Frankel. Simon CooperЧитать онлайн книгу.

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       A certain kindness

      Another Frankel? What are the chances? Realistically speaking, infinitesimally slim, but maybe even more slim than we might ever imagine, even though the thoroughbred you see striding out on the racecourse is very much the product of man.

      As a nation we started riding horses in the seventh century; up to then horses were beasts of burden carrying loads, pulling carts or, in the time of Boudicca, war horses powering chariots. By the early 600s, it was considered a matter of status to appear on horseback, with the riders largely confined to those of the first rank of a society still adjusting itself after the departure of the Romans. Wind forward three centuries and the first mention of racehorses appears, called at the time ‘running horses’, and were so well regarded that Athelstan, the tenth-century king of England, passed a law prohibiting their export. However, the owners were not blind to the benefits of new bloodlines and started importing stallions from the continent, a process that was inevitably accelerated a century later in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and the arrival of William the Conqueror from France.

So the sport of racing evolved, largely under the patronage of royalty, noblemen and the well-to-do. But it wasn’t always smooth. Oliver Cromwell banned racing in England, dissolving the Royal Stud at Tutbury, disposing of both Charles I and his 140 horses, though the latter were sold, meeting a better fate than their master. Happily the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 marked the restoration of horse racing, for in the new king Charles II the English had an enthusiast for the sport. He hosted races at his park at Windsor before establishing Newmarket as the place to be devoted to horse racing, running his own horses and putting up prize money with silver trophies. With this royal imprimatur, racing as we know it today was on its way and the emergence of the thoroughbred as a specific breed of horse was just around the corner.

      The word thoroughbred is not unique to horses; it is often used to refer to somebody or something of outstanding quality. However, in the context of horses, with the T capitalised, it denotes a very particular hybrid of the breed. The Thoroughbred has a specific genetic make-up, with all the unique characteristics of agility and speed that flow from that. It has been bred for a singular purpose – racing – which sets it apart from other horses, in the same way that say the Shetland pony or the Shire horse have become deft at the tasks for which they have been bred over the centuries. However, while the Shetland is a product of island isolation, the Thoroughbred came about due to a very different set of circumstances, both at the same time deliberate and accidental.

The deliberate was the arrival of three stallions from the Middle East over a period of forty years from the 1690s, imported to breed with the native mares to produce ‘bigger, tougher, stouter and faster racehorses’ as Binns and Morris, authors of the definitive book Thoroughbred Breeding, succinctly put it. The accidental is how Byerley Turk, the first of those three, arrived in England to take up his stud duties. You might imagine that a party was dispatched to the Arabian Desert to track down nomadic Bedouin tribes. In a windswept tent, among ever-shifting dunes the adventurers would, over sweetened tea, parlay gold or some such into horseflesh before making the long and arduous journey home with this newly prized stallion. It would be quite the adventure; reminiscent of Indiana Jones. But the truth even out-Hollywoods Hollywood.

      The Turk, as he tends to be known for reasons that will become apparent, was foaled in the Balkans in 1679 and, as the story goes, was adopted by a near-penniless groom who saw in him great potential and the chance to escape to make a new life for the both of them. So, having trained this young horse in the art of warfare, the pair made their way to Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, where they joined the Turkish cavalry. By way of the Siege of Vienna, the Turk, along with his groom, ended up in June 1686 as a military charger protecting the Hungarian capital of Buda (now Budapest), a Turkish conquest since the sixteenth century, in yet another siege. The odds against their side, the Turks, winning were slim: they numbered 7,000 soldiers with the massed ranks of the European army, including the British, somewhere close to 100,000. By the end of the summer, Buda had fallen and the Turk along with his groom were captured by a group of English aristocrats who brought them back to England.

At this point, we don’t exactly know how the dark brown colt came into the ownership of Captain Robert Byerley. Some say he purchased him in London; others that he was himself at the Siege of Buda. But regardless, the Turk’s fighting days were far from over. Byerley was a professional soldier with a horse to match. The two were in service together, and when the time came he rode his war horse to Ireland in opposition to the Jacobites. But it wasn’t all skirmishes and battles. They stopped along the way to win a contest at Downpatrick Races, before the pair went to war one last time at the Battle of the Boyne. And it is only at this point that the Byerley Turk truly becomes part of our story, because whether it was out of sentimentality or a recognition that he was something special, Captain Byerley retired his stallion to stud. And over the next eleven years, the Byerley Turk, a horse of decidedly Arabian appearance but otherwise unknown pedigree, stood in northern England to head the bloodstock revolution.

      But for all the importance of the Byerley Turk, who was followed to English studs by the Darley Arabian in 1704 and the Godolphin Arabian in 1729, there was no great plan as such. It just so happens that a few of the great and the good of English society took it into their heads that by mixing the Middle Eastern bloodline with the native stock, they would produce a better racehorse. There was no overarching genetic science to suggest it would work – that explanation was some centuries away. It was simply a notion of an idea. But it was an idea of astonishing perceptiveness, for within the space of a few decades they had bred what was termed the ‘enhanced English racehorse’; and with a further nod to Middle Eastern heritage, the Middle Eastern word Thoroughbred was adopted to define this new breed of equine that was by the 1750s being exported to North America, Europe and around the globe. The international bloodstock business is older than you might suppose.

So, if you took the trouble to trace back Frankel’s family tree for the thirty or forty generations to those pioneering days of the early eighteenth century, you would find in his pedigree at least one of those three Arabian stallions. And Frankel is not alone. For it is a remarkable fact that every single Thoroughbred racehorse you see alive today is a blood relative of at least one of those three foundation sires. It is odd to think had a stray bullet hit the Turk on a distant battlefield, in a time far removed from ours today, all this might never have come to be.

      The Port of Holyhead does not look much like a hub of the international bloodstock trade. Arrivals from across the Irish Sea are greeted by a sign that welcomes them to the Isle of Anglesey, with the next prominent landmark the Lidl supermarket. Those departing from this northwest outpost of Wales probably don’t feel inclined to shed a tear. It is not a place to linger.