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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Fast Horses The Racehorse in Health, Disease and Afterlife, 1800 - 1920 Harper, Esther Fiona Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 Fast Horses: The Racehorse in Health, Disease and Afterlife, 1800 – 1920 Esther Harper Ph.D. History King’s College London April 2018 1 2 Abstract Sports historians have identified the 19th century as a period of significant change in the sport of horseracing, during which it evolved from a sporting pastime of the landed gentry into an industry, and came under increased regulatory control from the Jockey Club. Although racehorses were the animals around which the sport developed and was practiced, they have rarely featured as historical actors in histories of horse racing. My research aims to rectify the situation by positioning the racehorse at the centre of the historical narrative. In this thesis, I examine how racehorses influenced horse racing in England between 1800-1920, and how humans interacted with and acted upon racehorses. This thesis shows that a Thoroughbred horse was not automatically a racehorse, however. Rather, it was an equine athlete that was artificially created and maintained by humans, and entered into a variety of unique relationships with them. Prized as equine athletes, financial assets, and as individuals with differing behavioural characteristics, collectively, racehorses were expected to demonstrate that they participated willingly in the sport. The racehorse’s body was a vital indicator of health, condition and likely future performance, and 19th century understanding of it was greatly influenced by humoralism, which, in turn, shaped training regimes, feeding, housing, and equine healthcare. Racehorses’ bodies and behaviours were simultaneously physical enablers of human sport, and limiting factors, as racehorse trainers sought to bring the animals in their care into peak condition without them becoming diseased. Yet, racehorses also remained exceptions among the equine population. During the 19th century, change and innovation in farriery and hoof-care was driven primarily by the perceived needs of urban working horses, instead of racehorses. Famous racehorses were exceptions to the already exceptional, and the practice of burying and memorialising the most prized racehorses after they had died, allowed racehorse owners to demonstrate their compassion for animals, while simultaneously creating places and material animal-things for reminiscence. 3 Table of Contents List of Illustrations, Photographs and Tables 5 Introduction 7 1. Understanding the Racehorse— breed perceptions and 29 individualised encounters 2. Training the Racehorse 65 3. Housing and Feeding the Racehorse 98 4. Racehorse Health Care 132 5. Farriery and Hoof-care as Animal Welfare 171 6. Racehorse Death & Memorialisation 213 Conclusion 257 Acknowledgements 261 Bibliography 263 4 Illustrations, Photographs and Tables Fig. 3.1 A Stall at Audley End 110 Fig. 3.2 An early example of loose boxes at John Scott’s stable 112 near Cheltenham, 1822 Table 3.1 Recommended temperature for stables 117 Fig. 3.3 Mayhew’s stable design 119 Fig. 3.4 Design for infirmary boxes, in T. E. Coleman’s Stable 123 Sanitation and Construction, 1897 Fig. 3.5 Infirmary boxes at Druid’s Lodge, Wiltshire 123 Fig. 3.6 Photograph of 1904 a loose box built for Leopold de 126 Rothschild to house his racehorses Table 3.2 Number of stalls and loose boxes in plans for training 127 – 128 stables in and around Newmarket Fig. 5.1 An illustration showing the underside of a horse’s 176 hoof Fig. 5.2 A convex shoe in widespread use at the time, and two 178 of the new types of shoes recommended by Coleman Fig. 5.3 Illustrations from Bracy Clark’s Podophthora showing 180 the same hoof before and after one year of being shod Fig. 5.4 A horseshoe with calkins 186 Fig. 5.5 Early 20th century patent rubber-covered horseshoes 187 and Sheather’s Pneumatic Horseshoe Pad Fig. 5.6 Illustrations showing the Charlier shoe & Charlier tip 191 Fig. 5.7 An annotated photograph from 1883 showing the 204 forefoot of Arthur Astley’s horse ‘Tommy’ Fig. 5.8 The unshod hooves of Dr R. Ralph Llewellyn’s horse 206 Fig. 6. 1 Charles Towne, Episodes in the Life of a Racehorses, 224 oil on canvas, c. 1800-1850 Fig. 6. 2 The monument to Dorris at Childwickbury Stud 227 Fig. 6.3 Eclipse Foot Trophy 229 Fig. 6.4 A variety of hoof trophies by Rowland Ward 232 5 Fig. 6.5 Robert the Devil in the shop window display at 235 Gibson’s Saddlery, Newmarket, 2015 Fig. 6. 6 The hooves of the racehorse St. Simon turned into a 240 silver gilded desk set Fig. 6. 7 St. Simon’s hide at Heath House, Newmarket, 2015 244 Fig. 6. 8 Persimmon’s skeleton and a mould of the horse’s head 249 on display at the Natural History Museum in Kensington Fig. 6. 9 Persimmon’s head 251 6 Introduction There’s a painting on display at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire of two men standing by while a bay racehorse called Furiband grazes in a field. On the left, a gentleman (presumably the horse’s owner, Sir Henry Harpur) leans onto his cane. His gaze is averted downward, as if he is looking at a particular part of the horse, or maybe-- lost in thought-- he isn’t intentionally looking at anything at all. To the right, a well-dressed groom holds the grazing horse. There is a slack in the leadrope as Furiband grazes quietly beside him. The groom’s hand rests gently on the horse’s neck, his fingers woven between the animal’s mane. This painting is different from other horse paintings of the period. No jockey is pictured just before or after an important race. This isn’t an imposing stallion in his paddock at a stud, or a famous racehorse posed to show off its conformation and athleticism. Rather, it is a quiet moment between humans and a horse, a moment of co-existing in the same place in time. Ignoring the dress of the two gentlemen, it’s a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in many equestrian contexts today. As a horse rider, I am conscious of these parallels; although centuries separate us, most horse riders today have been the groom in the painting, resting a hand on a horse’s neck while we let it graze beside us. What can our equestrian forefathers (two-legged and four-legged) tell us about their shared existence? In researching this thesis, I sought to uncover one particular aspect of human and equine co-existence: the sport of horse racing in England in the 19th and early 20th century. I followed these elite pleasure horses and their humans through archives and books, paintings and architecture, taxidermy and skeletons. The goal was to uncover important developments in the sport of horse racing, and what that history looks like when the horse becomes an actor within the historical narrative, while at the same time, never losing sight of moments like that depicted in the painting at Calke Abbey, free from the burden of milestones and great achievements – humans and racehorses co-existing in the past. 7 Histories of horse racing Today, horse racing is the second-most popular spectator sport in Britain; only football is more popular.1 Over centuries, it has evolved into a global industry far removed from its origins as an aristocratic pastime, yet unashamedly proud of its heritage. From statues to street names, parades of retired winners to the very names of many of the races run today, public history forms an almost unavoidable aspect of participation and spectating. Tune in to any major televised race, and you’ll see the archive video footage played before the big event – Red Rum winning the Grand National, Lester Piggott’s Derby victory on Nijinsky… A steady stream of biographies and popular histories of horse racing demonstrate the public appetite for stories of heroism and triumph over adversity, and keep alive the public fascination for horse racing’s iconic figures. Since the publication of Wray Vamplew’s The Turf in 1976, horse racing has also become a subject that has attracted growing attention from academic historians, who have up-ended the heroic narrative of sporting champions in favour of a more critical look at the sport’s development. Horse racing has proved a useful lens through which to study the history of sport, leisure and public spectacle.