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Rowlandson cartoon of a Newmarket bookmaker |
Bet on a long-time dead cert
A legenday racehorse and a rogue gambler make a winning combination in a new history of 18th-century Merrie England, writes Peter Gruner
Eclipse.
By Nicholas Clee. Bantam Press £25.
A LOVEABLE Irish rogue, an upmarket brothel keeper, and the undisputed greatest racehorse of all time are the ingredients for a true story set in 18th-century Merrie England.
New Statesman magazine columnist Nicholas Clee, in his new book, Eclipse, provides a fascinating insight into the history of the Sport of Kings and its colourful, if occasionally somewhat shady characters. Clee, 51, who lives in Finsbury Park and is married to writer Nicolette Jones, is the former editor of the book industry magazine The Bookseller.
The London of 1750, which he describes in vivid prose and with illustrations, had two faces. There was the Canaletto-inspired view of bewigged men and women with hooped skirts strolling through elegant squares; and the Hogarth view of drunks lying in the gutter spewing, dogs and pickpockets weaving among the crowd, prostitutes entertaining clients in a window, and people tipping out the contents of a chamber pot into the street.
The book’s two major figures fit the Hogarthian image. They are gambler and charmer Dennis O’Kelly, an Arthur Daley character who called himself “The Count”, and his business-minded girlfriend Charlotte Hayes, a madam who ran a discreet house for sex in Pall Mall, called The Cloister.
The couple are in and out of debtor’s prison until Dennis makes the purchase of a lifetime, a racing thoroughbred called Eclipse, at a knock-down price.
Cashing in on the gambling epidemic, suddenly Dennis and Charlotte are coining it in and beginning to mix with the knobs and snobs.
Worried observers at the time described England as like a casino from end to end. You could bet on anything that moved, be it fighting cocks, dogs, or men. George II was himself the subject of a wager when he led his troops into battle. You could get quite good odds of 4-1 against him being killed.
A similar ghoulish opportunity for betting arose when a man collapsed outside Brooks’s in London. Club members staked money on whether he was dead or not.
Gambling was not only a sport for grandees. The middle and lower orders bet at horse race meetings and cricket matches. There was even a fore-runner to today’s lottery, raising money for such causes as building bridges across the Thames.
Eclipse (1764-1789) was a temperamental and unruly stallion at first. Once he could be ridden, stable men would train him by donning stout leathers to protect their legs and take him into the woods around Epsom for a spot of night-time poaching.
The thoroughbred went on to win 18 races, including 11 King’s Plates. His prize money totalled £2,863 – equivalent to £304,000 today. One writer of the time said: “He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur, or was ever, for a moment, distressed by the speed of a competitor. He outlasted every horse which started out against him.”
Only one race really tested Eclipse’s powers, over the Beacon Course in Newmarket in 1770 against the highly rated Bucephalus.
With a supreme effort Eclipse won and Bucephalus never raced again. Eclipse also went on to sire 344 sons and daughters who won a combined total of 862 races, earning many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Dennis and Charlotte became wealthy thanks to racing and the sex industry and obtained a mansion in Edgware, where Dennis transferred his stud. The building is today occupied by the private North London Collegiate School for Girls.
Today 95 per cent of thoroughbreds trace their descent to Eclipse in the male line and many of the remaining 5 per cent have him in their pedigrees.
Every horse that ran in the 2006 Derby was a male line descendant of Eclipse; so was every horse that ran in the French Derby; and every horse that ran in the Kentucky Derby. His influence is not confined to flat racing. Kauto Star, the winner of the recent Cheltenham Gold Cup, is an Eclipse descendant. So were jumping greats Desert Orchid and Arkle.
Eclipse’s skeleton is on display at the Royal Veterinary College, near Hatfield – although, at the moment, it lacks a head. That’s in Cambridge, where scientists have succeeded in taking a sample of DNA from one of his teeth as part of a project to unlock the “lifecodes” of great thoroughbreds.
Author Clee says: “I’m a bit of a fan of horse racing and this was a marvellous story which had never before been thoroughly explored.”
A very occasional gambler on the horses himself, Clee won £126 at Cheltenham recently, backing the horse 90th Minute. “I put £10 on it to win and to my amazement it did,” he says. “I don’t pretend to have any expertise and very few punters ever make a profit. The only sensible way to look at it is to say: ‘here’s the betting bank and I’m prepared to lose a certain amount of money’.” |
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