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FAMOUS HORSES DISPUTED ORIGL INVESTIGATION OF THE BEND OR TADCASTER CAS REVEALS EXTRAORDINARY LAXNESS IN THE RECORD OF FOALING AT A GREAT ENGLISH STUD By SAL VAT OR As PART II f This undent history covers the period from 1C03 accession of James I to 1830 death of George IV or roughly speaking two centuries and u quarter In the interim a whole world of achievement had marJccdttheltjt rojressjnf equine affairs James I had owned the Markham Arabian Under Charles I LlacgsAyiiilc Uurk umltlio llelmsley Turk had flourished Racing vas suppressed under Cromwell owing to the fanatieismot the Iuritaiis but under Charles II it made up for lost time A whole host of Ori ¬ ental horses came into England in his reign and the improvement of the breed went merrily on Moreover it was Charles II who gathered together the farfamed Royal Mares which figure at the taproots of so many a modern pedigree The Byerly Turk flourished in the times of James II and William and Mary The Darley Arabian arrived in England in the time of Queen Anne The Godolphiu Arabian socalled came across from France in the early years of the reign of George II The Byerly Darley and Godolphin horses are the three patriarchs of the thoroughbred breed and their successors in these roles were their Jhree respective lineal descendants Herod foaled 1738 time of George II Matchcm foaled 1748 time of George II and Kelipse foaled 1704 time of George III The Derby 1780 Oaks 1779 St Leger 1770 Two Thousand Guineas 1809 and One Thousand Guineas 1814 the worlds premier racing classics all were established during the reign of George III but owing to the fact that this sovereign was repeatedly incapacitated by insanity his sou George TV under the title of Prince Regent had been the Uncrowned king from 1811 until his fathers death in 1820 1820In In 1791 the Weatherbys had published what they termed An Introduction to a General Stud Book which in their own words consisted of a small collection of pedigrees which Jiad been extracted from Racing Calendars and Sale Papers The first volume of the true Stud Book appeared in 1803 and a re ¬ vised version in 1808 while the lirst edition of Volume II appeared in 1821 However back in 1780 William Pick of York had published what he entitled A Careful Collection of All the Pedigrees It was Then Possible to Obtain A second volume of this work came out In 1805 TlTc death of tiifr compiler then caused a hiatus until 1822 when II Johnson brought out a third vpldine Fortyfive ycarsvtben elapsed before a fourth and linal volume appeared in 1S67 Few but antlquqriaii pcdigree Investigators today possess this work whose latest volume brings us down to 1792 only but in Picks pages many statements and items of information appear which the now official General Stud Book of the Weatherbys docs not contain During the reigns of the Stuarts and oh down to and including that of George IV the foundation pedigrees of the breed were being pieced together by breeding and othcropcrations IfStud masters and stud groom were as slipshod and unreliable in 1880 as Lord Suffolk states and records so badlykept when they were kept at all whlclUWjjSiieldoni wliat Avcrorthe conditions in eqrljer crasj fcWeJSgt an inkling by examining their social history The times of llje Stuarts were notoriously corrupt Read the diaries and memoirs of the worthies of those days if you wish to comprehend the modes modesvand vand morals that prevailed One of the most celebrated rakes arid wits of the court of Charles II was the Earl of Rochester and one evening he affixed the following epigram to the knob of the door of the merry monarchs chamber Here lies our sovereign lord the king whose word no mnif relies on who never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one THE MERRY MONARCHS VERACITY VERACITYNo No man relied on the word of Charles II and he was himself so little offended by Rochesters epi ¬ gram that he laughed at it ntfr did the royal wrath descend upon its author While if we jump from the Stuarts to the Georges we find that standard authority the Encyclopaedia Britannica stigmatizing George IV as false as well as licentious his word was never to be trusted George IV both as Prince Regent and as King enjoyed the distinction of being called the first gentleman of Europe Yet the inandbut running of his horse Escape in 1791 caused his favorite jockey the celebrated Sam Chifney to ba banned by the stewards of the Jockey Club and as a result of the scandal the royal colors disap ¬ peared from the turf for nearly twenty years During these eras society took its tone from its monarchs and it was under such monarchs and in such an atmosphere that the pedigrees took shape and have come down to us which today we are asked to regard with superstitious reverence It is upon these pedigrees that the pur sang theory of British thoroughbred blood as opposed to the impure blood of the American breed is founded and upon their basis that American impure blood is now excluded from the British Stud Book BookIt It has always been a mystery to many minds why with few exceptions British turfmen and turf writers persist in glorifying the early Oriental progenitors and ignore the genuine EngHsUjelemeuts which went to the making of the breed Of course not all of them do so and it is refreshing to find that Charles Richardson in Jiis notable work The English Turf states explicitly that many of the ancestors of every thoroughbred are lost to obscurity Joseph Osborn Beacon whose Horse Breeders Hand ¬ book iii its various editions lias been one of the most useful works of Jtlie kind ever published and eu Joys a deserved distinction stresses the importance of the indigenous elements blit at the same time executes n singular volteface by marking unknown taproots in Jlis tabulations as Arabian a luminous example of the inability of a sincere and honest intellect to adhere to realities in the last analysis However there are still more surprising things in evidence Consider for instance the case of Professor William Ridgway of the University ot Cambridge a man of emirierice in many branches of learning whose Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse published in 1005 at the Cambridge University Press iis far and away the most erudite and exhaustive book on the subject ever written After howingthat thc th6roiighbred breed has been built up out of many different elements the Professor for ¬ getting everything but the necessity of worshiping the Oriental fetish gravely informs us that it is now practically admitted that our racing stock is purely foreign in origin since witlt the remarkable ex ¬ ecutions of Sampson and Bay Malton in each of which there was a plight cross of vulgar blood no horse ot mixed lineage has been able to beat one of pure North African blood by North African the Professor ineanswhat is generally termed Oriental it being his contention that all the highcaste Oriental breeds originally sprung from a North African source sourcePUR PUR SANG VERSUS THE OUTSIDER Now as everybody well knows Sampson and Bay Malton were by no means the only instances of liorses with a slight cross of vulgar blood that were able to outrun those of the pur sang persuasion All the old authorities unite in declaring that when the Oriihitals were brought into England from the j Markham Arabian 1G1G down the native born made them look cheap when it came to racing The speed of the indigenous British horse was far superior to that of the oldtime Oriental just as that of the modern thoroughbred is far superior to that of the modern Oriental Speed in a genuine racing sense as known to England and America never was and never will be a distinguishing trait of the Ori ¬ ental breeds Thc old writers name native horses such as Valentine and others which could run over ill the Arabs Barbs Turks etc etc that went against them And in comparatively modern days Amer ¬ ican sportsmen and British as well have seen more thaiuone horse bred outside the pur sang dispensa ¬ tion show a clean pair of heels to boasted scions bred within it Incidentally it may be noted that in this classification we may particularlyf cjte the family ofrBraiu jle today one of the dominant ones of this country in the male line In the female line Bramble runs jack in the seventh remove to a daughter of Mambrino which horse was a grandson in direct descent of me of Professor Ridgways two remarkable exceptions namely Sampson When Sampson first made iis appearance on the British turf it was jeeringly asked if his owner hud brought a coach horse hery o run for the plate However Sampson won the plate that day after thr e flirtsmile htats tud cdr ying 140 pounds Subsequently he approved himself one of the great horses oMihjilay at longdistances ind high weights Bramble his Americanbred dpscendant was the premier cup iforsijipf liis liisllay llay arid iis feat of winning the Baltimore AVestchester Monmouth Saratoga and Brighton Cups ill in one sea on 1879 each race being at two miles and a quarter is one which no other pejrforiner e cr equaled Lhc taproot of his family is Bruce Lowes No 9 the Old Vintner Mare and Lowe himself was not ery high on it saying that it would be a difficult tasu for the warmest believer1 in the family to oint out one really highclass sire in its ranks It is also difficult to believe that had Lowe lived until oday he would have disputed that Bramble was a really highclass sire Yet in the pedigrce of Bramble he infusion of the blood of the plebeian Sampson enters at a point no less than nine generations this side if the taproot
