteen other jockeys are desperate to beat him, some of them pathologically so. The reason is simple: envy. The mount on Craganour will be only his second ride in England this year, following Louvois in the Guineas. It is all about figures. The Guineas was worth £6,800 to the winner; the Derby £6,450. Two rides; two wins; two fat presents. While the home jockeys dragged themselves round the provincial gaff tracks scratching around for any kind of ride in the big-money races, Reiff sat at home in Maisons Laffitte waiting for the telegram like a hired gun, the mercenary brought into town to fulfil the contract and then depart, handsomely paid. Yet Reiff was merely responding to market forces.

‘The dearth of English riders is a serious matter,’ commented The Times.

There was never a period when the average skill was so low. It is beyond question that innumerable races have been lost during the last season in consequence of defective riding. No one has been able to suggest any reason why native jockeys have thus lost their art. Of the last twelve Derbies, only three have been won by riders of British birth.

Americans had claimed seven, for the sons of Uncle Sam plying their trade in Europe had ‘growd like Topsy’. English owners could call on a dozen or more crack American riders in addition to the likes of Danny Maher and ‘Skeets’ Martin who were based in England. And then there were French-based Englishmen like George Bellhouse and the perennial French champion jockey George Stern.

Thus, Reiff’s presence on the favourite’s back aroused much resentment among the home jockeys who were fed-up with losing lucrative rides in the major races to the Yanks who’d lorded it over them for the best part of twenty years. ‘Rivalry between the English riders and the Yanks borrowed from France is becoming a serious problem,’ noted the racing correspondent of the Daily Express. There was no telling how this bad feeling might manifest itself during the customary hurly-burly of the Derby.

The second jockey is the disaffected English rider who partnered Craganour in the 1913 Guineas and thinks he should be aboard him today. Billy Saxby was a journeyman jockey until Ismay began patronising him and Craganour brought gigantic pay-days in the summer of 1912. He’s smarting at what he sees as an injustice, an unfair dismissal that has inevitably dissuaded other owners and trainers from putting him up on their horses. His confidence knocked, he started making rash decisions, incurring the wrath of the Stewards. He began feeling sorry for himself and piled on weight, every pound spelling fewer opportunities; inactivity spawned additional weight. Saxby was trapped in a spiral of decline that only a big win could arrest. It hurts that he won’t be on Craganour this afternoon. Victory in the Derby brought more than money: it bestowed immortality. He’s determined to win the race with his new mount, Louvois, or, at the very least, do everything in his power to stop Reiff stealing the prize that ought to have been his. Loder might sympathise: he views this son of a Sergeant-Major in his former regiment like his own and considers himself his Turf guardian. He feels convinced Ismay’s initial patronage and ultimate treatment of Saxby was nothing less than another calculated dig at him.

King George V and Queen Mary will be witnesses to this most sensational of Derbies. In marked contrast to his father King Edward VII, who’d revelled in the raffish atmosphere of the Turf and won the Derby three times, the new King’s sport of choice is sailing; and rather than collect mistresses in the manner of ‘Edward the Caresser’, the ‘Sailor King’ accumulates stamps. In deference to this legacy, twelve months ago he’d fielded a runner in the Derby to finish fourth, but the chances of Pintadeau’s full brother achieving likewise in today’s renewal are slim. Anmer sports fine looks but lacks matching ability. In the dismissive words of The Sportsman, he was one of those participants ‘far better in their stables than possibly interfering with some of the others’. One could excuse his jockey, Herbert Jones, for concurring: like every other occupant of the weighing room he has heard the rumours suggesting some suffragette outrage could be in the offing and that, as the King’s jockey, he might be singled out. He might even be shot at.

The race their Majesties will watch takes just two minutes 37.6 seconds to run. Yet in this short space of time the intervention of Emily Davison at Tattenham Corner results in the fall of Anmer; the later charge for the winning post involving half-a-dozen horses is described by one of the combatant jockeys as ‘a bull fight’. Both events are recorded for posterity by the new-fangled contraption that is the newsreel camera. However, what the cameras couldn’t record was a third set of events, of equal sensation, that transpired in the Epsom Stewards’ Room during the thirty minutes immediately after the 6/4 favourite Craganour passes the post a head in front of the 100/1 shot Aboyeur. The outcome of this clandestine Stewards enquiry is the single instance of a Derby winner being disqualified on the grounds of foul riding. This enquiry is launched by Eustace Loder; he acts not only as prosecutor but also judge and jury, and he calls upon Saxby as a key witness.

This entire sequence of events – two public and one private – was shot through with acrimony of the sourest kind. It’s hard not to conclude that a cocktail of toxic ingredients was stirred that June afternoon. Davison’s estrangement from the suffragette leadership made her a loose cannon capable of any outrage. The rough-house denouement of the race was an inevitable consequence of the ill-feeling simmering between the home jockeys and the foreigners. Rancour corroded the judgement of Eustace Loder, a man in the clutches of a terminal disease.

The key to unlocking the mystery at the heart of the ‘Suffragette Derby’ lies embedded in the psyche of Loder and Davison, two middle-aged egocentrics: the one a pillar of the Establishment whose very stability the other was actively undermining. Trapped in an emotional insularity of their own manufacture, the pair embraced their personality flaws like a suit of armour until, unable to take it off, they were dragged down by the weight of it. Both were assertive individuals, prepared, if necessary, to be the centre of attention. What divided them was the wherewithal. Loder could exploit a position of power and make capital out of the ‘Rules’, whereas Davison had no option but to make up her own ‘Rules’ as she went along.

Nothing became Davison more than the apparently heroic exploit that led to her death. It caused her to be sanctified by colleagues eager to validate their crusade with a ‘blood sacrifice’; and mythologised by feminist writers whenever an example of peerless and principled womanhood was called from central casting. However, Davison’s ‘outrage’ has been grossly misrepresented. It involved nothing gloriously sacrificial. It resulted from a chain of miscalculations and irrational impulses, the like of which punctuated her entire suffragette career. What else apart from self-delusion could account for an intelligent woman thinking she could walk among galloping racehorses weighing half a ton apiece, emerge unscathed and depart scot-free to fulfil her social obligations that evening? Davison was blessed with great intellect and courage but scant common sense and self-control. Therein lies the truth of the outrage that sullied the 1913 Derby.

If Davison’s Achilles heel was self-delusion, Loder’s seems to have been the inflexibility born of a life governed by manuals and rule books. Such codes come only in black-and-white. There’s no palette with the colours of compromise, no scope for turning a blind eye, little room for extenuating circumstances or hope of forgiveness. Living his life in a moral strait-jacket rendered Loder’s Derby objection automatic, albeit not necessarily well-intentioned.

The suspicion lingers, however, that Loder’s cardinal sin lay unexposed. The truth of his ‘objection’ to Craganour’s – and Ismay’s – victory hinges on a question he was never obliged to answer: would he have shown the same eagerness to orchestrate an enquiry hell-bent on disqualification had the roles of Anmer and Craganour been reversed and the owner at risk of forfeiting the Derby been his King instead of Bower Ismay?

The notion Loder might risk raining on his sovereign’s parade is laughable. Spoiling Bower Ismay’s party, on the other hand, was evidently pardonable – which demands the distinction be subjected to forensic analysis. And therein lies buried the truth of the objection and disqualification that marred the 1913 Derby.

For so long as this Derby is recounted and reviewed, the names of Davison and Anmer, Loder and Ismay, Reiff and Saxby, Craganour and Aboyeur will be linked inextricably and their roles debated. What is beyond dispute is that the one day of the year when Epsom basked in the national consciousness ended with it under intense scrutiny for all the wrong reasons – a view not lost on the town’s own newspaper, the Epsom Advertiser:

The Epsom Derby of 1913 will long be remembered by everybody – whether of sporting instinct or otherwise – as one of the most sensational on record. The event is looked upon by a large number of visitors as a day’s outing, and many of the parties picnicking on the Hill or other places cared little about the actual racing.

They were out for a day’s enjoyment, and it mattered little to them whether the favourite or the biggest outsider carried off the Blue Riband of the Turf.

Disaster followed upon disaster, and people went away from the Downs hardly knowing whether they stood on their head or their heels. On top of the favourite being disqualified after just snatching the race by a narrow margin came the mad act on the part of a suffragette which might have resulted in the loss of more than one life.

The paper was correct: the events of that Derby have never been forgotten; disaster did follow upon disaster. Some may assert Emily Davison’s Derby outrage to have been nothing more than a sideshow to the unique Derby objection that followed. Yet the 134th running of the Derby isn’t written into history as the ‘Suffragette Derby’ without reason. Her actions heaped ignominy on a day of national celebration; she was the first to disrupt a sporting occasion in the name of political activism and be filmed so doing. Without Davison, this renewal of the Derby would be forgotten by all bar Turf scholars.

But, where has truth given way to myth?

ONE

The Favourite

The heartbeat of a Derby comes from the horses. Not just any horses. The cream of one thoroughbred generation racing at three years old. Colts and fillies only. No geldings: only animals whose blood could further the breed were allowed to run. In any one generation that meant some 1,500 animals might start their lives theoretically holding Derby aspirations. That number was quickly whittled down as owners were obliged to make costly entries, in this instance by 18 July 1911, before their horses had appeared on the racecourse let alone displayed any ability commensurate with a Derby contender. From a total of 344 horses entered for the 1913 renewal just fifteen would go to post.

There had been racing on Epsom Downs of some sort since the reign of James I. The area’s additional attributes of spring waters, proximity to London and opportunities for hawking, hunting, boxing and cockfighting combined to make Epsom a fashionable spa to the wealthy. Samuel Pepys refers to racing here in May 1663 though at this date there was no thought given to any form of race approximating to the Derby. By the middle of the eighteenth century English racing began to shift emphasis away from mature older horses (five-year-olds and up) and races over extreme distances (two miles or more, run off in heats) toward shorter distances and younger racehorses. It was this school of thought that had initiated the Oaks, a sweepstakes (the entry fee of all the entrants going to the winner) for three-year-old fillies over one-and-a-half miles, in 1779. Its success spawned the Derby the following year for three-year-old colts (though fillies might still compete) to be contested over a mile. The distance of the race was only increased to one mile four furlongs in 1783 (plus 29 yards up to 1921) and the route of 1913 was not followed until 1872. The Derby had now outstripped its northern rival, the St Leger, founded in 1776 to become the primary target of every three-year-old colt. The final pair of races ultimately referred to as ‘Classics’ were the 2000 and 1000 Guineas (fillies only), run at Newmarket over a mile, and instituted in 1809 and 1814 respectively, but they weren’t regarded on a par with the other trio until the 1850s. Alongside the term ‘Classic’ soon appeared the term ‘Triple Crown’ denoting victory in the three colts’ events, or a fillies’ equivalent involving Guineas, Oaks and St Leger.

The status of the Derby exceeded crude financial measurement. The 1913 renewal wasn’t the most valuable race in the country – or even the most valuable Classic of the year. Its prize of £6,450 lagged a little behind the £6,800 of the 2000 Guineas (the 1000 Guineas was worth £6,400; the Oaks £4,950 and the St Leger £6,450), and all five Classics were overshadowed by the Jockey Club Stakes at £7,440 and the Eclipse at £8,735. But in terms of prestige the Derby looked down on every Classic and every race both domestic and foreign. In 1913 it was quite simply the most important horse race in the world: the very furtherance of the breed depended upon it. The Italian breeder Federico Tesio put its significance most eloquently:

The thoroughbred exists because its selection has depended, not on experts, technicians, or zoologists, but on a piece of wood: the winning post of the Epsom Derby. If you base your criteria on anything else, you will get something else, not the thoroughbred.

Horses who had passed that ‘piece of wood’ victorious became barometers of excellence in the history of the thoroughbred: the likes of Voltigeur and Gladiateur; Ormonde and Persimmon; and latterly Ard Patrick and Sunstar. In 1913 Craganour was a worthy favourite to join this list.

Craganour had proved himself to be head and shoulders above the rest of his generation. He had, at one time or another, met and beaten six of his opponents. Reproduction of his superiority over the Derby distance equated to a bare minimum of a three-length advantage over his nearest challenger. His Foxhill stable in Wiltshire became a fortress and his trainer, Jack Robinson, received letters, purporting to be from the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), threatening to burn it down and harm the Derby favourite. The horse, meanwhile, continued to do everything asked of him on the gallops. On the eve of the Derby, Robinson assured reporters that Craganour could ‘scarcely fail except by some stroke of bad luck impossible to foresee’. But he also confided to a friend: ‘This is always an unlucky race for me.’

William Thomas Robinson was invariably called ‘Jack’. So he ought to be: ‘Jack’ suited him. There’s a snap and a crackle about it – as there was about Robinson, who had a reputation for blowing hot and cold. Alert, and occasionally too quick-tempered for his own welfare, he gave the impression that any man who wished to get the better of him would have to be up very early of a morning; and then, likely as not, still fail. The slender frame of his days as a jockey had given way to that of a sturdy red-cheeked bantam with an air of shiny-shoed prosperity and a beady disinclination to allow any of his charges, equine or human, to entertain any thought of slothfulness. He loved the country squire lifestyle his hard work had brought him and entertained his owners and many stable visitors right royally. They included actress Lillie Langtry and the renowned Italian tenor Enrico Caruso – who was once found after a champagne luncheon leaning against a wall, singing at the top of his voice. Robinson liked nothing better than a practical joke and to this end would have a goat led round his dining room if he sensed any of his guests were bored or being boring.

Robinson had been a successful jockey, though never in contention for the championship owing to a tendency to put on flesh, but before training beckoned he can be said to have left his mark. Within three years of riding his first winner in 1884 he secured the St Leger on Kilwarlin and the Cesarewitch on Humewood, both of which advertised his mettle. The bad-tempered Kilwarlin repeatedly did his utmost to throw Robinson out of the saddle on the way to the start and when the flag fell stood rooted to the spot until the rest of the field had galloped a hundred yards. Robinson still managed to bridge the gap and just pip the Derby winner Merry Hampton. To ride Humewood, the young jockey needed to pare himself down to 7st 6lb. On the morning before the race Robinson was ordered by connections to walk from Newmarket to Cambridge and then back again, a round trip of twenty-six miles or more; the walk was to be broken with a breakfast of a pork chop and a pint of champagne. While Robinson watched, doubtless drooling from hunger and thirst, the chop was trimmed and half the champagne drunk by his escort. His ordeal was rewarded, for Humewood landed hefty bets.

The following season of 1888 was Robinson’s most successful, his seventy-five winners including Seabreeze in the Oaks and St Leger. This high point coincided with the end of his apprenticeship and also the start of his losing battle with the scales: his last four seasonal totals combined failed to reach his 1888 figure.

Thus Robinson retired in 1892 at the age of twenty-four with ample time to forge a reputation for himself as a trainer. He soon established himself at Foxhill, 600 feet up on the Wiltshire Downs close to Swindon, overlooking Wanborough Plain where he laid out eleven gallops and a tan track half a mile in circumference. Robinson planted 500,000 trees and miles of hedgerow to create a location made for keeping secrets. Only tinkling sheep bells and cawing rooks disturbed the silence.

Robinson set about engineering many a coup. He targeted the opening weeks of the season when he showed a wonderful knack of having his string fit to run for their lives: even his yearlings were tried before Christmas and then trained as hard as their seniors as Lincoln and Liverpool approached in the spring. It’s no accident that he landed the fiercely competitive Lincolnshire Handicap during the first week of the season on no fewer than four occasions. The success of 1898 came courtesy of Winkfield’s Pride. Deemed a doubtful participant the weekend prior to the race, odds of 100/1 were freely available; within forty-eight hours the price suddenly plummeted to 5/1 and, aided by Robinson’s brother Nat, Winkfield’s Pride won in a canter. The stampede of Foxhill’s heavy bettors to get ‘on’ the horse at the eleventh hour was so frantic that no one thought to advise the horse’s owner. He had to be privately accommodated before he allowed his horse to run.

Handicap successes followed thick and fast. No greater daylight robbery was committed by Foxhill than for the Chester Cup of 1904 when Robinson was abetted by a new confederate in Robert Sievier, punter and rascal extraordinaire. They had three runners engaged in the race, two of whom had good recent form in the book but it was the third, Sandboy, beaten in sellers and carrying just 6st 2lb, who was backed in to 9/2 second favourite and prevailed by three lengths.

It was inevitable that two schemers like Robinson and Sievier would fall out when gambles went astray. ‘Robinson’s chief failing is a lack of frankness,’ wrote Sievier in The WinningPost after their split,

even towards those with whom he is in closest contact. If he has, or thinks he has, a grievance, he is apt to nurse it, instead of openly stating it and clearing the air. Thus his success has been clouded and chequered with quarrels and misunderstandings, and he has missed the respect and popularity which have been freely accorded to less gifted men.

It’s safe to say this indictment of Robinson hinted at one Iago not being alerted to the schemes of the other.

Thus it can be said with absolute certainty: Jack Robinson knew the time of day and he was not above recognising a juvenile with class and Classic potential. He won the Gimcrack Stakes four times in five years for Colonel William Hall Walker, for example, and by the spring of 1913 he had won four Classics, three of them in 1905 courtesy of Vedas in the 2000 Guineas and Cherry Lass in the 1000 Guineas and Oaks – which contributed to Robinson finishing the season as leading trainer with fifty-two races and stakes won of £34,466. Two years later Witch Elm added another Oaks.

Robinson may have had his differences with a hands-on gambling owner such as Bob Sievier but he would experience no such problems with a non-punter like Bower Ismay. Only the positive qualities conceded by Sievier would be of any interest to Ismay. ‘As a trainer we have always maintained, in spite of our grievances, he is second to none,’ wrote Sievier.

There is no finer judge of a horse’s condition; there is no one more successful in getting a horse to the top-notch of condition, and at the same time keeping him in fine heart. He is one of the hardest-working men in his profession and whether the animal is a Classic candidate or the commonest selling plater, Robinson can be trusted to leave no stone unturned to make it produce the utmost of which it is capable.

The partnership between the irascible trainer and the sanguine owner had started slowly, but at the Doncaster September Sales of 1910 Ismay began to dig deeper into his resources: ‘Having embarked on a relatively successful career as an owner,’ asserts his grandson Michael Manser, ‘Bower would not have been Bower had he not wanted to be more successful.’ Ismay wrote out a cheque for 1,900 guineas to secure the top lot of the fifteen-strong consignment of yearlings sent up from the Sledmere Stud of Sir Tatton Sykes. This brown colt by Desmond out of Altesse was given the name Hall Cross. Thanks largely to Hall Cross, who won the British Dominion Plate and the Great Lancashire Breeders Produce Stakes, Ismay won more money on the Flat during the 1911 season than he had during the rest of his Flat-race career to date.

Suitably enthused by the success of Hall Cross, Ismay and Robinson returned to the Doncaster Sales in September 1911 and examined the Sledmere consignment with much anticipation. The progeny of Desmond naturally drew their attention, none more so than a washy bay colt with splashes of brown about him out of a mare called Veneration II. He sported a distinctive white blob on his forehead; more significantly, the colt held a nomination for the Derby. Moreover, although raised at Sledmere he’d been bred elsewhere and purchased privately along with his dam. His actual breeder was Eustace Loder.

The colt destined to race under the name Craganour was foaled at Loder’s Eyrefield Lodge on the last day of February 1910 when Veneration II was ten. She had a poor record as a racehorse, her sole success coming as a juvenile at Sandown Park and her performances as a three-year-old did not merit keeping her in training for a further year. Veneration II’s potential lay in the paddocks, for she was by Laveno out of Admiration and, thus, a half-sister to no less than Loder’s great racemare Pretty Polly. Much to Loder’s disappointment, Veneration II failed to redeem herself at stud. None of her first four foals won a race of any description. Furthermore, she didn’t share the kudos of being a daughter of champion sire Gallinule, like Pretty Polly: she was an obvious candidate to be culled.

It so happened that in 1910 some new mares were required by Sir Tatton Sykes’s Sledmere Stud, from whom Loder had acquired his future Derby winner Spearmint at the knock-down price of 300 guineas in 1904. The 5th Baronet was a more reclusive figure than his father (also named Tatton who was revered as the most popular living Yorkshireman toward the end of his ninety-three-year life) and not a little eccentric. His first act as custodian of his inheritance was to plough up its gardens and lawns. He thought flowers an unnecessary adornment and decapitated with his walking stick any examples he discovered around the estate, advising one tenant: ‘If you wish to grow flowers, grow cauliflowers!’ He distrusted front doors, always entering Sledmere via the back door, and took great joy in planting false front doors on his properties. Churches he loved restoring but gravestones he loathed and would not permit. His personal habits were no less whimsical. He believed it was important to maintain the body at a constant temperature and employed a collection of colour-coded overcoats fitting one over the other that he might discard whenever and wherever conditions dictated: the children on the estate were paid one shilling for picking them up and returning them to the house. Two pairs of trousers were utilised similarly; socks and shoes might also be removed and feet stuck out of a window if he felt too hot. Sir Tatton’s stomach was equally sensitive, causing him to swear by a diet of milk pudding. This odd lifestyle did not endear itself to a wife some thirty years his junior who much preferred drinking, gambling and playing the stock exchange. After ‘Lady Satin Tights’, as she became known in London circles, squandered £500,000 of his money Sykes used the columns of The Times to announce he would no longer be responsible for her debts. In due course he was sued by a moneylender but stated in court he would rather dishonour his wife than honour her debts – and won the case.

Sykes had periodically refreshed Sledmere’s band of broodmares since inheriting the East Riding stud in 1863, a strategy vindicated by the breeding of three other Classic winners besides Spearmint, including another Derby winner in Doncaster. Now aged eighty-four, he’d relinquished the day-to-day running of the stud to his nephew, Henry Cholmondeley, who enquired of Loder whether he might have the offer of some of his mares. Loder replied he might have the choice of the entire stud – bar Pretty Polly and two others. Cholmondeley selected Startling (a half-sister to a good horse in Star Shoot) and Veneration II. He paid 1,800 guineas for Startling and 1,700 for Veneration. Both had foals at foot by Desmond and were in foal to him once more. In keeping with Sledmere’s commercial policy, the two Desmond yearlings were sent to the Doncaster Sales of 1911 and went through the ring on Thursday 14 September. The Startling filly fetched 1,550 guineas; named Favilla, she never won a race. Robinson, bidding on Ismay’s behalf, had to beat off a strong rival in Lord Lonsdale before the hammer fell at 3,200 guineas for Veneration’s colt, making him the most expensive purchase of the week. Ismay’s decision to pay that sum for what amounted to a reject from one of the most successful studs in the land was interpreted by some as a deliberate poke in the eye to Eyrefield’s owner, Eustace Loder. Bower Ismay said nothing to disabuse them of that notion. He named his new acquisition Craganour after a mountain on his Scottish shoot at Dalnaspidal.

Yet it’s inconceivable for Ismay to have spent all that money just for the sake of irritating Eustace Loder. The colt’s sire may have appealed. Desmond was a black horse who was a decent two-year-old in 1898, winning the Coventry and July Stakes, but by the time he ran unplaced in the Derby he was already losing his zest for racing. However, as a son of champion sire St Simon and the Oaks winner L’Abbesse de Jouarre, he appeared to have a future as a stallion. His career at the Fort Union Stud of his owner Lord Dunraven in County Limerick had begun inauspiciously, with his initial crop selling for an average of only 48 guineas. Desmond’s standing rose when he produced a son easily his superior in The White Knight, whose string of victories included the Coronation Cup-Ascot Gold Cup double two years in succession (1907–08), the Goodwood Cup and the Ascot Gold Vase.

Like his father St Simon, Desmond was apt to transmit a degree of ‘hot’ temperament to his progeny, and gave ample to Craganour. Steve Donoghue never rode Craganour, but in his autobiography he recalled seeing plenty of him at Foxhill while riding out for Robinson:

Often after he had been out at exercise on the Downs and had been sent a good half-speed gallop, he would be so wrought up with his mighty speed, that it was impossible on getting back to stables to let him go straight into his box; he might have jumped through the roof! So he used to be walked round to cool off in the little railed-off enclosure in the middle of the big stable-yard, and in about ten minutes he would be as quiet as an old sheep, and could be taken in, and Jack Robinson’s little daughter, who was about ten-years-old, would go into the box and give him a handful of grass or lucerne.

Craganour wasn’t to be one of Robinson’s early juveniles. He didn’t make his debut until June. The venue was significant. It was Royal Ascot, and the chosen event was the New Stakes over five furlongs: at £1,962 to the winner, the richest juvenile event of the season thus far. Clearly, connections thought a lot of him, and he was sent off 3/1 second favourite in a field of fifteen that included Shogun (the 7/4 favourite, unbeaten in three starts, including the Coventry Stakes on the opening day of the meeting) and two other winners. He proceeded to advertise his inexperience by playing up at the starting gate, but once the tapes rose he showed he’d been well schooled, racing away from his draw on the stands rail to make every yard of the running. The nearest Shogun got to him was the three lengths separating them at the line.

Craganour’s subsequent campaign centred on the calendar’s other great Turf festival meetings. He went from Royal Ascot to the Newmarket July Meeting for the Exeter Stakes over six furlongs a fortnight later. Only three took him on. Showing how much he had learned from his Ascot debut, he was much better behaved throughout the preliminaries and was never out of a canter, sauntering home by three lengths at odds of 9/2 on. Next stop was ‘Glorious’ Goodwood, for the six-furlong Molecomb Stakes on 4 August. Starting at 9/4 on he was beaten a head in a muddling race by an American-bred colt named Rock Flint ridden by the American Danny Maher. Ismay’s ‘journeyman’ jockey Billy Saxby, it was said, had been outfoxed by a champion jockey. A top horse, the know-alls told Ismay, demanded a top jockey.

This surprising reverse, and the presence in the field of Shogun’s allegedly superior stablemate Fairy King, caused Craganour to start at the more conservative odds of 6/4 for the Prince of Wales’s Plate at the York Ebor Meeting. Fairy King was another son of Desmond and he had won his debut race at Goodwood. Craganour gave him 10lb and a three-length beating. Craganour got away slowly (he was held at the gate by one of Robinson’s staff) and then found himself almost put through the rail when Fairy King veered into the path of two other runners. According to sound judges, Craganour still had plenty in reserve.

The premier event for two-year-olds at the Doncaster St Leger Meeting was – and remains – the Champagne Stakes. Shogun had won both his races since Ascot and was fancied to reverse New Stakes running at level weights. The market made him 5/4 against with Craganour at 15/8. The presence of a huge crowd again had the effect of upsetting Craganour but once into his stride he proved to the press that he ‘must be judged the speediest two-year-old seen out at present’, leaving Shogun three lengths adrift once more.

The two rivals were to clash a third time. The championship race for two-year-old colts was the six-furlong Middle Park Plate worth £3,275 to the winner at Newmarket on 18 October. Any colt with proven ability and Classic aspirations for 1913 had to line up. Four others took them on, including Rock Flint, who’d won his race at Doncaster since Goodwood. An unknown threat existed in the form of Louvois, a colt by the Triple Crown winner Isinglass out of a mare called St Louvaine, which made him a half-brother to Louviers whom many believed had won the 1909 Derby for Walter Raphael (a member of a Dutch family of Jewish financiers) rather than being pipped by King Edward VII’s Minoru. Raphael’s hope had run four times: he’d recorded a hat-trick of wins at Newmarket and been beaten just the once, finishing last of four to another of today’s runners, Day Comet, at Goodwood. The remaining two contestants were J. B. Joel’s Radiant, a full brother to Derby winner Sunstar, who’d earned his place in the Middle Park line-up by winning the Imperial Produce Plate at Kempton Park from Lord Rosebery’s Sanquhar, and H. P. Whitney’s American-bred Harmonicon, who had just completed a quartet of successes by winning the Mersey Stakes at Liverpool. The race was over as a contest after just a hundred yards. Craganour (11/8 favourite) drew clear and made every yard of the running to beat Shogun by the customary three lengths; Louvois was the same distance back in third.

Both Craganour and Shogun were then put away for the winter. The only horse to have beaten the latter in eight outings was Craganour; and on his final start of the season Louvois franked the worth of the Middle Park – and the generation’s pecking order – by beating Sanquhar a head for the Dewhurst Plate, followed home by Rock Flint, Day Comet, Radiant and Harmonicon. Bower Ismay could entertain realistic hopes of a first Classic success. As could Billy Saxby who’d ridden him on each of his six starts. The Times, however, sounded a warning: ‘Craganour is a colt of character, good tempered, but requiring firm treatment and disinclined to allow liberties to be taken.’

Craganour’s five victories and one second had helped Bower Ismay break into the list of top ten leading owners with a total of £12,072 – almost double Eustace Loder’s winnings. Ismay donated half his winnings to the fund raised on behalf of those who had suffered as a result of the Titanic disaster.

Craganour was a foregone conclusion to head the Free Handicap. He received 9st 4lb, a decisive 7lb more than Shogun. In the wake of the two leading lights were Rock Flint (8st 10lb); Louvois (8st 8lb); Lord Derby’s quadruple winner Sanquhar (8st 5lb); Day Comet and Radiant (8st 3lb). Lord Rosebery’s filly Prue (winner of two of her three races including the National Breeders Produce Stakes and second to Shogun in the Woodcote Stakes after starting sluggishly) received 8st 1lb; and Fairy King 8st.

Languishing on 7st 9lb, some 23lb below Craganour, was another son of Desmond by the name of Aboyeur. During the winter of 1912–13 no one gave him a second thought as a possible Derby contender.

TWO

Lucky Loder

Selling a colt who developed into the Derby favourite signalled a distinct change of luck for Eustace Loder because he had frequently ascribed his success as one of the most successful owner-breeders on the Turf to more than a fair share of this elusive and priceless commodity. ‘You may put all the brains you have into racing,’ he was fond of saying, ‘but you will be nowhere unless you have luck.’ As Edward Moorhouse observed quaintly in an issue of the Pall Mall Magazine: ‘During the brief period in which he has wooed Fortune on the Turf, the fickle dame has treated him as one of her favourites.’ On the Turf as in life Eustace Loder could count himself a very lucky man indeed.

One of Dame Fortune’s greatest gifts to Eustace Loder was the birth in late March 1901 of a dark chestnut filly destined to be feted as the most illustrious of her sex to grace the English Turf. Within just four years of purchasing the Eyrefield Lodge Stud it was Eustace Loder’s great fortune to breed and own Pretty Polly.

For contemporary writers to talk of ‘Peerless Pretty Polly’ barely two years after singing the praises of another superb filly in Sceptre, the only horse to win four Classics, declares just how exceptional the daughter of Gallinule and Admiration must have been. In 1902 only the Derby eluded Sceptre, and she might well have secured that too, with a more judicious ride. So might Pretty Polly have won all five in 1904 had Eustace Loder entered her for the two Classics she didn’t contest, the 2000 Guineas and Derby. Loder had reasoned that a certain Oaks success might be forfeited by a hard race in the Derby against colts. As it was, Pretty Polly met the Derby and 2000 Guineas victor, St Amant, on five occasions and thrashed him each time, to the tune of an aggregate distance exceeding twenty-two lengths.

Loder’s ‘luck’ came with Pretty Polly’s conception, for her dam had done precious little on the racecourse to warrant her retention and possessed no pedigree to speak of. It was necessary to go back sixty years to arrive at a mare in the bottom line with credentials anything other than mediocre. Yet the long-backed chestnut with ‘drooping quarters, wide hips and the most magnificent shoulder’ had captured the heart of Loder’s stud manager, Noble Johnson, and he couldn’t bear to part with her. ‘I often rode Admiration out as a hack with the horses,’ he wrote, ‘and a more delightful ride no one could wish for. She was a nice tempered mare, and would stand about or do anything, and had the most perfect mouth and manners; a child could have ridden her.’

Loder paid just 510 guineas for Admiration as a yearling in 1893. Put in training, she lived up to her meagre price tag at two and three, prior to being transferred to Conyngham Lodge in the summer of 1895. Her subsequent record doesn’t read exceptionally on paper – handicap successes on the Flat at Baldoyle and Leopardstown – but Johnson wouldn’t have her disparaged. ‘I have heard it said that she was no good as a racehorse. This is not quite correct. I don’t think it is fair to say she had no racing merit. Up to a mile she could hold her own in fair class company, and was very honest.’ Admiration’s final appearance came in the Irish Grand Military Steeplechase at Punchestown, in the hands of Loder’s friend and fellow cavalryman Arthur Hughes-Onslow. She was sent off favourite and finished third after striking into herself landing over one of the big drop fences. Loder and Johnson earmarked her for their new stud, Eyrefield Lodge. She would repay Johnson’s faith by producing thirteen consecutive foals, nine of whom won a total of forty-two races worth over £52,000. The second of those, by Laveno, only won a single contest: her name was Veneration II and she was to go down in the history of the Turf as the dam of Craganour. Her third foal, by Gallinule, was named Pretty Polly and she would re-write Turf history.

Loder’s retention of Admiration suggested his luck was running strong and her union with the sire Gallinule franked the point. Gallinule was a fine-looking specimen who’d shown smart form as a juvenile but never won thereafter in thirteen attempts. He retired with the dubious reputation of being both a ‘roarer’ and a ‘bleeder’ but this failed to deter Captain Henry Greer from speculating £900 and standing him at his Brownstown Stud not far from Eyrefield. ‘Who’s the mug?’ Gallinule’s profligate and hard-drinking owner, George ‘The Squire’ Baird, was alleged to have asked. ‘I hope he’s got the money.’ To begin with things didn’t go well as Gallinule’s infirmities discouraged breeders. Greer was reduced to offering a free service in order to gain any custom. Once he even put Gallinule up for sale at £300 but received no takers. Fortunately, in 1895, Portmarnock became the first of a string of Gallinule offspring to land the Irish Derby (six of the next seven renewals). By the time of his death in 1912, Gallinule had sired the winners of six Classics in England and been champion sire twice.

Noble Johnson had always shared Greer’s faith in Gallinule as a potentially successful stallion and, thanks to their friendship