Eclipse

Written by Nicholas Clee

This is the story of perhaps the greatest racehorse of all time, unbeaten throughout his career and so feared by rivals that finally they simply refused to race against him. While Eclipse was lionised by Georgian society, his future success was not evident from his looks, he was both ‘leggy, and possessed, experts thought, an ugly head.’

But this is not just a story about a horse, it is also a fascinating social history of late 18^th-century England where a horse ‘bred as was fitting by a royal duke’ could be owned by ‘an Irish adventurer whose companion was a brothel madam.’ The Irish adventurer was Major Denis O’Kelly who rose from sedan chairman to owner of the greatest stables in England while his companion Charlotte Hayes was one of the most famous brothel keepers of the Georgian age. Together, they ‘were at the summit of two of the most important leisure industries in Britain’, sex and horseracing.

The second part of the book is just as interesting, concentrating on Eclipse the stallion whose bloodline so dominates today’s thoroughbred horses that ninety-five per cent of all racehorses are descended from him.

Even today, it is ‘Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.’