THE EARL OF DERBY GOES TO THE KENTUCKY DERBY

Those familiar with Kentucky Derby Week in Louisville know that, in addition to the hot-air balloon and steamboat races, Friday’s race card features the running of the Kentucky Oaks. The Oaks is a mile-and-one-eighth race for three-year-old thoroughbred fillies. It was first run at Churchill Down on May 19, 1875. The next day is the running of the Kentucky Derby, for three-year-old thoroughbreds, regardless of sex, at one and one-quarter miles. It, too, was first run in 1875, but, interestingly, it was run two days before the Oaks, on May 17.

Their antecedents, however, run back much further in history.

It was a scene that would be familiar to central Kentucky horsemen and their friends. A party was being held on a horse farm and estate, and the guests and their host began talking about horses, in particular their horses. They lamented that there was not a good race to test their fillies. The host, however, was the Twelfth Earl of Derby, Edward Smith-Stanley, or Lord Stanley, and the year was 1778. They decided to hold a race for fillies the next year and named it The Oaks, after the name of Derby’s country estate. Lord Derby’s horse won.

This race continues to run and has spawned imitators around the world, including the Irish Oaks, the New Zealand Oaks, the Oaks d’Italia and, of course, the Kentucky Oaks.³⁸⁵

The event was such a success that Lord Stanley and his friends decided to run a new race the following year open to all three-year-old thoroughbreds. At the party where the new race was planned, the guests decided it should be named either for the Earl of Derby or for Sir Charles Bunbury, who was steward of the English Jockey Club. Legend has it that the decision was made by a coin toss; Lord Stanley won, thus initiating the English or Epsom Derby. Bunbury would later get a race named in his honor, the Bunbury Cup, run at Newmarket. The first running of the Epson Derby was on May 4, 1780.

Edward Stanley, Seventeenth Earl of Derby. By Sir William Orpen.

This race, too, inspired other races to be similarly named, and there are derbies in Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and at several race courses in the United States, including the Kentucky Derby.³⁸⁶

In the early 1870s, Louisville was without a racetrack, and horsemen discussed how they could start a new track. They called on Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., whose grandfather co-led the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition exploring the Louisiana Purchase territory. He undertook to go to Epsom in England to view the Derby and Oaks, then he went to Paris, France, where a new jockey club had been organized in 1863, to watch its great race at Longchamp. Thus informed, Clark brought what he had learned about tracks and racing, including the idea of a Kentucky Oaks and Kentucky Derby, back to Louisville. He helped organize the Louisville Jockey Club, raise money for a track and facilities and find the land, donated by brothers John and Henry Churchill. On May 17, 1875, the first Kentucky Derby was run before an estimated crowd of ten thousand spectators. And a tradition was established.³⁸⁷

The Stanley family, Earls of Derby, have played major roles in English history since at least the 1400s.

In 1485, upstart Henry Tudor of the Lancasterians was challenging King Richard III for the throne. By virtue of his second marriage, Thomas Stanley had become Henry’s stepfather. Henry and Richard met in the decisive Battle of Bosworth Field. Stanley and his brother gathered their forces on a hill overlooking the two rivals and their armies but did not take sides. Finally, seeing that Henry had achieved the advantage, they entered the fray on his side. Thomas Stanley’s reward from the new Henry VII was to be named the first Earl of Derby.³⁸⁸

An announcement appeared in the Lexington Leader 445 years later that the Seventeenth Earl of Derby, Edward George Villiers Stanley, would visit Lexington and then go to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby—so far as is known, the first time any of the Derbys came to Kentucky.³⁸⁹

This Derby followed his ancestors in military and political service in England, serving in various regiments during the 1880s as a young man (he was born on April 4, 1865), then entering Parliament in 1892. Between then and 1906, when he lost his seat in the general election of that year, he served variously as Lord of the Treasury, Financial Secretary to the War Office and Postmaster General. His father died in 1908; succeeding to the earldom, he entered the House of Lords. In April 1918, Edward became ambassador to France. He donated a silver cup to the French authorities, the Lord Derby Cup, for a rugby championship as his father, the Sixteenth Earl, had donated the Stanley Cup for hockey.³⁹⁰

Throughout his career, Lord Stanley maintained a keen interest in thoroughbreds and his own racing stables. He was leading owner seven times during his lifetime and leading breeder ten times. His horses won the Epson Derby six times between 1924 and 1942.³⁹¹ Upon his death, the Bloodstock Breeders Review, considered an authoritative source, said: “Throughout the long history of the British Thoroughbred no single breeder exercised more influence on the breed than the late earl.”³⁹²

Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, was not making his visit as a publicity stunt. He was a breeder and owner of fame on his own and would have been welcomed as such by the Kentucky racing community. Five days after the announcement, the newspaper ran an extensive report of the breeding and racing success of the earl, noting his political and military achievements as well as those on the track, including that his horse had won the Epsom Oaks four times. It noted that the earl, sixty-six years old at the time of his visit, currently stood the leading English sire at his estate. He was not without his Lexington connections. One horse bred by Stanley was at Hal Price Headley’s Beaumont Farm, and the earl himself had leased another to his host, Joseph E. Widener, owner of Elmendorf Farm on Paris Pike north of Lexington.³⁹³

Widner made his fortune in the traction business in Philadelphia.³⁹⁴ At its peak under James Ben Ali Haggin, Elmendorf Farm comprised more than 8,500 acres, almost all in Fayette County (Lexington).³⁹⁵ In about 1906, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad constructed a one-mile spur track into the farm, which was later connected at the farm’s Paris Pike entrance to the interurban rail system, which ran out from Lexington to surrounding communities.³⁹⁶

The earl’s trip began in New York, where his ship, the Aquitania, docked after crossing the Atlantic. He was met there by Widener. From there, the earl and his company would travel to Washington, D.C., to meet President Herbert Hoover. They would then travel to Lexington.³⁹⁷ The visits were described by the Lexington Leader as a “round of social entertainment in New York and Washington.”

The Aquitania, “The Ship Beautiful,” was a Cunard Line vessel introduced in 1914 with the intent that it be the most opulent ship afloat. It was launched on April 21, 1913, by the Countess of Derby as the largest ocean liner in Great Britain. Following the sinking of the Titanic the year before, plans had been revised to make the Aquitania safer and more watertight.³⁹⁸ The Earl of Derby would later return to England aboard its sister ship the Mauretania, “The Grand Old Lady of the Atlantic.” Cunard’s third sister ship in this series was the Lusitania, which was sunk by the German navy on May 7, 1915.³⁹⁹

The earl arrived in Lexington in Widener’s private railway car on the morning of May 14 at the Southern Railway station on South Broadway. They announced he would visit a half dozen or more famous central Kentucky horse farms over the next two days. Social engagements would include dinners and luncheons at various farms. The news reports do not say, but it is likely for both ease and security that the earl and his host took the private car over the tracks to Elmendorf Farm’s spur and thence to the residence.⁴⁰⁰

To cap off matters, for the first time in the history of the Kentucky Derby, the governor, Flem D. Sampson, declared Derby Day a state holiday in honor of Lord Stanley’s visit!⁴⁰¹

However, from the standpoint of the social scene, calamity struck. The Earl of Derby had come down with a cold and was cancelling engagements, at first just for Thursday. By the next day, his cancellations extended to include all local events, a dinner in Louisville and a Derby morning breakfast. As it happened, Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson, former personal physician to President Woodrow Wilson, was in Lexington for the races and was called to Elmendorf to examine the earl. Said to be running a slight fever, he was advised to take bed rest and call off his engagements. However, the paper reported, “his lordship was quite sure, however, that his indisposition will sufficiently improve” to permit him to attend the Kentucky Derby.⁴⁰²

The previous day, the newspaper had reported that a dispatch from Liverpool, England, near the ancestral estate of the Earls of Derby, stated that the country estate, in the family for five centuries, had been placed for sale on the market due to increases in taxation and duties. The estate comprised 2,500 acres. The Earl’s secretary, traveling with him, issued a denial from Elmendorf Farm. Unaddressed was whether Lord Stanley simply desired to avoid conversation over the matter and conveniently came down with his cold.⁴⁰³

His “strength regained,” as predicted, the Earl of Derby, with Mr. and Mrs. Widener and Admiral Grayson, left Elmendorf at 9:30 a.m. on Derby Saturday, traveling in Widener’s private car The Lynnewood pulled by a special train from Lexington to Louisville.⁴⁰⁴ Along the way, a stop at the station in Frankfort drew a crowd of “several hundreds,” and Lord Stanley addressed them from the car. He ventured the opinion that Gallant Fox, an entry from Woodford County, would win.⁴⁰⁵

The experienced horseman was correct. Gallant Fox with Earl Sande in the saddle came in first, which led to a series of stories with plays on words about the “two earls.” Of special note is that Sande won his third Derby this day, equaling the previous record of African American and Lexington jockey Isaac Murphy.⁴⁰⁶ The Earl of Derby had watched the first three races from a private box in the clubhouse before descending to a specially constructed “pagota” in an enclosure near the finish line to watch the Derby. Prior to the races beginning, the earl held a press conference at which he made the statement that he might race his horses in America in the future.⁴⁰⁷

The Earl of Derby and his party returned to New York, likely in Widener’s private car, for a day of racing at Belmont, being only the second time he had ever seen racing on dirt. On May 21, 1930, Lord Stanley and his party boarded the Mauretania for the return voyage to England.⁴⁰⁸