Eclipse Read online

  Eclipse

  Nicholas Clee

  LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND • JOHANNESBURG

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  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409080794

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  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA A Random House Group Company www.rbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Nicholas Clee 2009

  Nicholas Clee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9780593059838

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Nicholas Clee

  Prologue

  1 The Chairman

  2 The Bawd

  3 The Gambler

  4 The Duke

  5 The Meat Salesman

  6 The Young Thoroughbred

  7 Coup de Foudre

  8 The Rest Nowhere

  9 1-100 Eclipse

  10 The First Lady Abbess

  11 The Stallion

  12 The Most Glorious Spectacle

  13 Cross and Jostle

  14 An Example to the Turf

  15 The 14lb Heart

  16 The Litigant

  17 The Decline of the Jontleman

  18 Artists’ Models

  19 Eclipse’s Legacy – the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

  20 Eclipse’s Legacy – the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

  21 The Skeleton

  Sources

  Appendix 1: Eclipse’s Racing Career

  Appendix 2: Eclipse’s Pedigree

  Appendix 3: The O’Kelly Family

  Appendix 4: Racing Terms, Historical and Contemporary

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Plates

  Index

  For Nicolette, Rebecca and Laura

  Also by Nicholas Clee

  DON’T SWEAT THE AUBERGINE

  Prologue

  GO TO THE RACES, anywhere in the world, and you’ll be watching horses who are relatives of Eclipse. The vast majority of them are descended from Eclipse’s male line; if you trace back their ancestry through their fathers, their fathers’ fathers, and so on, you come, some twenty generations back, to him. He is the most influential stallion in the history of the Thoroughbred. Two and a half centuries after his imperious, undefeated career, he remains the undisputed paragon of his sport.

  The story of this career begins on a spring morning in 1769, at a trial on Epsom Downs. Scorching across the turf towards a small group of spectators is a chestnut with a white blaze. Toiling in his wake is a single rival, who will never catch him – not if they race to the ends of the earth.

  Among the witnesses at this awe-inspiring display are two men who, according to the tradition of the Sport of Kings, should not be associated with the horse who will become its greatest exponent. One, Eclipse’s owner, is a meat salesman, William Wildman. The second, who wants to own Eclipse, is an Irish adventurer and gambler.

  Dennis O’Kelly arrived in London some twenty years earlier, full of energy and optimism and ambition. He has had his ups and downs, including an affair with a titled lady and a spell in prison, but at last – thanks to his gambling abilities and to the remarkable success of his companion, the leading brothel madam of the day – he is starting to rise in the world.

  What Dennis does not know is that certain sections of the establishment will never accept him. What he does know, as with quickening pulse he follows the progress of the speeding chestnut, is that this horse is his destiny.

  1

  The Chairman

  LONDON, 1748. The capital is home to some 650, 000 inhabitants, more than 10 per cent of the population of England. What image of Georgian metropolitan life comes to mind? You may have a Canaletto-inspired view of an elegant square. Bewigged men and women with hooped skirts are strolling; there are a few carriages, and perhaps a wagon; the gardens are trim; the houses are stately. Or you may be picturing the London of Hogarth. The street is teeming, and riotous: drunks lie in the gutter, spewing; dogs and pickpockets weave among the crowd; through a window, you can see a prostitute entertaining her client; from the window above, someone is tipping out the contents of a chamber pot.

  Both images are truthful.1 London is a sophisticated city of fashion, an anarchic city of vice, and other cities too. In the West End are the titled, the wealthy, and the ton (the smart set); in the City are the financiers, merchants and craftsmen; prostitutes and theatre folk congregate in Covent Garden; north of Covent Garden, in St Giles’s, and in the East End and south of the Thames, are the slums, where an entire family may inhabit one small room, and where disease, alcoholism and crime are rampant. ‘If one considers the destruction of all morality, decency and modesty, ’ wrote Henry Fielding, the author of the exuberant comic novel Tom Jones, ‘the swearing, whoredom and drunkenness which is eternally carrying on in these houses on the one hand, and the excessive poverty and misery of most of the inhabitants on the other, it seems doubtful whether they are most the objects of detestation or compassion.’ Among the native populations of these districts is a substantial admixture of Irish immigrants. A new arrival, with some modest savings and a sunny determination to make a name for himself, is a young man called Dennis O’Kelly.

  Dennis was born in about 1725. His father, Andrew, was a smallholder in Tullow, about fifty miles south-west of Dublin. Dennis and his brother, Philip, received little education, and were expected to start earning their livings almost as soon as they entered their teens. (There were also two sisters, who made good marriages.) Philip began a career as a shoemaker. Dennis had grander ambitions. Soon, finding Tullow too small to contain his optimistic energy, he set out for Dublin.

  The discovery that Dubliners regarded him as an uneducated yokel barely dented his confidence. Charm, vigour and quick wits would see him through, he felt; and he was right, then and thereafter. A few days after his arriva
l in the city, he saw a well-dressed woman slip in the street, and rushed to her aid. There was no coach nearby, so Dennis offered his arm to support the woman’s walk home, impressing her with his courtesy. She asked Dennis about his circumstances and background. Although he gave as much gloss to his answer as he could, he was heard with a concerned frown. You must be careful, the woman advised him: Dublin is a very wicked place, and a young man such as you might easily fall into bad company.

  People who give such warnings are usually the ones you need to avoid. But this woman was to be one of several patronesses who would ease Dennis’s passage through life. She was a widow in her thirties, and the owner of a coffee house, where she hired Dennis as a waiter. Under her tutelage he lost, or learned to disguise, his rough edges, grew accomplished in his job, and graduated to become her lover. There was supplementary income to be earned by defeating the customers at billiards. It was a pleasant arrangement. It could not satisfy Dennis, though. Once he had amassed a fortune of £50 (about £6, 500 in today’s money, but then a modest annual income for a middle-class provincial household), he said farewell to his mistress and made his way to London.

  This account of Dennis O’Kelly’s early progress comes from a sketch ‘by our ingenious correspondent D.L.’ that appeared in Town & Country magazine in 1770, just before the end of Eclipse’s racing career. It offered the fullest portrait of Dennis until the publication in 1788, a year after his death, of a racy work entitled The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O’Kelly, Esq: Commonly Called Count O’Kelly. The book belonged to a thriving genre of brief lives, hastily produced and written by hacks (the term ‘memoirs’ applied to biography as well as autobiography). Their tone was often cheerfully defamatory, and entirely suited to portraying the riotous, scandalous, vainglorious Dennis. But while no doubt legendary in spirit, and certainly unreliable in some details, the Genuine Memoirs do tell in outline a true story, verifiable from other sources, including primary ones. It must be admitted, however, that the anecdotes of Dennis’s adventures in his younger days seem to be the ones for which ‘D.L.’ and the author of the Genuine Memoirs (who sometimes differ) allowed their imaginations the freest rein.

  Dennis arrived in the capital with the qualification only of being able to write his own name. He spoke with a strong accent, which the Genuine Memoirs characterized as ‘the broadest and the most offensive brogue that his nation, perhaps, ever produced’, and ‘the very reverse of melody’. (Various contemporary chroniclers of Dennis’s exploits delighted in representing his speech, peppering it with liberal exclamations of ‘by Jasus’.) He was five feet eleven inches tall, and muscular, with a rough-hewn handsomeness. He was charming, confident and quick-witted. He believed that he could rise high, and mix with anyone; and, for the enterprising and lucky few, eighteenth-century society accommodated such aspirations. ‘Men are every day starting up from obscurity to wealth, ’ Daniel Defoe wrote. London was a place where, in the opinion of Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, ‘we may be in some degree whatever character we choose’. Dennis held also a native advantage, according to the coiner of a popular saying: ‘Throw an Irishman into the Thames at London Bridge, naked at low-water, and he will come up at WestminsterBridge, at high water, with a laced coat and a sword.’

  In the Town & Country version of Dennis’s early years in London, he relied immediately on his wits. Dennis, the ingenious D.L. reported, took lodgings on his arrival in London at a guinea a week (a guinea was £1 1s, or £1.05 in decimal coinage), and began to look around for a rich woman to marry. Needing to support himself until the provider of his financial requirements came along, he decided that gambling would earn him a living, and he frequented the tables at the Bedford Coffee House in Covent Garden and other smart venues. In the convivial company of fellow Irish expatriates, he played hazard – a dice game. Very soon, his new friends took all his money.

  ‘By Jasus, ’ Dennis said to himself, ‘this is t’other side of enough – and so poor Dennis must look out for a place again.’ (‘D.L.’ had some fun with this story.) He got a position as captain’s servant on a ship bound for Lisbon. Sea journeys were hazardous, but could be lucrative if they delivered their cargoes successfully. Dennis was lucky, and got back to London with sufficient funds to support a second stab at a gambling career. This time he avoided hazard, and his expatriate chums, and stuck to billiards.

  Another new friend promoted his marital ambitions, suggesting that they form a partnership to court two sisters, each ofwhom had a fortune of £1, 000 a year. It was the work of a week. The partners did not want their marriages to be legally binding, so they hired John Wilkinson, a clergyman who specialized in conducting illegal ceremonies at the Savoy Chapel (and who was later transported for the practice). Before the honeymoon was over, Dennis had managed to persuade his friend to entrust his new wealth to him. Then he absconded. He spent time in Scarborough, attended the races at York, and cut a figure in Bath and in other watering-places. It was some time before he returned to London, where he found, to his satisfaction, that his wife – with whom he had no legally binding contract – had become a servant, and that his former friend had emigrated to India. They could not touch him.

  However, Dennis again struggled to earn his keep. The genteel façade that was necessary in the gambling profession was expensive to maintain. And he still had a lot to learn. In order to dupe ‘pigeons’, as suckers or marks were known, he employed a more experienced accomplice, with whom he had to share the proceeds. Before long, Dennis fell into debt again.

  Version two of Dennis’s story, from the Genuine Memoirs, has come to be the more widely accepted. In this one, he made use of his physical prowess. Leaving behind several creditors in Ireland, he made his way to London and found a position as a sedan chairman. Sedan chairs, single-seater carriages conveyed by horizontal poles at the front and back, were the taxis of the day. There were public, licensed ones, carried by the likes of Dennis and his (unnamed) partner; and there were private ones, often elaborately decorated and carried by men who were the antecedents of chauffeurs. The chairs had hinged roofs, allowing the passenger to walk in from the front, and they could be brought into houses, so that the passenger need not be exposed to the elements. Dennis, who was never shy or deferential, took advantage of the access to make himself known above and below stairs:‘Many and oftentimes, ’ the Genuine Memoirs reported, ‘has he carried great personages, male and female, whose secret histories have been familiar to his knowledge.’

  The Covent Garden Morning Frolick by L. P. Boitard (1747). Betty Careless, a bagnio proprietor (a bagnio was a bathing house, usually a brothel too), travels to work in a sedan chair. Hitching a ride, without a thought for the poor chairmen, is one of her lovers, Captain Montague. Dennis O’Kelly was the ‘front legs’ of a chair.

  The physical burdens were the least of the trials of the job. Chairmen carried their fares through London streets that were irregularly paved, and pockmarked with bumps and holes. There was dust when it was dry, and deep mud when it was wet. The ingredients of the mud included ash, straw, human and animal faeces, and dead cats and dogs.The winters were so fierce that the Thames, albeit a shallower river than it is now, sometimes froze over. Pipes burst, drenching the streets with water that turned rapidly to ice. Illumination was infrequent, as the duty of lighting thoroughfares lay in part with the inhabitants, who were not conscientious; people hired ‘link-boys’ to light their journeys with firebrands. In daylight, too, it was often hard to see far ahead: London smogs, even before the smoky Victorian era, could reduce visibility to a few feet.There was intense, cacophonous noise: carriages on cobbles; horses’ hooves; animals being driven to market; musicians busking; street traders shouting.

  The chairmen slalomed through this cha
os with the ruthlessness of modern bike messengers. They yelled ‘By your leave, sir!’, but otherwise were uncompromising: a young French visitor to London, taking his first stroll, failed to respond to the yells quickly enough and was knocked over four times. Chairmen could set a fast pace because the distances were not huge.A slightly later view of the city from Highgate (the print is in the British Library) shows the built-up area extending only a short distance east of St Paul’s (by far the most imposing landmark) and no further west than Westminster Abbey.To the north, London began at a line just above Oxford Street, and ended in the south just beyond the Thames. Outside these limits were fields and villages. The chairmen carried their customers mostly within the boundaries of the West End.

  Dennis was in St James’s when he met his second significant patroness (after the Dublin coffee house owner). Some three hundred chairs were in competition, but this November day offered plenty of custom: it was the birthday of George II. Horsedrawn coaches could make no progress through the gridlocked streets, and the chairmen were in demand. A lady’s driver, frustrated on his journey to the palace (St James’s Palace was then the principal royal residence), hailed Dennis from his stalled vehicle. Dennis leaped to the lady’s assistance, accompanying her to his chair and scattering the onlookers who had jostled forward to view such a fine personage. He ‘acted with such powers and magnanimity, that her ladyship conceived him to be a regeneration of Hercules or Hector, and her opinion was by no means altered when she beheld the powerful elasticity of his muscular motions on the way to the Royal residence. Dennis touched her ladyship’s guinea, and bowed in return for a bewitching smile which accompanied it.’2