Kirtlington’s Matchless Derby History

[Wandering Eyes]

Fifty years ago, a little colt labelled a ‘typical first foal’ at birth and later overlooked at the yearling sales, recorded the first half of one of the most extraordinary achievements in the 240-year history of the Derby.

Blakeney (GB) may not be regarded as one of the best Derby winners of all time but, with half-brother Morston (GB), who followed him to glory at Epsom four years later, he is responsible for ensuring that Arthur Budgett, who planned his mating at Kirtlington and later honed his athletic ability on the downland at Whatcombe, would go down in history as the only person ever to have bred, owned and trained Derby-winning half-brothers.

Budgett died in June 2011 but his family name lives on in the racing and breeding world through his son Chris, who initially ran his father’s Park Farm before branching out on his own when purchasing neighbouring 350 acres some 30 years ago and starting his own operation, Kirtlington Stud. More recently, Arthur’s grandson and Chris’s nephew Charlie Budgett has developed his own venture on the original site of his grandfather’s breeding operation, now named Kirtlington Park Stud, of which we will hear more in tomorrow’s TDN.

At Chris Budgett’s Kirtlington Stud, echoes of the Derby double abound. A portrait of Windmill Girl (GB) (Hornbeam {GB}) hangs on the wall of the entrance to the office, while different sections of the farm bear the titles of three of her offspring: Blakeney, Morston and their half-sister Cley, all three named after neighbouring Norfolk villages, as was Blakeney’s sire, Hethersett (GB).

“I’m the younger brother, so my brother inherited everything over there and we kept some horses there for a long time, which was great,” says Budgett from his house on a usefully high perch in the centre of the stud, with idyllic 360-degree views of his land’s soft curves.

“We bought this in 1988. It was a farm, there were a few hedges here, but no trees, no nothing, so we built everything. In those days in our game, if you were lucky you were able to make a decent living out of it. So we just rolled everything back into it year after year and built the place up.”

Budgett’s ‘game’ is breeding, boarding mares and consigning their offspring for clients, as well as pinhooking the odd foal with notable success. With his friend Will Edmeades, he pinhooked a Mark Of Esteem (Ire) foal who, being out of a Blakeney mare, may well have tugged a little on an otherwise sales-hardened heart. Whether sentimentality played its part or not, the colt’s purchase from Harry Ormesher’s Old Suffolk Stud proved to be sound judgement if not sound business. The 20,000gns foal was sold to trainer Marcus Tregoning for 16,000gns the following year and, named Sir Percy (GB), went on to become the best 2-year-old in Britain before emulating his maternal grandsire by winning the Derby.

“Buying Sir Percy was totally down to Will,” Budgett recalls with some modesty. “He knew Harry Ormesher and knew the breeding. We didn’t think we’d have a hope in hell of buying him to be perfectly honest, but I think everyone was against Mark Of Esteem. We took him up to the yearling sales and he was a cracker of a yearling, really nice. We had another yearling up there that was the order of the month and was out of his box 80, 90 times. I think Sir Percy came out seven or eight times. Nobody wanted him because he was by Mark Of Esteem. This is what I find the problem with the market now: people aren’t looking at the horses.”

It was an eye for a horse that stood Budgett’s father in good stead. Arthur Budgett picked up Windmill Girl as a foal for just 1,000gns from the dispersal of Major Lionel Holliday, though he had intended to resell her as a yearling. When she failed to reach her reserve, he put her into training and guided her to victory in the Ribblesdale S. and a runner-up finish in Oaks—more than enough to guarantee her pride of place at Park Farm. He later reinforced his appreciation of this particular operation by sending Windmill Girl to the Holliday-bred Hethersett in her first year at stud.

Budgett says, “My greatest fun is in buying cheap mares and seeing if I can make them work. That’s what my dad did, too. He never spent a lot of money buying horses, so he had to look at it from different angles rather than just going for something like a Kingman every time. That was the way I was brought up. When he bought Windmill Girl, it was because Brook Holliday was a proper breeder of horses. Okay, Windmill Girl was the cheapest one of the dispersal he bought her from, but my dad was chuffed to bits to be able to buy some of that blood.”

He continues, “You can’t do that now. You buy a cheap horse, there’s no market for the progeny. It’s becoming more and more difficult because we all know how much training costs and how poor prize-money is to compensate for that. We all know, on the other hand, that if actually you have something that’s halfway decent, rated 90 and above, it’s worth a great deal of money. That’s where you’re looking now, to try to get that mythical black type, though there’s a lot of crap black type around.”

Budgett appreciates his knowledgeable client list, on which features Elite Racing Club, the syndicate which has an extraordinary strike-rate with its homebreds, including the Group 1-winning fillies Soviet Song (Ire) (Marju {Ire}) and Marsha (Ire) (Acclamation {GB}). Kirtlington Stud is also a temporary home each year to a batch of Cheveley Park Stud yearlings.

“I’m very lucky that most of the people I breed horses for understand racing very well and over half the yearlings we’ll have here go into training, which is probably quite unusual for a stud farm,” he says.

It is perhaps unusual for many farms in the commercial era, but it comes as little surprise at Kirtlington Stud, where the family’s greatest success is commemorated discreetly by its small Windmill logo. Budgett missed his father’s first great Derby triumph as he was at school, but he was at Epsom four years later to cheer Morston home and meet the Queen.

He recalls, “During Blakeney’s Derby I was playing cricket but a friend of mine was absolutely mad on racing and he had a radio on the sidelines. When the horse won we all jumped up and down, not really knowing what we were doing. Then when Morston won, I was actually at the Derby. I don’t know how you explain the elation, the euphoria, that surrounds something like that. Even at that age, and I was only small and wasn’t really involved in it, it was fairly obviously something very special.”

He adds, “I remember reading about Jim Bolger two or three years ago. He said his great aim in life is to match or beat my father’s record of owning, breeding, and training two Derby winners. I know it’s nothing to do with me but I think it’s a great compliment and an honour. There is a man who is totally, single-mindedly dedicated to what he does, trying to achieve it. Naturally, I hope he does it actually. What a great thing.”

Budgett’s pride in his father’s achievements is understandable, so too is the fact that he was reluctant to follow in his footsteps as a young man. A career as a trainer was quickly eschewed and the role of stud farmer came almost as a compromise. Having played no hands-on role with horses while he was growing up, Budgett made sure to learn from the best around the world before immersing himself in the breeding game, with stints at Haras d’Etreham, Lindsay Park Stud and also in Kentucky.

He says, “I didn’t really want to be involved in horses when I was younger. I was brought up at Whatcombe. My dad wanted me to train and I said no. He then asked me if I’d get involved with the breeding side. He had three mares or four mares and, just to please him, I said I would. So I went and worked in America, France, Australia and did what everyone does nowadays. I got very lucky. I worked for Arthur Hancock at Stone Farm when it was really enormous. He was a wonderful man, Arthur. Seriously wonderful man. He was wild, but in a really great way and he taught me about life and about horses. How to, I suppose, assimilate problems and understand them.

“I’ve always loved animals, so that part of it wasn’t difficult. It was the people side that made me not want to train. Dad was very lucky. He was probably the last man who trained for friends. I know some people train for friends now, but almost exclusively his yard was full of people he liked. If he didn’t like them, he wouldn’t train for them.”

Having perhaps been hesitant at the start, Budgett is now almost evangelical in discussing how the breeding industry could attract more young people to the workforce.

“I find it strange that there aren’t a lot of young people really interested in doing what we do because it’s a great way of life,” he says. “I feel that we [the breeding industry] don’t get involved enough in early education. I’m talking about infant schools, getting them to come round the farms. I feel that the industry has missed a trick. We should have a national open day at stud farms. It’s not that difficult to organise. I do it with Elite Racing Club two or three times a year. We have groups of 150 at a time. I think it would be a brilliant thing to open it up to people so they can understand what we do with the horses, because we have a rising problem in our country with people being anti-everything. It will affect racing more and more, so the best way to deal with it is to show people actually what we do, how we look after the animals, how actually our horses here probably get better fed than some humans.”

A keenness to promote the positives of Thoroughbred breeding runs hand in hand with concerns over the increasingly commercial nature of the industry. “I was taught that we are the custodians of the breed and as custodians of the breed, the damage we’re doing is appalling. It’s breeding for the sales, not for good horses, sound horses,” he says.

Half a century on from the heyday of Arthur Budgett’s reign at Whatcombe, times have certainly changed. The Derby is no longer run on a Wednesday; there are few old-school English breeders building broodmare bands with the express wish of winning the Oaks or the Derby, and our method of record-keeping has mostly gone digital.

Budgett says, “When my mum died, I found that she had kept every snippet of every horse that won a race. Of course now they’re totally redundant because the internet has got the lot.”

What has not changed, however, is that a fertile swathe of Oxfordshire turf has avoided development for anything other than the odd barn here and there and is still farmed with the hope and intent of breeding equine champions. Good management and good intentions are important factors but, as Budgett refers to on numerous occasions in recalling the past and assessing the present, good luck is also required.

“Actually my dad was incredibly lucky,” he says. “Blakeney got a big knee before he went up to the sale. Harry Deakin, the stud groom, was in tears because he felt he was the best horse he’d ever seen in his life but nobody wanted to buy Blakeney, so he came home and my dad trained him.

“My mum and dad were single-minded about the training and it was a very close community at Whatcombe. I have total respect for everybody who dealt with those horses. Obviously dad because he was in control, but then there was Harry Deakin, Tom Dowdeswell and Joe Vowles, the head lad and head feeder—they were all part of the team that actually made it possible. It wouldn’t have happened if one of those hadn’t have been involved.”

He adds, “There was an enormous amount of luck involved, but also an inordinate amount of skill to get it to that lucky point.”

 

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