Frankel

1

Genetic alchemy

Yesterday I met Frankel who crept up on me all of a sudden. One moment I was deep in conversation and the next I sensed a presence behind me. Maybe someone said something along the lines of ‘here’s the man’. In truth, I don’t recall precisely but when I turned around there he was: the greatest racehorse that has ever strode out on God’s turf.

As I wended my way across the Cambridge fens, which in turn gave way to the ordered horse paddocks that surround Newmarket, I tried not to elevate this meeting to something of a semi-religious experience. An audience with the Pope. A pilgrimage to a Tibetan mountaintop to meet the Dalai Lama. It seemed the wrong side of sane to equate a horse on such a level.

And indeed that is true. But rarely in life does one ever get to meet the truly great. They are the stuff of legends. Stories passed down through generations. The prism of time only giving us a hint of what the truth may have been. But here was I doing that very thing. A chance to look, see and touch. Make a judgement all of my own. To burn into my memory a horse that will likely never, ever exist again.

You’d barely give Frankel’s home a second glance if you drove past. Yes, the sweeping turn to the entrance looks immaculate, but the redbrick walls are low and the signs discreet. Beyond the gates that swing open to acknowledge your arrival, the scene that greets you appears to be anything other than a horse stud farm.

The smooth tarmac gives way to immaculately raked gravel that scrunches under my tyres. In the absence of signs, a kindly gardener points me in the right direction, curving me around the tall copper beech that was hiding the offices. Well, these are not offices in the absolute sense of the word, but rather the most magnificent country house, known as Banstead Manor Stud, that people just happen to work in. It is the European headquarters of the world-famous racing and breeding operation, Juddmonte, owned by His Highness Prince Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, known universally across racing as Mr Khalid Abdullah, befitting his privacy and pursuit of excellence. I honestly don’t know if Juddmonte’s Banstead Manor was designed by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, but it has all the heritage. Long, horizontal, thin red bricks delineated by perfectly trowelled lime mortar. Tall, slender chimneys, artworks in their own right. Narrow windows that mimic the first Elizabethan age. I’m ushered into a rather grand room which is full of Frankel memorabilia; even the mints are wrapped in his racing colours. Among the paintings and prints is a faded handwritten letter from a son to his mother in old-fashioned copperplate script. It seems Frankel is not the only one to achieve world fame to have lived at Banstead Manor; this was the childhood home of Winston Churchill.

I’m met by Shane Horan who is introduced to me with a job title I’ve never heard spoken of before, but that speaks more to my ignorance in these matters than the title itself: Nominations Manager. He is, it transpires, responsible for which mares are chosen each season (requests to mate with Frankel are significantly oversubscribed). We sit down in what I guess would once have been the drawing room, with furniture as comfortable today as it would have been back when this was a grand home. Reclining on the sofa, I have a glorious view across a York stone terrace, striped lawns, and between the house and yet another copper beech, a statue of a full-sized horse on a Portland stone plinth. I hazard a guess that it might just be Frankel. I am correct.

I pull out my pad and start to ask Shane a few questions, but we both know that really I am being polite. Seeing Frankel is the thing. The answers will come later. We are just playing for time. Soon Shane looks at his watch, stands up, and beckons me to follow. ‘We’ll just catch him on the way back.’ It is shortly before 3 pm but I’m none the wiser as to where Frankel has been or where he is going. I don’t like to ask, as the assumption seems to be that I should know.

My other assumption was that I’ll need a pair of wellington boots to tramp around, or at least make my way to the stud yard. Shane gives me a quizzical look when I ask whether I should change footwear. I’ll take that as a no. The walk to the stables is both short and perfection. Another striped lawn gently slopes away from the house. A small lake gurgles as a pulsing fountain spouts water. The yew hedges are geometrically precise. Gertrude Jekyll, Lutyens’ landscape gardener of choice, would most definitely have approved of the splendid herbaceous borders, the flock of colours rising from low at the front to tall at the back. Less than a hundred yards from the house, Shane swings open a small gate and beyond the shiny, black-painted tubular steel of the estate fencing is more striped lawn, specimen trees, soft pale shingle pathways and three turreted stable blocks.

Disabuse yourself that this is any ordinary stable block; if there was a star rating for horse accommodation this would be seven star plus a bit more. The original building, that houses just two horses, repeats the brickwork of the house, with dark-wood stained stable doors at either side adorned with solid brass catches and bolts. In the centre a corbelled arch leads to a white-painted door, slightly knocked and careworn by daily stud life, with the tack and feed store beyond. The slate roof is topped by two jaunty looking turrets, which serve as ventilation shafts, each of which is capped by what you might easily mistake for a black pointed witch’s hat. The shafts, a sort of forerunner to air conditioning, were by all accounts originally installed by army engineers who were billeted in the stables during World War II, and the style has been replicated with the three later stable blocks, perfect facsimiles both, with housing for eight stallions in total. This is, and has been for the past six years, Frankel’s home.

There is most definitely a sense of theatre leading up to meeting the equine who is often termed, with no sense of anything other than the truth, the wonder horse. In turn, I am shown stallions Bated Breath, Kingman and Oasis Dream who are led out of their respective stalls for my perusal. Privileged though I am to see them, I do feel a bit of a fraud. If you are a keen follower of horse racing, and breeding in particular, those names will leap from the page. For me, just starting my equine genetic education, they are simply the most beautiful specimens in the prime of life, living in the most splendid surroundings. In time I’ll piece it all together, but for now, without wishing to diminish them in any way, they are the amuse-bouche.

As I turned to see Frankel for the first time, he was most definitely different to the others but perhaps not quite as I imagined. While the first three had variously danced on their toes, squiggled their ears, held heads high, eyes darting to every person and chewing on the brass chain that connects leading rein to head collar, along came Frankel, head bowed down. There was no fuss. No ceremony. I would say he sauntered up to me, but that suggests a levity of demeanour which is not him at all. He moved with considered purpose. Each stride was for a reason, delivering one foot in front of the other with an economy of effort. Pausing at the required spot as if to say, I’m not going to move further unless it is absolutely necessary. But don’t mistake this for laziness. Here was a horse who was alert to everything and everybody around him.

He took to my scratching at the white star on his forehead in good part. Just patting him on the neck seemed rather inadequate; too small and fleeting a gesture to connect with this great beast. He kept his head slightly bowed as we went eye-to-eye. I slid my hand down the front of his face, tracing the line of his blaze, the white hairs that narrow then widen again just as the coat gives way to the soft, dark skin of the muzzle. Warm breath gently exhaled from his nostrils, the steady beat of breathing pacing out the comfortable moments between us. There was a slight damp odour in the air, but not unpleasant. Oats and hay maybe? As I jiggled my fingers around his wet mouth, we ended up playing a little game as he twisted his lips as if to capture a stray piece of my hand. Until, quite suddenly, without breaking eye contact, he nudged my hand away. The game was over.

For Rob Bowley, his stallion man, had just produced the most enormous carrot. However potentially tasty my fingers might have been, carrots were clearly a known quantity in Frankel’s life. It is fair to say, he was not a tidy eater. As he bit, crunched and chewed his way through this industrial-sized vegetable, a pool of carrot juice and orange-coloured pulp, certainly enough to fulfil one of your five-a-day, gathered at his feet. So intent on eating, he didn’t seem to notice the brief arrival of the stud cat George who sidled over to sniff, then reject, a possible windfall. That said, George and Frankel go back a long while, as the cat arrived at Banstead just a month before the horse, though the pedigree of the latter was considerably more certain than that of the former. George just appeared from nowhere, the grey tabby taking up residence without so much as a by-your-leave. Despite much asking around the village nobody ever claimed him so, as the Frankel express has thrilled ever faster, George had been along for the ride, elbowing his way into photoshoots and among film crews. I’m not sure Frankel liked sharing the limelight, for he studiously ignored George, as all the while I stood at his head he kept me fixed in his gaze, those dark brown eyes giving nothing away.

And that is what I recall most about my first meeting with Frankel. Not his impressive frame. Not his beautiful home. But his eyes. They followed the unknown quantity, in this case me, everywhere. Rob, Shane and all the other Banstead people – Frankel had locked them away deep inside that head of his. But of the new, he was curious. Something to be sized up, evaluated and considered. As Frankel was wheeled away and he gave me one last sidelong glance, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that he had been judging me more than I had been judging him. It was an odd and slightly perplexing sensation. He is, after all, only a horse but I felt I had undergone some sort of benediction.

Once Frankel was gone everyone definitely relaxed – now that is odd – as the conversation turned to his daily regime. The question in my mind was soon answered without me ever having to ask it – Frankel was on the way back from his 3 pm covering. Or to put it in layman’s terms, a mating with one of the 150 or so mares that would be visiting with him from mid-February (breeders with some sense of humour commence the season the day after St Valentine’s Day) until mid-June. If you are starting to do the maths to conclude that is a lot of covers in not a lot of time, you’d be right. Plus you have to account for some multiple covers of the same mare to ensure success. So, at the moment of my mid-afternoon meeting, Frankel was only just past the halfway point in his day with 7 am, 3 pm and 9 pm appointments in his daily diary. Great genes are in great demand.

Today Frankel is ten and has spent the greater part of his adult life at Banstead Manor Stud in Suffolk. Indeed, this was where he was born, but his story really starts 400 miles due west in another horse county of another horse country. County Tipperary in Ireland.

There is a fine motorway that takes you from Cork in the direction of Dublin. It’s very twenty-first century with wide lanes and tolls; maybe it is the latter that discourages traffic because it seemed very empty to me. But the moment you turn off to follow the signs to Fethard, you are in old Ireland. The lanes are narrow. The stone walls in need of repair. Topped with hedges interspersed with ragged barbed-wire fencing. You would never call the rural architecture that plots your journey beautiful. The grey, squat, rectangular bungalows are built with practicality rather than beauty in mind, often juxtaposed by the adjacent farmyards that seem to have been forever falling down awaiting a wave of gentrification that may never arrive.

And pretty soon you are in Fethard. The roads are potholed. Shops are boarded up. This seems like a bit of Ireland still awaiting the arrival of the Celtic tiger. But you can’t help but smile at the sign on the wall outside the bar: McCarthy’s est. 1840. Publican. Restaurant. Undertaker. One of Ireland’s oldest unchanged pubs. If that doesn’t arrest the progress of a hungry traveller nothing will, though the slight carbolic smell that hangs over the town is disconcerting. Here is a place where peat is still burned as the fuel of choice.

On, through and out the other side of Fethard and suddenly twenty-first-century Ireland seems to be back, but with a twist of rural chic. Instead of just driving down a road you appear to be driving down an avenue. The verges are trimmed. The hedges cut box-straight, lined on the field side with gradually maturing trees planted perfectly parallel to the road, and beyond that post and rail fences delineating paddocks. Even the farm gates are a cut above your usual rural offering, with sweeping turn-ins and fancy stone pillars. Helpful signs direct you off the road to such-and-such farm or so-and-so stud. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of a group of mares and their foals.